Christ Church

“There was a certain beggar named Lazarus”

Lazarus ‘R Us. We are Lazarus. There are two people named Lazarus in the Gospels. The one is the blessed subject of a parable told by Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, the story we heard today. The other is the blessed object of a miracle done by Jesus in John’s Gospel. There is much that is similar about them.

But there is this difference. The one lays on the ground – a beggar in the dirt, unnoticed, at the gate of the rich man – and then dies. The other dies and then is buried in the ground – hidden in the grave for four days. But, then, both are raised up – the one into the bosom of Abraham, the other into the company of his family and friends, among whom is Jesus himself.

What does it all come down to? Simply this. The love of God compels us to love one another where we are – on the ground and even out of the ground, as it were. This is not a may-be but a must-be for our salvation and more generally for the health of our communities and cultures. We are commanded and compelled to love out of the vision of love which has been shown to us. Such was Trinity Sunday when we beheld the strong and defining love of God. “Behold a door was opened in heaven.” “Batter my heart three-personed God,” as John Donne puts it, for only that strong love can move us to God and to him in one another.

When we ignore the stranger in our midst or neglect the beggar at our door, then we deny the God who became poor for our sakes, who came into our midst, and who knocks at the door of our hearts. When we are consumed by envy at the good fortune of others, when we are filled with hatred and wrath for the hurts and injuries inflicted upon us, whether real or imagined, when we are complacent and indifferent to the sufferings of others, then we place ourselves very far from God and do great harm to others as well as to ourselves.

To put it in terms of the parable, there is a great gulf fixed between us and God when we ignore the poor man at our gate, the neighbour close at hand, and our loved ones all around. Then we place ourselves in torment, the torment of our self-willed distance from God. Then we are pretty far gone – like Lazarus in the ground four days, “behold, he stinketh”, says Martha, and so do we in the sins of our indifference and selfishness. But, “Lazarus, come out”, Jesus says.

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“Apart from me you can do nothing”

A strong and provocative statement, perhaps, but surely no less so than Jesus telling Nicodemus who came to him questioning in the night that “ye must be born again”, a phrase, I fear that has often been misunderstood if not hijacked to the agendas of a purely experiential religion of sentiment and feeling and its corollary of authority and self-righteous presumption devoid of thought. Does not Jesus also tell Nicodemus “marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again”? He goes on to talk of the great mystery of spiritual life. Ultimately, he speaks about the mystery of his own life, the mystery of the Trinity. “If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe heavenly things?”

And yet, it is precisely heavenly things that he reveals in and through the things of this world. We are in the presence of the great mystery of God, the holy and blessed Trinity. “He therefore that would be saved let him thus think of the Trinity,” the great Creed of Athanasius puts it. What does that mean? To think of the Trinity in a certain way. What is that way? It is the very way which Jesus shows us, taking the things of this world and showing us that they only have life and meaning when they are lifted up into the life from which they come and to which they return. Apart from me you are nothing, we might say.

That way of thinking is the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology. Fancy words, perhaps, but words which reveal the necessary and important way of thinking God. They are the forms of our negative and positive thinking about God, the counter to our idolatry and atheism. They are about our freedom and life.

God is nothing, meaning no thing like other things, no being like other beings. It is entirely proper to say that God is nothing if by that we mean something different from our world and day, from us and our being. That is negative theology. It distinguishes God utterly from everything else in the created order. The Creator is not the same as the created. And yet, there is a relationship between them that is also positive; nowhere more profoundly so than in the idea that we are made in the image and likeness of God. God reveals himself to us by way of the things of the world, perhaps most wonderfully in the parables of the kingdom. “The kingdom of heaven is like unto” this and that image from our world and day. That is positive theology. The Athanasian Creed dances us through the necessary paradoxes of reason without which our reason is dead and deadly, destructive and empty.

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