Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 15 2025

Amos 6:1a, 4-7

1 Timothy 6:6-19

Luke 16:19-end

 

“If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

The gospels, from beginning to end, are the story of the Resurrection of Jesus. They would not have been written if the first disciples had not had the experience of Jesus, crucified and raised from the dead. Everything in them was written in that light. And they were written, some 40 to 60 years after the Resurrection, because the risen Lord was still a living experience transforming the lives of believers. People were still meeting Jesus and finding their lives changed by that encounter. Therefore, what he said and did in his lifetime mattered, and needed to be written down.

The experience of the Risen Lord was and is the most important fact in the life of the Church. The Church which wrote the gospels, and the Church which reads them. That’s us. For us, as for Christians in every age, meeting the risen Lord changes everything.

It changes where we see God at work. Not in the centres of power and wealth, but in the outcast, in the marginalised, in the victim who was rejected, cast out, crucified, buried. And who was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. God is at work where the world thinks everything is over and done with, worthless, finished, and forgotten.

And that is the meaning of the parable in today’s Gospel. The story of a heedless rich man and a pious poor man, and how their situations are reversed by God’s judgement after death, was a well-known moral fable at the time of Jesus. But Jesus changes it. In his story, Lazarus is not obviously religious. It is his poverty and need, not his piety, that we are to notice. And then comes the twist in the tale: “neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” We see that this parable needs to be read, like the whole of the Gospel, in the light of the Resurrection. Because Jesus is, pre-eminently, the one who rose from the dead. 

The Resurrection changes how we understand God. The humble and meek are indeed lifted up, raised even from the death that human violence inflicted. The resurrection is God’s judgement on a society which survives by creating victims. But it is also God’s inauguration of a new society, of his kingdom. The old order of sin and death gives way as God exposes and reverses the extent to which we have been complicit in it. 

Jesus, like Lazarus, was counted as nothing by the world which rejected him and put him to death. The rich man simply didn’t see Lazarus when he was alive, or if he did just assumed that he was getting what he deserved. The rich man is someone who does not understand what God is like. Even in the afterlife of this parable, which is the truth about Lazarus and the rich man seen in the God’s light, he thinks that Lazarus is someone who can be ordered to come to him, like a slave, with a drink of water.

Today in our great city, it is too easy to ignore those who are on the margins. The poor, the homeless, the hungry, those with no opportunities, victims of people trafficking and modern slavery. Those who are excluded tend to become invisible. And in this one world, our global home, how easy it is not to see those who suffer from war, poverty and injustice, in our relentless exposure to calamitous news from distant places.

But for us who believe in the Risen Lord, who are being transformed by the power of his risen life, we cannot let our brothers and sisters be invisible. We cannot turn away. Because that would be to turn away from where God is at work, from those whom God most values. For the face of Jesus, the outcast and the Risen Lord, shines out most clearly in our brothers and sisters who are on the margins and most in need.

On the last two Sundays we have had two feast days, which meant that we departed from the readings from Luke’s Gospel set for those two weeks. But in fact the readings for those feast days, and for today, have a common message, which has even developed in a coherent way. 

On Holy Cross Day, we saw that the saving work of Jesus, in his death and resurrection, reconciles humanity with God and with one another, creating one new humanity in which there is no distinction of race, nationality or culture. On Saint Matthew’s Day, we saw that even people of the same race and nation, bitterly divided by politics and social position, could find a new unity, a new belonging together, in Jesus. 

Today, the story of the rich man and Lazarus teaches us to notice those who also belong, but whom we would not see, unless Jesus were walking with us on the path of discipleship, showing us his presence in those most marginalized and most in need. Our vision and understanding are enlarged to embrace all of humanity. All are called into the new reality of God’s kingdom. 

It is true that problems of exclusion and marginalization can have complex roots and we cannot ourselves personally solve all of them. But we can give of our surplus to those agencies that have the means to help. And we can build a better world by being citizens who see, and draw attention to, Jesus in the most excluded. Because the first in the Kingdom will be Lazarus and all the marginalized and ignored ones of the world, who in fact show Jesus to us most truly. Then even those who are comfortable and secure can find a place at the table alongside them, through God’s mercy, through learning to see.

The Church always looks to Jesus, and is constantly being taught by him, the risen Lord, the living reality in our lives. Jesus risen from the dead alone undoes the sinful ordering of human society and makes new life possible for everyone – for the poor and dispossessed at our gates, and even, if they can but believe, for the rich and powerful. Because, through God’s infinite love, the gate of mercy stands open even for them.