Becoming Lazarists through Listening to Moses, the Prophets and the Risen One, 26th Sunday (C), September 25, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Parish, Manhattan
Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
September 25, 2022
Amos 6:1.4-7, Ps 146, 1 Tim 6:11-16, Lk 16:19-31

To listen to an audio recording please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today Jesus gives us all a parable that begins with a rich man who was adorned in royal purple clothes and exquisite priestly linen who dined sumptuously each day. In the first reading, the prophet Amos describes people in Jerusalem who slept on beds of ivory — just think about what that cost! — eating lambs and calves, having jam sessions on harps, drinking wine not from glasses but from bowls, and anointing themselves with the best oils, the ancient version of the best skin care products, perfumes and colognes. These figures are those whom many in our culture are trained to aspire to emulate, to be rich and care free, woofing down lamb, veal, filets and caviar, guzzling down precious aged wine and liqueurs, having private concerts of the finest musicians, dressing to the nines like royalty and sleeping on beds made out of the trunks of elephants. Today we’d add garages full of fancy automobiles, private jets, stables full of horses, marble floors, and perhaps golden toilet seats. It all sounds pretty good. If you work hard at a great Ivy League school, work the networks, score on the appropriate investments, some say, that could be you. But in a huge wake up call, God through Amos proclaims “woe” to those who live this way and Jesus in the parable describes how the rich man ended up going to hell, across an unpassable chasm from eternal happiness, in torment because of flames and tortured over the fate of family members living the same vain lifestyle. By today’s readings, especially by the Gospel parable, God communicates to us quite clearly that he wants us to live differently. He does not want any of us to remain unmoved when we hear the story of Lazarus, covered with sores, being licked and consoled by the compassion of stray dogs, longing to eat just the crumbs from the rich man’s table. He does not want any of us to remain unstirred, either, by the desperation of the rich man after he dies. What Jesus wants us to realize is not simply the state each of them is in, but the fact that each predicament was totally avoidable.
• In the Parable, the rich man goes to Hell not because he was rich, not because he had earned his money in an immoral way, not because he had been asked by Lazarus for help and refused, not because he had sent dogs to lick Lazarus’ wounds or had done anything at all evil to him. He went to Hell because when there was a poor man at his gate he simply did nothing. He was condemned not because of anything he had done, but precisely because of what he hadn’t done: he was so caught up in himself that he didn’t make any effort at all to help out a man who was struggling and dying in his midst. He simply ignored him.
• In St. Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 25:31-46), Jesus made clear that when he judges us, he will separate us into two groups on the basis of how we have treated the poor and needy among us. To those on his right who will be saved, he will say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you since the beginning of the world, for I was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, ill or imprisoned and you cared for me.” But to those on his left, he will declare with infinite sadness, “Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, because I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink, naked and you gave me no clothes, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, ill and in prison and you didn’t care for me.” The condemned will poignantly ask, “Lord when did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, ill, a stranger or a prisoner and not minister to your needs?” Jesus will then reply, “As often as you failed to do this to the least of my brothers and sisters, you failed to do it to me.” The rich man went to Hell because in neglecting the dying poor man at his doorstep, he was neglecting God himself. In failing to love his neighbor, he was failing to love God and in fact failing to love himself properly, too. This point was made once by the brilliant late Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, who used to celebrate Mass at Harvard when I was an undergraduate, who once told a group of wealthy donors, “The poor need you to stay out of poverty, but you need the poor to stay out of hell.” Or as Archbishop Charles Chaput, the retired Archbishop of Philadelphia, has often said: “Either we care for the poor or go to Hell.” Jesus’ message is clear.
• This is a message many of us need to hear. Many Catholics are accustomed to thinking about how God wants us to change simply in terms of the bad behavior we know he wants us to excise from our life, like the bad thoughts we have, the mendacious or malicious words we say, the wayward deeds we commit. But, as we note at the beginning of each Mass, these are not all the sins we commit. We confess to Almighty God and to each other that we have sinned not just in our thoughts, words, and deeds, but in “what I have failed to do … by my own most grievous fault.” Few of us spend much time, however, examining ourselves on these failures. We omit the omissions, the acts of love we should have done but didn’t do. The lesson Jesus teaches us in the Gospel is that, like the rich man, it’s not enough for us not to do evil, but we also have to do good, to sacrifice ourselves for those who are needy, to look past ourselves, identify their needs, and do what God makes possible to remedy them.
• This is a challenge today because we’re now living at a time in which — because of technological advances in television, cameras, the internet and social media — we see can see all the tragedies happening across the country and globe almost all at once. We see news report of floods in Pakistan, a hurricane in Puerto Rico, another massacre against Christians in Nigeria or Madagascar, Uyghers imprisoned in detention camps in China, Ukrainian refugees in Poland, South Sudanese refugees in Uganda, Venezuelan refugees being moved as political pawns from one part of the United States to the next, including here in New York City, and, rather than being stimulated, many of us become desensitized, tempted to flip the channel and wash our hands. We know that 829 million people in the world, one in nine, are chronically malnourished and 155 million children go to bed each night starving, but many say there’s little they can do. We walk the streets of Manhattan, like Broadway from campus down to 110th or 96^th and we pass many homeless begging for food and money that we’re tempted to pretend we don’t see them or to try to walk on the other side of the road. Even after the Dobbs decision, we recognize that each year more than 600 thousand babies, made in God’s image and likeness, will have their lives ended through abortion in our country alone, but most turn a deaf ear to their silent screams. We can multiply the examples, but the sheer magnitude of the needy and their needs can sometimes make us just turn away and turn inward, mind our own business, and divest ourselves of responsibility.
