Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

There was a rich man who used to dress in purple and fine linen and feast magnificently every day. And at his gate there used to lie a poor man called Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to fill himself with what fell from the rich man's table; even the dogs came and licked his sores. (Luke 16:19-21)

The parable warns us about an excessive concern for comfort and the things of this world, which will inevitably lead us to a neglect of God and neighbor.

The description of the rich man is quite superlative. He is dressed in purple and fine linen, and his whole life could be summed up in that he feasted magnificently every day. But then there's a great contrast, because you have this poor man called Lazarus, who lay at his gate covered with sores, who was hungry, who even longed for the crumbs, but nobody gave them to him. Then we're told the dogs came and licked his sores. It's the epitome of destitution.

The Gospel, in painting this picture, talks about a man who precisely fell into that trap of excessive concern for comfort. Instead of winning his heaven through the use of his wealth, he lost it forever. Our Lord contrasts these two extreme conditions, the vast wealth in one case and tremendous need in the other.

Our Lord doesn't condemn the rich man because he is rich. It's not a sin to be rich. Somebody who has the talent to be able to make a million dollars, well, should try and make a million dollars, and then try and do as much good with that money as he can. Christ never condemned riches. What he did condemn was the bad use of riches. Often Our Lord used the wealth of rich people. He used the tomb of Joseph of Aramathea. He got help from Nicodemus. But he never condemned riches in themselves. What he did want was that everybody would have a social conscience, social concern for people around them.

The entire emphasis of the parable is on how the riches have been used. We only have expensive clothes and sumptuous daily banquets mentioned, whereas Lazarus was not even given the leftovers.

The rich man did nothing wrong as he amassed his fortune. The poverty of Lazarus was not his fault, at least not in a direct way. Also, he didn't take advantage of his position to exploit Lazarus. But he had this definite lifestyle. It can be summed up in those words, “he feasted magnificently.” You could say that he lived for himself as if God did not exist.

He had completely forgotten the fact that we are not owners of what we have, but just administrators.

The rich man had a good time for himself. He wasn't against God, nor did he oppress his impoverished neighbor. He was just blind to the existence of the needy person on his doorstep.

In some ways it was a very simple mistake. Our Lord is warning us that we can all make that mistake. He lived for himself. He spared himself no expense. But his great sin was that he did not see Lazarus. He could have cared for Lazarus if he had not been so selfish. He didn't use his wealth in any way that was in conformity with God's desires. He didn't know how to share.

It's how important it is for Christian parents to take advantage of situations that present themselves, to teach their children not to be blind, to see needy people around them, to be generous, and to share what they have and to find that greatest joy in their life from that sharing.

St. Augustine says Lazarus was received into Heaven because of his humility and not because of his poverty. Wealth itself was not what kept the rich man from eternal bliss. His punishment was for selfishness and disloyalty.

We're told that the poor man died and was carried away by the angels into the embrace of Abraham. (Luke 16:22) In this world, Lazarus had the dogs, but now he has the angels. The rich man also died and was buried and in his torment in Hell, he looked up and saw Abraham a long way off with Lazarus in his embrace. (Luke 16:22-23)

The conditions of the two men are completely different. Their roles are reversed.

He cried out, “Father Abraham, pity me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue.” (Luke 16:24)

He didn't say, “Send Lazarus with the fire truck or with the hose, but just get him to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue. Any alleviation would be marvelous. For I am in agony in these flames.”

Abraham said, “My son, remember that during your life you had your fill of good things, just as Lazarus had his fill of bad. Now he has been comforted here while you are in agony.” (Luke 16:25-26)

Probably the rich man regrets now very much that he didn't have better eyesight to see Lazarus. Our selfishness can be manifested in an insatiable desire to possess more and more material things. It can make people blind to the needs of their neighbors. Selfish people can come to treat others as if they were objects without value.

We can be reminded in this parable that we all have needy people living around us, people like Lazarus. We can't forget to administer what we have with generosity. In addition to sharing material things, we also should be sowers of understanding, of sympathy, of friendship.

There's a very nice movie called A Christmas Carol (1984), based on the famous novel of Dickens, which is well worth watching sometime. You're probably familiar with the character there called Scrooge. He's hunched over stacks of coins. He's greedily tallying his bursting accounts as he and his employers shiver in the cold but he is too cheap to spend money on coal to keep the office warm.

All Christians have to have a special sensitivity for their employees, people working under their nose. Do they have a just salary? Do they have what they need? Could they be more comfortable? Think about their family, their children.

