Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C (2025) - Fr Joseph Vnuk, OP

When I was a nineteen-year old science student at the University of Adelaide, there were four students called Gillard. I became friends with the brothers David, Chris and Mick, who were good Catholics and engineering students. The fourth Gillard, not related to these three, studied law and was into student politics. I was aware of her existence, but we did not go to the same lectures, nor did I ever attend meetings of the Left Coalition or the Womyn’s Collective, so we never met. Twenty-five years later, when Julia Gillard finally got the numbers in caucus and replaced Kevin Rudd, I realised that I had missed my opportunity to be on first name terms with the Prime Minister of Australia.

Last Sunday in the Gospel Jesus was urging us to make the right kind of friends, friends who would welcome us into the “tents of eternity.” Today we are presented with the great parable of the missed opportunity: There was the rich man, passing by Lazarus every day, and he completely ignored him, never invited him in for lunch, never even gave him a cheese sandwich and a cool drink. And now the rich man is burning in agony, tormented by thirst. I do not need to explain it any more, but let’s pause for ten seconds and consider the possibility that we are doing the same thing.

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But that is not the news of today’s parable, least of all the good news. The message that we need to look after the poor at our gate is the message of Moses and the prophets. Amos, whom we heard just now, is a good example of it. It is the other aspects of the parable that help us overcome all the obstacles that we put in our way that prevent us making friends with the poor.

The first obstacle is that the poor at our gate are sometimes dirty or smelly or perhaps not pleasant to look at. They may not make us squirm in quite the same way as Lazarus with his gaping sores licked by dogs, but we may still feel uneasy in their presence. The parable asks us to look again. Here is Lazarus, at the bosom of Abraham—that is, given the place of honour by the most important person at the banquet. The sheer dignity and joy that Lazarus enjoys cannot be put into words—for an excellent interpretation in music, listen to the In Paradisum from Faure’s Requiem. Let us look again at the Lazarus at our gate, and see the companion of Abraham. This is the sort of company we want to keep.

The second obstacle is that we tend to focus on the rich as individuals and consider the poor as an anonymous mass, especially if they come from another country. You know the sort of headlines: plane crash in Ruritania; no Australians on board. This parable quite deliberately turns this upside down. The rich man is simply a rich man, one of the great anonymous mass of rich people, but the poor man is singled out for our attention: he is Lazarus. It is very easy to regard the poor as a nameless crowd, whether we want to exploit them or to liberate them. Jesus is setting an example. He wants us to get to know the poor by name (at least some of them), and to start telling the story from their point of view. Next time you meet a beggar, it is not the story of you meeting someone who inconvenienced you and tried to get money from you; it is the story of Fred or Sandra, the homeless person, who turned to this passing rich person for help, and was perhaps helped, or perhaps knocked back.

But going further, Jesus is able to tell this story because he is the one who himself became poor and despised. “So disfigured did he look, that he seemed no longer human … A man of sorrows and familiar with suffering,” as Isaiah tells us. And in his resurrection Jesus, even more so than Lazarus, shows us the dignity in God’s eyes of those whom the world looks down on.

The purpose of his resurrection, then, is not to scare us, the way the rich man wants Lazarus to warn his brothers. Amos can be scary enough. Rather, it is to change our view of the poor, to help us to see as God sees, that is, to see what really is.

There are two ways in which our celebration of the Eucharist today will help us to see as Jesus sees and to feel as Jesus feels.

The first is the Mass as sacrifice. We are called to unite ourselves with Christ on Calvary so that we can see the world as Jesus saw it from the cross, where he was rejected by some of the rich and powerful, and welcomed the repentant thief into paradise.

Secondly, so that we may achieve on this earth what Lazarus longed to achieve: to receive the scraps of the heavenly banquet. And, grateful for God’s mercy, to put ourselves in the right frame of mind. In this life, not to refuse table-fellowship to the poor, and then to be ready to join Lazarus at the feast in the kingdom, with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to Whom be honour and glory for ever and ever.

Fr Joseph Vnuk, OP is the Regent of Studies and the Chaplain to Monash University, assigned to St Dominic's Priory, Melbourne.