THE WORD THIS WEEK

By Bishop David McGough
Twenty-sixth Sunday of the Year Amos 6: 1 & 4-7; 1 Timothy 6: 11-16; Luke 16: 19-31 ‘It is the Lord who gives bread to the hungry, the Lord who sets prisoners free. It is the Lord who gives sight to the blind, who raises up those who are bowed down.” The responsorial psalm at today’s Mass reflects the nature of Israel’s God. He would be known as the God who had heard the cry of his people’s oppression in the land of Egypt, the upholder of the widow and the orphan. It had been in the desolation of their own sufferings that Israel had come to know the compassionate God. If they were to keep faith with such a God they would find their identity in the same compassion. Bread for the hungry and liberty for captives could never become a marginal concern for the children of Israel. To know God, to walk in his ways, would be to hear the cry of the oppressed, to feed the hungry.
This consideration, above all else, fuelled the ferocity with which Amos denounced the excesses of a faithless people. He poured scorn on those who sprawled on ivory beds, who dined on lambs and stall-fattened veal. Although luxury had dulled their senses, this, in itself, was not their greatest sin. Their sin, in forgetting the poor, was to make themselves strangers in the presence of a compassionate God. “They drink wine by the bowlful, but about the ruin of Joseph they do not care at all. That is why they will be the first to be exiled; the sprawlers’ revelry is over.” Jesus came into the world as the fulfilment of the Father’s concern for the poor and needy. He came to proclaim good news to the poor, to bring liberty to captives and to set the downtrodden free. Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry, identified himself with those who lived at the very margins of society. Again and again Jesus insisted that it was in welcoming the least of his brethren that we welcomed him.
This identity between Jesus and the poor of this world stands behind the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. The rich man is not condemned for wealth alone. The sin of the rich man was to allow his wealth so to insulate him from the cares of the needy that he failed even to notice Lazarus starving at his door. In the dialogue that followed the death of the rich man, Abraham spoke of the gulf that separated the rich man from God. “Between us and you a great gulf has been fixed, to stop anyone, if he wanted to, crossing from our side to yours.” Concern for the poor, whether by direct involvement or charitable giving, can never be at the margins of our Christian commitment. When we allow our comfort to become the barrier between ourselves and the poor, we put in place the gulf that separated the rich man from God. More important than what we do with our wealth is what it does to us. It was no excuse for the rich man that the poor were out of sight and out of mind. Let us pray that we use what we have so as never to put ourselves beyond the sight and mind of a compassionate God. The comfort that separates us from the poor can so easily become the gulf that divides us from the mind and heart of God.