Scrooge is the richest man in the city, and he keeps his wealth so securely locked away that no one, not even himself, benefits from it. No one was more successful than he was in a worldly sense. His business was prosperous. He was powerful to the point of being feared. He had the biggest mansion in town. And yet what did his success do for him? Well, it turned him into a monster. He was blind to the needs of those around him. He was blind to his own capacity for true human greatness.

Like the rich man in the parable, only when he saw his life from God's perspective did things change. He saw how many opportunities for doing good that he had squandered. He saw how many people he had used or ignored instead of loved and helped. Only then was he able to begin living that life worthily. Only then did he begin to experience the joy and meaning that he'd been yearning for all along.

Probably not all of us are as successful in the worldly sense as the rich man in the parable. But we're all constantly tempted to think that that kind of success is what life is really about and that can be just as dangerous, even if we can't have it, we want it for our children.

We can act as self-centered as Scrooge, even without having a comparable bank account. If in our minds we're seeking worldly success, instead of success as God understands it, and that's what the media culture all around us are constantly inviting us to do, we can fall into the temptation of being disciples of scrooge instead of being disciples of Christ.

How well we use the goods of this life may determine whether we win or lose our entrance into Heaven. Our life on earth is a testing ground for our generosity.

We're told in the Acts of the Apostles that it's better to give than to receive. (Acts 20:35) No greater lesson can we teach our children, no greater legacy can we give them than an example of having lived by these words. Paradoxically, we get more from giving than from receiving. What we get is Heaven.

I used to visit an elderly 97-year-old priest here in Nairobi in the last couple of years. He was the first missionary to a place called Pokot in rural Kenya, a very isolated place.

He used to say that when he went there in 1952, there was no education, no medication and no revelation. He spent the next 49 years of his life building 32 primary schools, two secondary schools, about four hospitals, about 25 parishes and he lived a long and healthy life, a very holy man. And he died a couple of weeks ago.

He went back to Ireland to celebrate the 70th anniversary of his priesthood, intending to come back here to Nairobi because he wanted to be buried here in Kenya. That was his final wish and dream. But God may have granted him many other things, but he didn't grant him that.

But before he died, he had a bit of a get-together with some missionary nuns there in Ireland and he was telling them a story that before he left in May, some people from Pokot, where he had been living for 49 years, came to see him because they said they wanted to celebrate his 70th anniversary of his priestly ordination with him.

With them, they brought a jar of honey and this was very symbolic because among the many different projects that he had and that he started, he helped the women there to start making honey; as a sort of a home making project and helped them to make some money. Today there are two honey factories in that place that grew out of his initiative. They brought him a jar of honey and they said,

“Father, this is the finest, sweetest, most purified honey in the whole country. And we came to bring a jar of it to tell you that what you gave us is sweeter than this honey. The Word of God that has built us up, that has helped our society to develop.”

Now they have educated people there. They have vocations to the priesthood. They have all sorts of things. When you look at the litany of things that that man did in the course of his life, it's quite an impressive litany.

He told me his early history, his father had a good education, he became a vet. But then his mother died when he was four years of age, leaving five children. She died of tuberculosis. The father had to go and visit many farms. The children were farmed out to different relatives to bring up. Three of them became priests and one became a missionary nun in Papua New Guinea. Quite an amazing story. This fellow, that childhood marked by the cross, produced all of these fruits.

All of us have to try and share with others what we ourselves have been given. St. Paul says, Be not conformed to this world, but be renewed in the spirit of your mind. (Rom. 12:2 ) That was Paul's message to the first Christians in Rome. When we lead selfish lives, we find it very difficult to see the needs of others.

We also may find it very difficult to see God. St. John Paul said the rich man was condemned because he did not pay attention to the other man, because he failed to take notice of Lazarus, the person who sat at his door and longed to eat the scraps from his table.

We should be willing to give away a great deal. In these weeks and months coming up to Christmas, well, it's a good time to plan these coming months. See in my family if I can put a value-added message during these coming months about generosity, detachment, which ultimately are the messages of Bethlehem - How I can bring my family in contact with poor people more frequently, to open the eyes of my children.

There's a document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that says, Christians must not sit idly by as the tide of materialism sweeps over our entire culture, nor should we become entrapped by a purely economic vision of the world. Solidarity is a direct requirement of human and supernatural brotherhood.

We have to see people around us and the dignity of every person, and the rights of every person to material things. That attitude will lead us to live that personal poverty which our Lord called blessed.

We don't waste food, or we don't tolerate people around us wasting food, or throwing rubbish in public places, banana skins or plastic bottles. We care for other people, we care for the world, we care for the environment as God gave it to us.

