Lazarus and the Innominate Rich Man

Luke 16.19-31; 1 Timothy 6.6–19

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan, Vicar

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

28 September 2025, 15th Sunday after Trinity

As one of the local Cambridge bands said a few years ago: Money. It’s a gas.

However, whilst Pink Floyd sang with ironic glee about how amusing money is, I’m going to take them more literally — just as a gas expands to fill the volume of the container it is in, so money expands to fill the whole volume of whatever mental and spiritual space we give to it.

Now, Jesus preached about money a lot.  A lot. More than a quarter of his parables either address money, or use money and wealth as an illustration. Last week’s lectionary Gospel concluded with Jesus clear instruction: you cannot serve both God and money. Today’s Gospel takes that warning one step further — and perhaps in a way you might not notice.

This is the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. Not the Lazarus who was Martha and Mary’s brother, but a different man with the same, common name: Eleazar — or in Greek, Lazarus.

And then there’s the Rich Man.

There are plenty of unnamed characters in Jesus’ parables — kings, wayward sons, widows careless with their small change, stewards & landlords,  in fact, everyone in all the parables except for Lazarus.

So it’s worth noticing the unusual fact that the poor man has a name but still the rich man does not. St Jerome felt this indicated that Jesus was relating a true tale, rather than a parable.

But then — why doesn’t the rich man have a name too? Why not continue the corroborative detail? Indeed, it is so discomforting that medieval tradition just went ahead and gave the rich man a name: Dives.

The classicists in the congregation, of which there are a few today because of course, will already know that Dives is simply Latin for… rich. So maybe not so much of a name after all.

Now of course, he did have a name. After all, he had brothers. I can’t imagine his mother saying,

These are my boys Isaac, Saul, Joseph, Simon, Menahem and my eldest son, who is wealthy.

But money is a gas, taking over the whole volume of its container, and displacing so much, until we are left with an innominate man dressed in purple and fine linen, feasting sumptuously every day.

Everything else about him — how he spoke to his brothers, what his favourite psalm was, the nightmares he had as a child, that joke he told over and over again, a particular tic when he walked, an angle of his head when he was perplexed, and eventually his very name — all the fine details of a life disappeared into this: There was a rich man.

So wealthy that, when Lazarus lay at his gates, covered in sores, starving amongst the mangy mongrels, the rich man remained unmoved. So wealthy that, having a glimpse of Lazarus at Abraham’s bosom, he instructs Abraham like a steward, to send servant Lazarus to fetch him water.

You and I, of course, like everyone else who hears this parable, know we would never be so obtuse, so obfuscated by wealth. Of course not.  And yet…

It doesn’t have to run gold-plated toilets; we can let money rule our hearts on a very slim budget indeed. Just as a gas expands to fill the volume of its container, so money fills and obscures the whole volume of whatever mental and spiritual space we give over to it.

Money obscures all the time, because money is so very rarely just money. Think about your own family of origin, about how your parents talked about — or didn’t talk about —  money.

For some rare families it may be money was just money — something necessary for buying food and paying rent and taxes and bus fare. But for most of us, money was (and is) often something else.

A proxy for control., for affection., for power, for commitment. Money is such a tempting, useful, malleable tool.

Malleability is built into its software — money is famously fungible, filling the empty spaces in our lives where we crave approval, affection, or a sense of control. Which means it is easy in a family to use money in place of relationship — fungible for control, affection, power, commitment,

It is easy to use money in place of relationship in our communities as well — fungible for control, value, power, security.

But of course, money isn’t really relationship; wealth can keep us comfortably distant from our neighbours, but left to its own devices, money cannot replace relationship, cannot serve as a fungible proxy for loving our neighbour as ourselves:

Lazarus remains outside the gate, while the rich man is so consumed by consuming that he’s eaten his own name.

But if we let money be just money — not giving it over as a proxy for love, for power, for control — then how much easier it becomes (in the words of our epistle) to “do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share” members of a Christian household, a singular body with a hierarchy of mutual responsibilities: so that those rich in goods must be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, to take special care of the most vulnerable, those vulnerable to poverty and hunger, those displaced by war or exploited by greed…even called to protect the beauty and well-being of creation (which cannot speak for itself in the courts of human affairs but endures pollution and exploitation in our pursuit for ease and profit while we run rough-shod over this fragile earth our home).

So put not your trust in princes, nor in any human power (Ps 146),  but care for the most vulnerable, repenting and returning when we have fallen short, guided by God’s Word in Scripture, in Sacrament, in the whole of creation. travelling together in pursuit of righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness.