Mr Moneybags and the Big Issue seller

 

Once upon a time, there was a really big city gent, known as Mr Moneybags.
You might have seen him, dressed in an Armani suit,
with a Philippe Patek watch on his wrist,
being driven through Brixton in a top-of-the-range Lexus, or perhaps a Tesla, to his offices in the City, or Canary Wharf.
Mr Moneybags did a great deal for charity;
he always gave a handsome cheque to Children in Need and Comic Relief, and quite often got himself on the telly giving the cheque to the prettiest presenter.

But in private he thought that the people who needed help from organisations like Comic Relief were losers.
Actually, anybody who earned less than a six-figure salary was a loser, he thought.
He despised his five brothers,
three ex-wives,
ten children,
twenty-five grandchildren
and the hordes of mistresses,
secretaries,
assistants
gofers
and general flunkies
who surrounded him –
and they knew it, too.
Especially, though, he despised the homeless people,
who he thought really only needed to pull themselves together,
to snap out of it,
to get a life.

Particularly, he despised the Big Issue seller
who he used occasionally to come across in the car-park.
He would usually buy a copy, because, after all, one has to do one’s bit, but once in the car would ring Security and get the chap removed.

Laz, they called him, this particular Big Issue seller.
Not that Mr Moneybags knew or cared what he was called.
I’m not quite sure how Laz had ended up on the streets,
selling the Big Issue
or even outright begging.
It might have been drugs, or drink,
or perhaps he was just one of those unfortunate people who simply can’t cope with jobs and mortgages and families
and the other details of everyday life that most of us manage to take in our stride.
But there you are, whatever the reason,
Laz was one of those people.
He was rather a nice person, when you got to know him;
always had a friendly word for everybody,
could make you laugh when you were down,
knew the way to places someone might want to go, that sort of thing.

But what he wasn’t good at was looking after himself,
keeping hospital appointments,
taking medication,
that sort of thing.
And so, one morning, he just didn’t wake up,
and his body was found huddled in his bed at the hostel.
They couldn’t find any relations to take charge of it,
so he was buried at the council’s expense, very quietly, with only the hostel warden there.
But the warden always said, then and ever afterwards,
that he had seen angels come to take Laz to heaven.

At about the same time, Mr Moneybags became ill.
Cancer, they said.
Smoking, they muttered.
Drinking too much….
Rich food….
So sorry, there was very little they could do.
Now, of course, Mr Moneybags wasn’t about to accept this,
and saw specialist after specialist,
and, as he became iller and more desperate, quack after quack.
He tried special diets,
herbal remedies;
he tried coffee enemas,
injections of monkey glands,
you name it, he tried it.
But nothing worked and, as happens to all of us in the end, he died.

His funeral wasn’t very well-attended, either.
Funny, that –
you’d have thought that more of his
five brothers,
three ex-wives,
ten children,
twenty-five grandchildren
and the hordes of mistresses,
secretaries,
assistants
gofers
and general flunkies
might have wanted to be there.
But no.
In the end, only the ones to whom he had left most of his money were there,
and a slew of reporters,
hoping to hear that the company was in trouble.
Which, incidentally, it wasn’t –
whatever else Mr Moneybags may have been,
he was a superb businessman, and the company he founded continues to grow and flourish to this very day.

Anyway, there they were,
Mr Moneybags and Laz the Big Issue seller, both dead.
But, as is the way of things,
it was only their bodies which had died.
Mr Moneybags found himself unceremoniously told to sit on a hot bench in the sun, and wait there.
And he waited, and waited, and waited, and waited,
getting hotter and hotter,
thirstier and thirstier.
And he could see the Big Issue seller, whom he recognised,
being welcomed and fed and made comfortable by someone who could only be Abraham, the Patriarch.
After a bit, he’d had enough.
“Abraham,” he called out, “Couldn’t you send that Big Issue seller to bring me a glass of water, I’m horrendously thirsty?”

