Sermon: Dogs, Angels and Riches

Luke 16.19-end

In due course I want to link three elements in today's gospel - dogs, angels, and riches - but let me begin elsewhere with a confession, for surely in these more tolerant times it can do no harm for me to admit publicly to having two live-in lovers. The female one spends the night with me, stretched out on top in such a way that I scarcely feel her presence. The male, as you might expect, is much more demonstrative. Very first thing in the morning when I go downstairs there he is on my lap, smothering me with kisses. To those of you not in the know perhaps I should hasten to add that the female is a Burmese cat, and the male a Cocker Spaniel. I mention them this morning because they may be used to illuminate this morning's parable and in particular the contrast between attitudes to pets now and those once prevalent in the ancient Middle East.

Consider for a moment the dogs who lick Lazarus' sores. Many readers, I suspect, imagine the equivalent of a pet Labrador also lying under the table and attempting to soothe the wretched man's pains with a gentle lick. But that is not at all what is implied. For a start, talk of ‘what falls from the rich man's table' is a hopelessly over-literal translation. What is meant are the scraps or leftovers, and these are what were then flung to dog and man alike at the distant courtyard gate. The dogs would in fact have behaved like dogs generally at the time, in essence as scavengers. Their tongues would be out for what they could get from Lazarus' puss and blood, not what they might do to sooth him.

And the same is uniformly true throughout Scripture with only one exception, which occurs only in passing in the Apocryphal book of Tobit. There brief mention is made of a dog accompanying Tobias (6.1) on his mission to save his father, Tobit, from poverty and blindness. The key role, however is played by their companion, Azarias, whom Tobias learns at the end of the book has in reality been the archangel Raphael. The result of that tale was numerous portrayals of the scene in art, as wealthy patrons sought to justify their own more positive attitudes to dogs in the face of Scripture's dozens of contemptuous references. Yet in the process the donors inadvertently in their turn contributed to another misunderstanding of Scripture, to a sentimentalising of angels that has rendered them less and less credible in the modern world. Indeed, many of us now find it difficult to know what to make of the allusion in the parable to angels carrying off poor Lazarus to heaven (v.22), a mere metaphor perhaps, we suppose, for his transfer to another world.

Indeed, metaphor it is, but also very much more than that. The reason why so many of us find yesterday's feast-day of St Michael and All Angels problematic is because for centuries now angels have in effect been domesticated, treated almost like pets as it were. Think, for example, of all those putti, little children with wings that the Renaissance introduced or again the very effeminate form so many of them took in the nineteenth century. Yet, as the warrior St Michael reminds us, that is not at all how they were once conceived. And not just St Michael, but more generally. In earlier art angels were always mysterious characters, larger than life and with wings of extraordinary beauty and variety of colour. And why? Because they are seen to stand next to God; certainly closer than we human beings, since, unlike us, they share God's own immaterial, non-physical being. And because so close to God that very closeness can alert us to how great a privilege the incarnation was for us - God becoming not what is most like himself, an angel, but in Christ something as strangely unlike and different as ourselves.

So, two quite different sorts of challenge in reading correctly this parable. Both require us to enter a different world but not with the same result. In the case of the dogs licking Lazarus' sores we have a world far removed from our pets, and it is a world we rightly reject, just as we do the Bible's attitude to, say, slavery or the status of women. But on the other side, its portrait of angels and their role is there to challenge us to think again. The mystery of the cherubim and seraphim before the throne of God reminds us that human beings are not the acme of creation. The splendour and glory of what God has created is infinitely more varied. So reading Scripture with care means rising above our particular prejudices and misconceptions, above all not pre-determining answers in advance.

All this has turned out to be a rather long preamble to my main point which concerns the heart of the parable, and what it says about riches and poverty. The Protestant among you will want Lazarus to have been rewarded for his faith, the more Catholic for his good works. But careful reading suggests that both desires remain equally unfulfilled. We are not even told that Lazarus was a good man. Elsewhere we are told by Jesus that it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Mk. 10,25). But, again, no explanation. So, what could be meant?

I suggest a close analogy with the contemporary response to dogs and angels. In both those cases modern sentimentality makes it very difficult for us to see the correct significance of either in their original scriptural context. Similarly then, with riches but for a rather different reason. Sadly wealth all too often closes our eyes to spiritual values, so preoccupied do we become with the use of our possessions. It was a lesson I learnt very early in life, when I first went out with a charity collecting tin about the age of twelve or thirteen. I had expected the most generous to be the people who lived in relative affluence like my own parents, but that was far from being so. The largest donations most commonly came from occupants of the run-down flats in the town where my school was situated. Some of the wealthier even quoted the familiar adage, ‘God helps them who help themselves.' And that is a pattern I have often seen repeated since. It is all too easy for those of us with money to convince ourselves that all of it is essential to our needs, in providing for our children and so on. The poor, however, know what it is to be in want. The result, more often than not, is that there flows from them a natural sympathy and generosity towards those in need. So far from holding on to the little they have, they are keen to share, and for others to enjoy that little.

Now, fortunately for us, none of this is a universal feature of human nature. The poor can sometimes be vicious and nasty, just as (more relevant to our own condition) the rich can at times be generous. It is just that it often easier for poverty in itself to generate such thoughts of compassion. In a similar way it sometimes takes something as stupendous as the birth of one's first child to produce wonder and awe; an extremely unlikely stroke of good fortune for it to dawn that one's status in life is in no way merited; pain and suffering for some to discover the value of faith for the first time. The lesson to draw is not that these are always good things - pain, for example, can sometimes also coarsen and harden. No, what matters is that one never closes the door, that one remains continually open to the possibility of new insights, and so to the unfamiliar and unexpected. The Epistle to the Hebrews observes that those who offer hospitality have sometimes entertained angels unawares (13.2). The trouble is that this is unlikely ever to become a serious possibility, unless one's mind remains open to how rich the possibilities are.

So I end this sermon by appealing for less certainty about what Scripture means. Two thousand years of biblical revelation and two thousand years of church history suggest a much wider range of options than most of us are prepared to admit. The poor can tell us something important about ourselves, and not just calls to faith or action. So too can the creatures with which I began, our pets. As mine are both called after bishops, it is appropriate that my last sermon for the Cathedral should end with an authoritative pronouncement from them. Dogs are often accused of being only interested in food. Not so with Tunstall. As I mentioned at the beginning, his rather too effusive demonstration of love is always how my morning begins. Food in fact comes only third, with freedom in exploring once more the house number two. Cats, it is often said, treat their owners as servants, and otherwise remain sublimely indifferent. Again, not so with Carilef. Admittedly, like her owner, she finds herself reluctant to admit dependence on others, and so disguises her own need to give and receive love, but it is there nonetheless. When she looks at her most sublimely indifferent and stretches out her body into an enormous yawn, after many a false start that is when I now know her to be at her most expectant, as I lift her up into my arms, and am duly rewarded by very audible purrs. The gospel message of the need to give and receive love coming from the humblest of our fellow creatures.

Be a know-it-all professor of theology or canon of a great cathedral, and the prison shutters will soon close in on you. See yourself as a pilgrim with much yet to learn, and not only will there be much to learn, but, as Durham's own poet, Francis Thompson puts it, you may even:

Turn a stone and start a wing!

‘'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangéd faces,

That miss the many-splendoured thing (From ‘The Kingdom of God').

In other words, angels, and the glory of their wings can now be yours, if only you remain always open and expectant. Amen.