This is quite different from the poverty that oppresses most of the people we know in the world. Before this type of poverty, said St Pope John Paul, and privation, the Church lifts up her voice to promote the solidarity which is so urgently required.

We have to help everyone in the world to see people around them as their brothers. How can I help the people in Ukraine? And also how can I help the people on my doorstep? They're brothers in need of the great treasure of the faith which we possess.

Sometimes people around us don't just need material things, they need our joy, our friendship. Sometimes they also need our economic assistance.

Mother Teresa says the greatest poverty is loneliness. We can't remain indifferent to conditions in parts of the world where so many people are suffering for want of food. The president of this country recently said there are 14 million hungry people in this country. People lack food, people lack education.

They also may be ignorant of the truths about man and about God. We can examine our conscience and see, well, is my detachment real detachment? Does it lead to any practical consequences? Our lives should be a model of temperance as far as our use of material goods are concerned.

It's very good that we deny ourselves the pleasures of some fruit of the tree of good and of evil. We all need to have something that we deny ourselves. I can do without. Do we have our heart focused on the treasures that last forever which neither thief can take nor moth can destroy? (Matt. 6:20)

That's why we have to encourage people or remind people around us with a certain periodicity about the need to think about eternal life. If we are faithful, we will have Christ for all eternity. Something very wonderful. Something worth dreaming about and thinking about.

Saint Augustine says, How lovely I suddenly found to be free from the glamor of those vanities, so that now it was a joy to renounce what I had been so much afraid to lose. But you cast them out of me, O true and supreme loveliness, you cast them out of me and took their place instead. You who are sweeter than all pleasure, yet no mere flesh and blood, brighter than all light, yet deeper within than any secret loft...

Generosity is a virtue of great souls who find their reward in the act of giving. A generous person knows how to give without demanding. When we give, it enlarges the heart. Our Lord sometimes asked for a little, but then he asked for a lot.

He told Peter, “Put out a little from the shore.” (Luke 5:3)

But then later on He told him, “Launch out into the deep.” (Luke 5:4)

He invites us to leave our comfortable state and our egoism and to complicate our life. Heroic sanctity is tied up in following that call, leaving all things they followed him. (Luke 5:11)

And in the course of our life, we have to try and maintain and strengthen our generosity. We need to maintain it because otherwise it might diminish. We have the continual example of the generosity of the child in the manger. We are called to try and imitate the generosity of Christ, at the incarnation, at the redemption, who paid the great price of His precious blood, of which there was a super abundance. There's a small step from lack of generosity to lukewarmness.

In the life of the Holy Family, we see that nobody holds anything back. Saint Ignatius tells us to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and not to seek any reward.

It's important for children to learn these lessons as soon as they have something to give. And when there is generosity and self-giving in a family, there is peace and serenity and joy because happiness in this world is found through giving and through self-giving. Christ left nothing for himself.

God loves generosity. Stinginess or selfishness can be like a slow-acting poison. It has a deadly effect. We can ask Our Lord in our prayer not to get too attached to the little or to the much that we may have, be it money or clothes or time or whatever, and to accept humbly our limitations and to struggle to overcome our defects.

At times, to be generous in that struggle, we're asked to do the least pleasant task first, to be ready to help whatever the circumstances may be at home, in school, in the office, in the street and to help with an upright intention, not just because there's something for us in it and to help anyone who may need our help. That also means that we're ready to do favors for those who ask them of us.

It was said in the early years of St Josemaria that he tried to do favors for many people. Generosity can also mean accepting people as they are, without attaching too much importance to their defects, giving a positive tone to our conversations, avoiding negative criticism, and in this way making it easier for those around us to come closer to God.

Generosity and not being deterred by the humbler chores that may need to be done. We have to learn how to give ourselves said St Josemaria in The Forge (44), to burn before God like the light placed on the lamp stand, to give light to those who work in darkness, like the sanctuary lamp that burns by the altar, giving off light till the last drop is consumed.

We're told in The Forge (45) also that the Lord, the Teacher of Love, is a jealous lover, who asks for all we possess, for all our love. He expects us to offer him whatever we have, and to follow the path he has marked out for each one of us. He wants us to be co-redeemers with him. That is why, to help us understand this marvel, he moves the Evangelist to tell us of so many great wonders. He could have produced bread from anything, but he doesn't. He looks for human cooperation. He needs a child, a boy, a few pieces of bread and some fish. He needs you and me, and He is God.

This should move us to be generous in our corresponding with His grace. And always we have the example of Our Lady, who gave herself so completely,

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)

Particularly at that moment when she went to give herself and her time and her energy in helping St Elizabeth.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

GD