And you know the rest of the story.
Abraham said, not ungently,
‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things,
while Lazarus received bad things,
but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.
And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed,
so that those who want to go from here to you cannot,
nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’
And he pointed out that Mr Moneybags’ five brothers,
three ex-wives,
ten children,
twenty-five grandchildren
and the hordes of mistresses,
secretaries,
assistants
gofers
and general flunkies
wouldn’t listen to Laz if he were to go back and tell them –
they really knew it already, thanks to Moses and the Prophets.
You note, incidentally, that Mr Moneybags didn’t ask if he could go back!

I think this story must have come as a huge shock to Jesus’ hearers. You see, back in the day, wealth was seen as a sign of God’s blessing – look how Abraham and Isaac became rich, or look at Job! Job quite believed God had abandoned him when his riches were taken away from him, but at the end, they were restored tenfold.

But by and large, if you were rich, God had blessed you; if you weren’t, then not. However, and this is a huge however, if you were rich, you were obligated to look after the poor. You weren’t to use your position to make matters worse for the poor; quite the reverse, you were expected to do what you could to alleviate their poverty. The prophet Amos, in our first reading, is warning his readers, painting a picture of rich people who were supposed to be using their wealth to tend to the welfare of God’s people, they were using it for their own comfort; sleeping on raised beds of wood inlaid with ivory at a time when most people slept on mats on the floor; eating veal and lamb at a time when most people at little to no meat; basically not giving a stuff about what happened to the poor as long as they had their own comforts!

Just like the rich man in our story. Basically, what he, and the people against whom Amos fulminates, were not doing was allowing God to transform them. They were proud. C S Lewis pointed out that pride is a terrible sin because “As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

The rich man was proud. He thought himself better than Lazarus, and spent his time – well, not all of his time, but you know what I mean – looking down on him. So he couldn’t be looking up at God and allowing God to change him. He couldn’t be looking up at God and knowing that God was immeasurably greater than he was. He may or may not have paid lip-service to God – he probably did. But it was only lip-service as, indeed, his ordering the kitchen to give the scraps to Lazarus was.

It’s easy to pay lip-service, isn’t it? And much harder to be really involved. We can’t do it of ourselves, of course; we have to allow God into our lives to change us and grow us and transform us into the people he created us to be. And we can’t do that if we are busy looking down on other people – not necessarily the beggar outside the supermarket or the homeless man outside the Tube station, but, for instance, if we see somebody making a mess of a job, whether as a volunteer or in paid work, and we think how much better we could do it. Or if we see someone doing or thinking something we wouldn’t do or think, and again, we think how much better we are for not doing that.

Do you remember the Pharisee, in another story Jesus told, who thanked God that he wasn’t like the tax-collector in the next pew? “Oh God, I thank you I am not like this tax collector; I tithe and I fast and I’m generally a Most Superior Person, thank you very much.” But Jesus said it was the tax collector, who knew himself to be a sinner, who went away right with God on that occasion.

I heard a story once of a Sunday school teacher who was discussing this parable with her class, and at the end, she said “Now, let us thank God that we are not like this Pharisee”. Hmm – all well and good, until the moment I found myself thanking God that I was not like that Sunday School teacher! For me, it’s one of the most difficult things, not being pleased with myself for not being like someone I may or may not privately think isn’t doing a great job.

But that makes me like the Pharisee in Jesus’ story, like the rich man in today’s story. And while I am looking down on the tax collector or the beggar, I’m not looking up to God. And it’s only by looking up to God that I can stop looking down on the tax collector or beggar.

It’s one of those circular things, isn’t it? The more we can look up to God, the less we are able to look down on other people. And the less we look down on them, the more we are able to see them as people like us. Had the rich man really seen the beggar, he might not have treated him as a brother, but he might have told his people to see to it that he had warm clothes and a place to sleep, and a good meal each day – and maybe, as his self-esteem increased, even a job of some kind, assuming the beggar could hold down a job in the first place. But no, he just allowed him to be fed on scraps and otherwise ignored him.

We need to give thanks, not that we are better than this rich man, because we aren’t. St Paul says, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

It is only through Jesus that we can be delivered from sin, and death, and only through him that we can become truly the people we were meant to be! Which you know, of course – I know you do – but it bears repeating every so often! Amen.