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.