Sunday the 28th of September 2025 - The Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Amos 6:1a, 4-7/ Ps 146(145)/ 1 Timothy 6:11-16/ Luke 16:19-31

Who are the privileged today? We look around our world and we see many people who are comfortably well off and some who are incredibly rich in contrast to many people who are objectively poor. The rich and famous are honoured by the world and we are encouraged to aspire to their lifestyles. The truth is that in the kingdom of God it is the poor who are the privileged and the rich who are destined to be outcasts. Amos, in the first reading, calls us all out of our comfort zones. What would Amos say to us today, Woe to those absorbed by social media, those couch potatoes glued to inane television programs, those eating and drinking to excess, those so taken up in themselves that they fail to even notice the sick, poor, and needy. How do we bridge the chasm between indifference and compassion in our world today?

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus can be challenging but the message of the gospel needs to unsettle us sometimes, to shake us out of complacency. The parable presents us with two people who have very different lives. The rich man dressed in purple and dinning sumptuously every day, purple dye being very expensive with purple clothing being a sign of great wealth, and poor Lazarus in a pitiful state lying at the rich man’s door in the hope of some scraps from the table.

An important aspect of this parable is not so much the contrast between wealth and poverty but that Lazarus was invisible to the rich man even though he had to step over or around him each time he came and went from his home. The poverty of Lazarus was not hidden away or in some distant land but right at the feet of the wealthy man. This is the kind of blindness that Amos was warning about in his society many years before and is still to be found today. The privileged who enjoy the best of everything can become so absorbed in their luxury they become blind to the suffering of others even those very close to them. In the gospel parable it is not wealth in itself that Jesus is condemning but the complacency, the indifference, the failure to even see or respond to the suffering of others.

We are reminded yet again that in God’s kingdom it is the poor who are the privileged and the wealthy who risk being the outcasts. Wealth in itself is not evil, indeed all we receive is gifted from God, but wealth and the good living it can bring can blind us to the suffering and needs to others and deafen us to the call from God to serve our neighbour. The extract from the letter to Timothy in the second reading calls us away from the passing comforts and status symbols of this world and towards the lasting values of the kingdom of God. To “pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called.” Jesus taught that the poor are the subject of God’s preferential love, the church therefore, through us it’s members, must show that love in the world, working tirelessly to bring relief, defence, and liberation to those in need.

Again of particular note in the parable today is the fact that even after death, even when he saw Lazarus being comforted in heaven, the rich man still viewed Lazarus as his servant calling for him to be sent to cool his tongue. Even with the truth laid out in front of him the rich man remained blind and cannot shake off his sense of entitlement. The great chasm between the rich man and Lasarus had been forming during their lifetimes, growing wider by every act of indifference, each time the rich man stepped over Lazarus without seeing him, every lavish meal consumed, and by every expensively dyed item of clothing he bought.

We need to guard against building chasms in our own lives. Indifference to the poor and needy around us or in the wider world, keeping silent about unjust social and economic systems that keep people in poverty, excessive consumer consumption while our neighbours lack the essentials to live, preoccupation in our own comforts leading us to being blind to the needs and discomforts of others are all things that will widen that chasm. What can we do to ensure that this chasm can be bridged? As Abraham said to the rich man pleading for his brothers to be warned about their behaviour, we have the teachings of the church, scripture including Moses and the Prophets and crucially we have Jesus who is the one who has risen from the dead. The problem is that many people are blind and deaf to the word of God and even though someone has returned from the dead they cannot or will not see or hear him.

Who is the Lazarus at our gate today? Who are the suffering and needy that we consistently fail to see as we step over them? It might be an elderly lonely neighbour, an immigrant family far from their familiar home, people relying on the local food banks for the essentials of life, or a family member or work colleague struggling with invisible anguish. We cannot seek to honour God in our churches, in our prayers, in our hymns, dressed in our Sunday best, if we neglect him when he comes to us in those in need.

The kingdom of God is the opposite of the kingdoms we know on earth, in God’s kingdom the truly privileged are not the wealthy and admired of our world but the poor and needy, and those who see with the eyes of Jesus who respond with love and compassion. Let us pray that we always see the Lazarus lying on our doorstep before it is too late.

God Bless Brendan.