In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The Apostle Paul hit the nail on the head regarding the behaviour and attitude of people, when he was speaking this morning about how some people in those days were being circumcised only in order to escape the criticism of those who were insisting that the Old Testament Law had to be followed to the letter. People who are behaving this way are behaving simply out of fear. The whole point is (especially from everything the Apostle Paul is saying) that the way of Christ is not the way of fear at all. The way of Christ is the way of love, of life, of actual freedom, freedom which North Americans do not really know and understand. It is the way of true freedom : living in love with Christ, doing God’s will because of love for Christ – not because we are afraid of what might happen if we do not obey the Law, if we do not do what He says. We do what He says because we love Him. We follow His example and we follow His path because we love Him.
This is the way of Christian obedience. It is not : “Do what I tell you ; do it because I say you should do it”. True obedience is imitation of Christ. I am going to offer my imitation of our Saviour because He loves me and I love Him, and I want to be like Him. This is how love works. People who are married have to know about that. People who have ever been in love also probably have to know about that, because we try to emulate the one whom we love. We try to be pleasing to the person whom we love because we love that person. It is not because of some sort of slavish attitude. If the relationship between a loving couple is really honest, if they love each other, then they try to be pleasing to each other because of love.
Thus it is between us and Christ. We try to be pleasing to Him because we love Him. That is the nature of Christian obedience. It is not just rules and rules and nothing but rules. In this parable today about Lazarus and the rich man, we have yet another concrete example of how Christians are supposed to live (or not supposed to live), as the case may be. The rich man is obviously going to the Temple, and he is making the necessary sacrifices. He is being carried in and out of his palatial estate every day, going about his business. Every day, this poor Lazarus is sitting at his gate. I do not think those were the days when they had curtains around the sedan chairs. In all likelihood, it was not possible for this rich man to be carried out, and escape noticing that Lazarus was sitting there. To him, Lazarus was like a piece of furniture. He really was not paying any serious attention to him.
This man sitting outside his door was his opportunity to practice his love of God. However, this rich man (like most people are doing even to this day) would have been saying : “Let him get a job ! What is he doing sitting there, leeching off me ? Let him get a job and do something constructive instead of sitting there, even if he is covered with sores and the dogs are licking him. Let him go and look after himself. Do not bother me !”
In fact, Lazarus had been put there by the Lord so that this rich man would do something for him. We have to remember that this was before the welfare state. If one did not have work, the only other alternative was to beg. Let us turn our attention to Lazarus himself sitting outside the gate starving. Who knows if Lazarus did not starve to death outside that gate because the rich man did not feed him ?
When the rich man dies, he sees Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. Then the rich man becomes worried about his brothers, and asks Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers so that they would be rescued from the same fate as his. However, if Lazarus should go to his brothers from the dead in order to warn them, what would be the effect ? Lazarus, appearing to someone in a dream, is going to be frightening. He is going to warn them that if they do not straighten up, they are going to come to the same place as their brother. Let us take note of the underlying environment of fear : Lazarus should frighten his brothers with fear, so that because of fear they should comply with God’s Law and do what is right, so that they will not come there. The fact is, you know, that the Lord does not want us to come into His Kingdom because of fear. He wants us to enter His Kingdom willingly with love and in freedom, not because of fear. The Apostle John tells us : “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). This is the way of the Christian life : to be without fear. Fear is one of the major tools of the devil by which he regulates our lives and paralyses us. Being afraid of God is not the best motivation for entering the Kingdom of Heaven. He wants us to come into His Kingdom in love, and in freedom.
Sometimes people ask me : “How do I show God’s love ?” Obviously, we are showing our love for God by being here together this morning in His Temple as we are worshipping Him. That is one way of showing our love for God. The second way of showing our love for God is by communicating with Him in our prayers every day at home. People who love each other do not ignore each other. If they ignore each other, they do not really love each other. If they are a married couple and never talk to each other, that is not much of a marriage. Love requires communication. It requires affirmation. It requires renewal all the time. It requires constant, mutual feeling in order to be truly alive.
