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Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - September 25th 2016


Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

We don't have to travel very far to see the contrasts of poverty and excessive luxury, its all around us especially in the urban areas and cities of our world. In London for instance, just underneath the recently built and grotesquely expensive Hyde Park flats (some unoccupied because their rich owners use them as investments) the poor can be found. In the underpasses or on the grassy spaces they lie, homes of cardboard and ragged sleeping bags. Some are transient, wandering from place to place, others have fallen between the cracks of society to a place where drugs or alcohol become their way of life. The horrors of poverty are still with us!

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is a real challenge to us all. We can take it in a number of ways looking at the dissonance between the affluent members of society and those below the poverty line, or those who struggle each day to make ends meet. Real poverty seems to have an incapacitating effect on those bowed down under its clutches, there is nowhere to go, in those situations depression often blunts hope and imagination, are we able or willing to reach out and give hope?

Jesus also contrasts the inner poverty of the rich man with the surprising richness of Lazarus' own faith, he places them after death in a position where they see each other. In life the rich man lived in an almost obscene amount of luxury, he had, should he have wished, the opportunity to share his good fortune, for Lazarus the poor man is there, 'dumped' at his gate. But he has the blindness and arrogance of people with far too much, he does not get who his neighbour is, only the dogs console Lazarus.

But death, that great leveler of all people shifts the picture; it is now Lazarus who is comforted. Here we see the visual image of the Beatitude, "Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. . . . But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation" (Lk 6:20, 24) There is nothing wrong with being rich, but there is everything wrong with ignoring the helpless and the needy! Jesus is challenging our attitudes here. The rich man just doesn't get God or the commandments, that's the point of the ending. The question is, do we?


Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain

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