READING:
Luke 16:19–end.

Putting names to faces

I wonder how good you are at putting names to faces? Pub quizzes and TV game shows often challenge us with a picture round: film stars, footballers, politicians –  faces most of us vaguely recognise. But the point is not recognition alone; you have to give the name. Names matter.

For most of us who are not famous, being known by name is still one of the deepest signs that we matter. It says: you are not invisible. Think about the feeling when someone unexpectedly remembers your name, when a teacher recalls you years later, or when the cashier at the corner shop greets you personally. It is dignity. It is belonging.

In today’s gospel we meet two people. One had lived  in luxury, dressed in purple, feasting every day. The other had spent his  starving at his gate, covered in sores. Yet only one of them is named.  And ironically, challengingly it is the  beggar who is given a name:  Lazarus. The rich man has no name. It is a shocking reversal. In a society where wealth and power confer recognition, Jesus insists it is the poor who are remembered, who are named, who are known by God.

We often read this parable as a warning about life after death. But the real sting is not in the afterlife, but in the way life is ordered here and now. The “great chasm” is not simply a fiery abyss in the hereafter; it is already present. It is the gate between the rich man’s banquets and Lazarus’s hunger, the divide created by inequality, privilege, and indifference.

This parable is not primarily about charity that sprinkles crumbs from the table. It is about relationship. Sam Wells, vicar of St Martins in London  and a church whose mission is about being alongside the poor and marginalised on the streets of London, reminds us that God’s way in Christ is not “doing to” or even “working for,” but being with people, . The rich man’s sin was not only that he failed to share food, but that he refused relationship. He knew Lazarus’s name –  notice that, he uses it in the afterlife –  but he never let that knowledge change his heart. He let the gate remain closed.

Hell, in this story, is isolation: cut off from communion with God and neighbour. Heaven is being carried into Abraham’s embrace –  being with. The parable asks us not, “How much should I give?” but “Whom am I willing to be with?”

That may still sound abstract. So let’s bring it into focus.

Think of world news today. Every week we hear the number of people killed in conflicts –  “twenty-five killed here,” “fifty more there.” They become statistics. But what if every bulletin named each child? What if the newsreader said: “Fatima, aged 7; Mohammed, aged 4; David, aged 13; Sarah, aged 10.” The numbers would no longer be faceless. They would be children with birthdays missed, schools they’ll never return to, families left broken.

In response to the  Israel and Gaza conflict today, a woman in Cornwall a has taken on the task of wanting to remember that people killed is not a statistic but real people . She writes out, carefully and beautifully, the name of every child who has been killed on both sides of the divide. She says she wants to remind herself that each was a unique person whose life has been cut short. And she has been changed by the undertaking. Once you start naming, you cannot stop seeing. She now notices the person at the supermarket checkout, the man cleaning the street, the neighbour she used to ignore. She sees them as real human beings, carrying stories and struggles of their own. In learning the names of the dead, she has discovered the dignity of the living in the place that she lives.

That is exactly what Jesus is getting at. It is easier to live behind the gate, to keep people as numbers, categories, “the poor,” “the migrants,” “the homeless.” But once you learn a name and their unique story  everything changes.  And once you have shared your name and your story with the other person things change dramatically. A meeting of people on more equal terms . Lazarus the beggar is no longer an issue – he is your  neighbour.

Novelists have often grasped this. Think of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, where the wretched poor are given names, voices, and faces: Fantine, who sells her hair and teeth to survive; Cosette, the child who becomes a servant. They are not statistics; they are people whose stories break us open. Or think of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, where poverty during the Great Depression is not just “the Dust Bowl crisis” but the plight of Tom Joad and his family. Fiction does what the gospel parable does: it gives the poor names, and therefore dignity.

But we do not need to stop at novels. Walk into any food bank in this country and you will find Lazarus at the gate. A single mother juggling three jobs, but still unable to put meals on the table. An elderly man who never imagined he would be choosing between heating and eating. Do we know their names? Or do we call them simply “clients,” “service users,” “the poor”?

The prophets have already told us what God requires: justice, mercy, and humble walking with God. Jesus ends with a chilling line: even the resurrection will not convince those who refuse to see. We can believe in Easter triumph, but if it doesn’t lead us to recognise the poor, to cross the gates and chasms in our own lives, then we have missed the point.

So here is the challenge for us this Sunday. Who are the Lazaruses at our gates? Perhaps it is the homeless man outside the supermarket whose name we’ve never asked. Perhaps it is the colleague at work who always eats lunch alone. Perhaps it is the person in church whose story we’ve never learned because we hurry past with polite small talk.

The call of this parable is to begin with names. To stop walking past. To build not benefactor-needy relationships but genuine, mutual friendships. To recognise that Lazarus is not an object of charity but a bearer of God’s presence.

God knows us by name. In baptism, God speaks our name in love. The question is: will we learn the names of those whom the world forgets? Will we take down the gates, cross the chasms, and allow ourselves to be changed by the Lazaruses at our doorstep? For it is they, Jesus insists, who carry the kingdom of God in their embrace.

Photo Credit: Jennifer Grismer (Unsplash.com)