Voluntary Poverty for Eternal Glory

26th Sunday of the Year

Lazarus at the Rich Man’s Door, Esaias van de Velde and Bartholomeus van Bassen

The life of Christ and therefore the life of the Christian is a life of self-emptying. The one whom Paul describes as the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, and whom no being has seen or can see has emptied himself of his wealth and of the honors due to his kingship. He has given up all that is rightfully his in exchange for the relatively dull and drab existence of human life. And for this, the King was rejected, spurned, and slain—killed by his subjects who he had made his brothers. The life of Christ was a life of self-emptying. 

We know, however, that his self-emptying was not for naught. Paul also tells us that Though Our Lord Jesus Christ was rich, he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. A few centuries later, Saint Athanasius expressed the same in his famous maxim: God became man so that man might become God.¹ Christ’s voluntary poverty is the means of our eternal inheritance; his humanity, the cause of our divinity; his humiliation, the condition of our glory. Yet for his wealth to become ours it must displace the wealth we have accrued for ourselves. We, too, must also follow his example of self-emptying, divest ourselves of our wealth, and become poor so that he might make us rich.  

Throughout the Gospels Jesus minces no words when it comes to the dangers of money or ‘mammon’. When the rich young man goes away sad for love of his many possessions, Christ does not plead for his return by allowing him to retain his riches. What he says about the camel passing through the eye of a needle he does not qualify or couch. Christ is clear that attachment to wealth is an obstacle that blocks the path to eternal life; and the temptation toward wealth is so strong he considers even mere possession risky business.  

Christ is hard on wealth—perhaps harder than he is on anything else—because material wealth eclipses our metaphysical poverty. The sweat of our brow earns us a living that keeps us off the streets, in warm beds, and with full stomachs. We need money in order to survive, as the one without money acutely knows how close they are to death. Wealth, however,—that is, the surplus of money—distorts the sense of our fundamental dependency on something outside of ourselves for our existence and thus our constant reliance on divine grace. Coins in our coffers remind us of the successes of our own efforts and distract us from our existential need, our metaphysical poverty. However rich we may be in this life, we are all, in the end, nothing but beggars at the doorstep of the King of kings and Lord of lords. And for this reason, the King became our brother, and united himself in our poverty, that we would not be deceived by earthly wealth into forfeiting the riches of his divinity that he has come to bestow upon us.

Christ therefore calls his disciples, in every state of life, to embrace poverty. That much is clear from Scripture and from the living Tradition of the Church. How exactly that is to be done remains another matter. We find among the Christian saints both those who took our Lord’s words literally and sold everything for the poor and those who kept their wealth to do good. In either case, what makes the saint is their detachment from wealth: either to give it away or to keep it as not having it. With such indifference, the saints knew that what they had was from the Lord’s mercy and not from their own strength. And what will make us saints is our cooperation with the Lord’s grace to grow in such detachment by following Christ’s example and command to empty ourselves and give all that we have and are to the poor. 

Today’s Gospel speaks exactly to that and gives us, tangibly, a method of self-emptying to practice. This tale of the rich man and Lazarus is sometimes called a parable but there is reason to think it is something else. Whenever Christ speaks in parables, he never uses names. In the last two weeks, we have heard the parables of the prodigal son and of the dishonest steward. Christ does not tell us their names, but here he calls the poor man Lazarus. This suggests that Lazarus and the rich man who ignored him were not mere fictitious characters in an allegorical story meant to teach us a lesson but real people with whom Jesus and his disciples were familiar. And, if that is the case, then perhaps the Pharisees to whom Jesus told this story also knew Lazarus; and if so, then Christ uses their knowledge to their shame as he reveals that Lazarus rejoices in glory while the rich man, who in this life might have been their friend, now suffers across the unbreachable chasm in eternal torment.

We know that good Christians ought to care for the poor. On the surface, this Gospel seems to be yet another affirmation of that. Many of us already give generously of time, talent, and treasure to the less fortunate. We could certainly do more and give more. But that is not the point of this Gospel. This Gospel challenges us by narrowing our sights and lowering our vision. It is often easier to help the poor when they are far off, unknown to us in some far corner of the world that we can support from at a safe distance. In the world of Venmo and GoFundMe, charitable giving is convenient and painless. But the gain of convenience has been the loss of relationship. We can set about supporting a plethora of worthy causes in the poorest parts of the world and even our city and still neglect to see the poor right in front of us. What this Gospel teaches is that if we step over the poor in front of us, even as we set out from our homes to help others, then it will be those whom we’ve overstepped who, in the end, will stand over us in judgment. As Dorothy Day once reminded, “The mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him.”² When we step over the Lazarus on our door, we step over Christ. When the rich man died, he saw Lazarus and recognized him, for he knew his name. Lazarus wears different faces and takes different names in the people around us. But whatever his name may be, we know it. Lazarus is the one before us who we neglect to love. And the one we neglect to love is Christ. And if we neglect to love Christ in this life then he will neglect our cry for help in the next.

In this life, Christ calls us to embrace voluntary poverty so that we will not suffer the eternal poverty of the loss of his love. Poverty may take different forms for each of us, but we can all heed the call to empty ourselves to love the person who begs at the door of our heart. Wherever we find it difficult to empty of ourselves of our riches, whether our material wealth or the more precious commodities of our time and attention, we have found Lazarus; and in finding Lazarus, we have found Christ. In emptying ourselves to him, the Lord fills the hungry with good things, as he sends us, the rich away empty. And in the empty space he creates within us by his command to be poor, we again recognize our poverty and dependence upon him.

And our self-emptying will not be for naught. Poverty in the Christian life is not an end in itself but a means to greater wealth. We divest of our own riches, and we make space for Christ to fill us with his. The poor at our door remind us that we are all beggars before our King and sit at the door of his house pining for even the slightest sign of his love. His desire is to give us the full breadth of his love. But to receive, we must first give away. We must become poor so that we can be made rich. For it is by giving that we receive; by showing mercy that we are shown mercy; and by dying to ourselves and to others that we are born unto the glory of eternal life.

Homily preached September 24, 2022 at Our Lady of Grace, Parkton and September 25 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen.

1. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54.3.

2. Dorothy Day, “The Mystery of the Poor,” Houston Catholic Worker, vol. 26, no. 3.