This is how it is between us and the Lord. We need to be telling Him that we love Him. We need to be quiet with Him sometimes, letting Him tell us that He loves us. However, it does not stop there. It can never stop there, because Christian love must be expressed in concrete ways, beyond just talking. In a marriage, you cannot just say to your spouse : “I love you ; I love you ; I love you”, and leave it at that. That never suffices. Love has to be expressed in concrete ways as well. I am getting old now, and I find that many people have never seen the operetta, My Fair Lady. They do not know about the young poet who tells Liza in all sorts of poetry how many ways he loves her. She gets all irritated and exasperated, and she tells him to stop talking about love and to show her in concrete ways that he loves her. That is precisely what we have to show each other : that we love each other. We have to demonstrate to the Lord in concrete ways that we love Him as well.
How do we do that ? We do that by how we treat Lazarus. By that I mean by how we treat all the odd and strange people that the Lord puts in our path in any given day. How do we behave towards these people ? Do we condemn them for their weirdness, their eccentricities, their weaknesses, or do we thank God for the opportunity to meet such a person and say a good word to this person ? A good word is hard to come by these days. Mostly everywhere you go, people groan, moan and complain about this and that. They do not talk about anything good. They have forgotten all about the movie, Bambi. Thumper’s mother said : “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all”. People can be really gloomy these days. They need a good word. They need – we all need – to hear a good word from time to time.
The Lord does, in His mercy, send people to speak to us good words, nurturing words, helping words, correcting words sometimes, too. Without fear, we have to try to be an example of what it is to have joy in Christ : by how we behave towards a cashier in a store, for example. I saw two cashiers just the other day. Those poor persons looked so down that they did not want to talk. The relationship between human beings is painful to them, because people are often so grumpy – so they try to avoid communication. We have to show them the light of the love of Christ. Those poor cashiers that are beaten down by grumpy people have to be shown the love of the Lord. We have to show the love of Jesus Christ in countless ways, in all sorts of unexpected ways to unexpected people : people in airports, stewards and stewardesses on airlines. There are all sorts of persons that the Lord sends to us whom we must address with this love, with this joy in Christ. This love of Christ in us will die unless it is expressed. It must be expressed, and it must be expressed in all sorts of ways every day, and not only to our friends, not only to our family, not only to this congregation. It has to be expressed to the people around us every day amongst whom the Lord has placed us. We must express this love of Jesus Christ.
Then we will be following the right path. Then we will truly have hope of being in the Kingdom of Heaven because we will have allowed this love (which is the nature of life in the Kingdom of Heaven) to flow amongst us and through us, now, here, today, and every day. We express this love and share the Lord’s love without preaching, without quoting Scripture or quoting anything. We simply have to be a loving person to everyone around us. If the occasion comes to say something about Scripture, if the occasion comes to speak about Christ openly and clearly, it will present itself. A person will ask a question, and we have to answer. We have to be this love first. The Saviour is saying to us in a number of places that we have to be like salt and yeast in bread (see Matthew 5:13 ; 13:33). One cannot distinguish salt and yeast from the rest of the flour or anything else in the mixture. One cannot see where it is, but it is definitely active. Bread rises because the yeast is active, and the bread has flavour because the salt is active. This is how we have to be.
When it is time to be seen, the Lord will give that occasion. Just living this love with joy is the main thing of our life, especially as Orthodox Christians, because the Lord has given us everything. There is nothing lacking in our Faith. He has given us every tool, every resource necessary to live this life. We have to use those tools. We have to take them up, and we have to employ them.
Brothers and sisters, let us ask the Lord to give us the strength, the courage, the hope, and the strength of love to do exactly this. Let us concretely express His love, day by day, wherever we are, in the midst of whatever situation He provides for us so that everything about our life will declare His glory, together with that of the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.