• Pope Francis has called this the “globalization of indifference” and he’s trying to wake the world up to the way we can begin to live like the rich man in this Sunday’s Gospel. When in 2013 he went to the small Italian island of Lampedusa, where over the previous 25-year period more than 20,000 people had died making a perilous 16-hour journey on a rough stretch of the Mediterranean packed on pirate smuggling vessels, he poignantly asked, “Who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters of ours?” And he answered, “Nobody! That is our answer. … Today no one in our world feels responsible… for our brothers and sisters. We have fallen into the hypocrisy of the priest and the levite whom Jesus described in the parable of the Good Samaritan: we see our brother half dead on the side of the road, and perhaps we say to ourselves: ‘poor guy!,’ and then go on our way. … We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; [we say] it’s none of my business!”
• Where does this indifference come from? How can so many in the world, including so many of us Christians, get to the point where we chronically fail to be Good Samaritans, where our hearts are no longer touched by the misfortune of others, where we fail even to weep over others’ misfortune when we notice it? Pope Francis blames “the culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, which makes us insensitive to the cries of other people.” Such comfort, flowing from consumerism, makes us addicted to our own desires over others’ needs. Love of money and material things gradually makes our hearts stony, corrupted, anaesthetized and deadened. Like the rich man in the Gospel, we can stuff ourselves with so much food and pleasure that we longer empathize. We can be so blinded by ego that we fail even to notice the Lazaruses whom God places at our doorstep not only so that we might help them but so that through them he might convert and change us.
• Many of us are in need of that conversion. But the Lord’s grace is powerful and can in fact change us. That gives us great hope. One of the greatest examples showing the possibility of a profound personal moral revolution is prominently featured here in this Church of Notre Dame. If you enter through the gates at the front entrance and look to your left, we have a beautiful statue of St. Vincent de Paul, caring for two poor orphans. Likewise if you go into the sacristy, right next to the crucifix to which the priest bows before and after Mass, you have a painting of St. Vincent de Paul. His feast day is this Tuesday, September 27, the date on which he died in 1660. He is one of the greatest saints in the history of the Church, but he didn’t start that way. He began as a selfish egomaniac, ambitious to live the life of the rich man in today’s Gospel. His moving story shows what the Lord can do in each of us if we let him. Vincent was the third of six children of poor farmers in southwestern France. His parents struggled simply to make ends meet, but when Vincent’s father recognized how precociously intelligent his son was, he and the family sacrificed many of their animals to provide him an education. Vincent wasn’t particularly grateful, though. One day when his father made a long journey on foot to visit him at univesrity in his tattered peasant clothing, Vincent didn’t even go out to greet him because he was so embarrassed by his father’s poverty. Vincent’s ambition at the time was to become a priest not because he thought it was his vocation, but because he thought vainly that it might bring him money and fame. He thought that if he played his cards right, he might receive benefices for rich Churches and abbeys that would provide him enough income permanently to get his family out of the poverty, not primarily for their sake but because their penury embarrassed him. On account of his genius and motivation, he raced through university and was ordained a priest at the shockingly young age of 19, even though canon law required one to be 25. He wasted no time vainly trying to climb the ecclesiastical ladder. He became a chaplain to Queen Margaret of Valois and moved to Paris. As a brilliant “baby priest,” he quickly earned the reputation as a talented preacher, which gained him further entrée into French high society.
• But the Lord gave him two experiences that helped him to convert from his vanity and rejection of Christ in service of his own ego. The first happened in 1605, six years into his priesthood. After having gone to Marseilles to acquire an inheritance from an elderly widow — another sign of where he was placing his treasure — he boarded a ship to Narbonne that was captured by African pirates who brought him to Tunisia, where he was a slave for two years. God eventually arranged for his escape when he was able to persuade the wife of an ex-priest who had converted to Islam, to preserve his life, so that he might convert her husband and allow her with him to head back to France. Her conversion was an occasion of his. After his release, Vincent never forgot the misery these slaves were experiencing. He resolved to help them somehow, someway in the future. There were about 25,000 poor slaves on the Barbary Coast, mostly Christian. He would eventually train and send many priests and brothers to attend to their spiritual meets and never ceased to raise money to ransom them; by the time of his death, he had purchased the freedom of over 1,200. (Oskar Schindler saved 1,100 Jews in the Holocaust.) The second experience was a further crucifixion of his ego and pursuit of the esteem of others. After he had returned to Paris, his roommate was robbed of 400 crowns, a huge sum in that day. Convinced Vincent was the thief, the roommate maliciously accused Vincent to the police and everyone else. Whereas earlier Vincent may have trusted in his own abilities to defend his reputation, now he trusted only in divine Providence, who had just freed him from slavery. “God knows the truth,” he said calmly, as he bore the calumny for six months until the true thief confessed. It cured him of the vanity of placing his treasure in human respect.
