Begin with the Epistle, because the Epistle is where the Church wants us to begin the whole season. Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God. And then the line that ought to stop us where we stand: He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. Saint John is not saying that loving people is a nice consequence of knowing God. He is saying it is the test of it. You may have the creed by heart, you may have kept every fast, and if you do not love, you do not yet know the God you are talking about. For the God we worship this season — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — is in his very being a communion of love, and to know him is to be drawn into the thing he is.
But love of God is invisible, and we are very good at being sure we possess invisible things. So the Apostle closes the door on our self-deception with a sentence of plain arithmetic: If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? There it is. The love of God is verified, or exposed, at the level of the brother in front of you — the one you have seen.
And having said whom he hath seen, the Gospel walks a particular brother into view and gives him a name. Lazarus. He is laid at the rich man’s gate, full of sores, desiring the crumbs. And the rich man — Dives, as the tradition calls him — is clothed in purple and fine linen and fares sumptuously every day. Notice what our Lord does not say. He does not say that Dives kicked Lazarus, or cursed him, or had him driven off. There is no cruelty in the story at all. Dives’s whole sin is that he did not notice. Day after day he stepped past the gate to his table, and the man at the gate was simply not there to him. He loved not his brother whom he had seen — whom, in fact, he saw every single day.
Then both men die, and we come to the hardest line: between us and you there is a great gulf fixed. We are tempted to hear that gulf as something God fastens shut at the moment of death, a verdict slammed down from heaven. But look again at the parable. The gulf was not invented at death. It was the distance between the table and the gate — a distance Dives himself maintained, freely, comfortably, every day of his life. Death did not create that gulf. Death only made permanent the one he had already fixed. The gate was the great gulf in miniature, and he had been keeping it open for years.
The great gulf was not fixed at death. It was fixed in life — one unnoticed day at a time, at the distance between a table and a gate.
Dives, in torment, becomes for the first time a man who cares about somebody else: send Lazarus to warn my five brothers. And Abraham answers, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. If they will not hear the Law and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. And here the whole Gospel turns and looks straight at us across the altar — because One has risen from the dead. We are the five brothers. The messenger has already come. The warning Dives begged for has been given to us in the flesh, and the only question left is whether we will let it move us the few steps from our own table to our own gate.
Which is exactly why we prayed the Collect we prayed: that because, through the weakness of our mortal nature, we can do no good thing without thee, God would give us the help of his grace, that in keeping of his commandments we may please him, both in will and deed. Both in will and deed — for it is fatally easy to love Lazarus in the will and never in the deed. To feel the pang, to mean well, to intend kindness, and still step past the gate. That is precisely Dives’s love: real enough as a sentiment, fixed forever as a gulf. Natural love does not cross thresholds; it has to be carried across by grace, the very love of God shed abroad in our hearts.
So this is how the long season opens: not with a doctrine to admire but a gate to look at. Who is laid at yours? Not far off, not in the abstract, but at the gate — the brother you have seen, and learned not to see. Perfect love casteth out fear, the Apostle says; and the fear that most needs casting out is the small, respectable fear that keeps our eyes on the table and away from the door. The love of the Three who are One has already crossed the great gulf to reach us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. The single proof that we have received that love is whether we will carry it the short distance it asks of us. Look, then. Lazarus has a name. Open the gate.
We love him, because he first loved us.
AMEN.