• From that point forward, he was free to seek God’s interests in everything, and even though he would continue to walk in and out of French high society, his heart was set firmly on what the Lord wanted, on God’s glory, rather than the vanity of worldly success. He began from that period to welcome Christ in his poverty fully into his life and to help others to make the same exodus from rejection to welcoming. He was recruited by the powerful Count of Joigny, Philip de Gondi, to become chaplain to his family and tutor to his children. This was the assignment of the former Vincent’s dreams, but it was now an assignment that he twice laid down in order to become a pastor in rural areas in great need of conversion. Both times, however, Count de Gondi — who with his family loved Vincent — prevailed upon him to return. The latter time they enticed him by promising him that one of his tasks would be to teach the Gospel to the peasants throughout their expansive territory who were in ignorance and moral disarray. Count de Gondi, who was prefect of the French penal system, also arranged for Vincent to be named almoner and chaplain to the convicts in the galleys, which allowed Vincent to bring not just spiritual but material comfort to these prisoners across France. The more work he did among the poor and the outcasts, the more he became aware of how much work needed still to be done. He knew that organization was crucial. He began to recruit priests to help him in the work of preaching the Gospel to the poor; these clerics, drawn by Vincent’s example, became the first members of the Congregation of the Mission, which was popularly named, then and now, the “Lazarists,” because they cared for poor Lazarus however they found him. With the help of St. Louise de Marillac, he established the Daughters of Charity, to work in the many hospitals he was founding to care for the sick, incurable, orphaned, aged and abandoned. To help in the relief of the indigent, he instituted the Ladies of Charity, a group of wealthy women who would use their social connections to raise the funds needed not merely for the immediate care of the poor, but for their long-term education and training; in Paris these Ladies helped to run a soup kitchen that fed a staggering 16,000 hungry people a day. He also was appointed by the king and by the bishops to reform how priests were trained, so that everyone who was ordained would not only be able to preach the Gospel and celebrate the Sacraments but be a man, minister and model of charity. Everyone was involved in the work of charity: priests, religious men, religious women, lay people, because the needs were enormous. He had gone from vanity to sanctity, from worldly ambition to Christlike zeal, from seeking wealth to giving everything he had to those in need. To use St. Paul’s words from today’s second reading, he left spiritual worldliness behind to pure “pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience and gentleness,” to “compete well for the faith,” and to “lay hold of eternal life, to which you were called.” He’s doubtless praying for each of us today from heaven to have a conversion just as profound from worldly categories to the categories of the kingdom so that we, too, may lay hold of, rather than let go of, eternal life. He’s praying for each of us to become a Lazarist, too. Every Catholic is supposed to be a Lazarist, caring for poor men and women, boys and girls, materially and spiritually, however we can.
• This leads us to one last point from today’s Gospel. When the rich man due to his callous disregard to Lazarus in his midst asks Abraham, representing God, to send Lazarus to his five brothers to warn them that they need to be charitable, to overcome their indifference to the plight of those in need, lest they join him in the place of flames, Abraham replies that his brothers have Moses and the Prophets. They had Amos, like in today’s first reading. They had Isaiah, who said that the fasting God wishes is to “share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless, clothe the naked when you see them, and not turn your back on your own.” They had Hosea and so many others. But the rich man says that that the testimony of the prophets wouldn’t be enough, because his brothers, just like he used to, were ignoring God through Moses and the Prophets just like they were ignoring the poor. “But if someone from the dead goes to them,” the rich man protested, “then they would repent.” Abraham replies, however, that if they were deaf to the Law and the Prophets, if they were deaf to God, then they would be unmoved even by the appeals of someone risen from the dead.
• Well, today, we and the whole Church receive what the five brothers in the Parable did not. Not only do we have Moses and the Prophets to speak to us about charity, but Jesus, risen from the dead, comes to proclaim to us this Parable live. At Mass, we encounter him not under the appearance of a poor man but under the even humbler appearances of bread and wine. As he gives us his Body and Blood, tells us, “Do this in memory of me,” which means not just to celebrate Mass but to go and do what he does, giving our body, our blood, our sweat, our tears, our food, our material resources, and most importantly our love to others in need. God who calls us to be remember him and to love others as Good Samaritans will give us all the help he knows we need to do so, but we, like Vincent de Paul, need to respond to that grace, as true missionaries of his responsible, tender, compassionate love. This is the path that, when it comes time for our judgment, will enable Jesus to wave each of us to his right for having cared for him in the person of others. This is the way that we may take our seat with all those eating not just scraps from the Master’s table but sharing in the sumptuous eternal wedding banquet for which the Mass is a foretaste. This is the path for which Jesus created us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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