[My sermon today at the “Skelya” (Rock) Church, Rivne; if you are interested in what we preach about during the ongoing full-scale russian war against Ukraine… People sometimes ask what is left to preach when the sirens and explosions do not stop. We do not preach a softer Gospel here, nor a louder one. We open the same Scriptures we always have, and we find that the russian war has simply moved them closer, so close that the text now reads us. Our sermons are not escapes from the shelling reports; they are attempts to stand inside them honestly, before God, without looking away from the wounded or away from Christ. It is one of them, on the rich man and Lazarus…]
#BeingHuman… The chasm we so often dig for ourselves over the course of our lives… about a distance that cannot be measured in steps… There are parables that frighten with images of hell. This one frightens me with something else: in it, hell begins not after death, but at the gate of my own house. At a distance you can step across with your foot and can never step across with your heart…
The rich man and Lazarus in this parable of Jesus (Lk 16:19–31) live a single threshold apart, not in different towns or villages. Lazarus lies “at the gate” of the rich house, covered in sores (which the dogs lick), waiting for the crumbs that fall from the table. Every day the rich man goes out about his business and comes back, every day he steps over Lazarus, and does not notice him. Now, he does not beat him, drive him off, mock him, or curse him. That is, he does not sin against him by his actions… But neither does he ever pay him any attention. And it is exactly this ignoring, and not some loud crime of the rich man against Lazarus, that will later turn out to be the chasm no one can cross…
I have thought for a long time about why this story gives me no peace right now, during russia’s ongoing full-scale unprovoked aggression, which has been going on not only for a fifth year, but for a twelfth. And I think it is because of the question of distance. And distance is what we have been living in, in Ukraine, for the fifth year of the “great invasion” and the twelfth year of the war as a whole. The distance between the one under fire and the one reading about it. Between the one in the dugout and the one scrolling the news feed. Between the name that is publicly mourned and the nameless and the missing, of whom no one will ever learn. Between the one for whom the siren and the shelling are the “norm” of life, and the one for whom they are only a sound in someone else’s video. Between a home that no longer exists, and another’s home, mentioned in passing over dinner before switching to other, more “positive news” about “hallelujah hope, forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation”…
The first thing that strikes me in this parable is what is not in it. The rich man commits no active crime against Lazarus. The sin here is of another kind. A sin with no verb “stole,” “struck,” “drove off,” “insulted,” and so on… The verb here is simply “did not see.” And this is the kind of guilt that is almost impossible to feel in yourself. The one who stole knows he stole. But the one who steps over someone else’s pain every day probably sleeps soundly, because, after all, “he did nothing wrong”…
And one more detail that horrifies me: the rich man, it turns out, even knew Lazarus by name… Already in hell he calls out: “Send me Lazarus.” He actually knew what he was called. He knew that man lay at his gate beside the homeless dogs. He knew, and walked past anyway. It is not the indifference of not knowing, but the indifference of knowing, dressed in purple: when you see, you recognize, you even remember the name, and still you step over him.
Here I want to be honest about something I catch in myself… War teaches you to step over. It has to teach you, otherwise, as the “faith-based counceling experts” say, our “mental health” will not survive, and we may become inconvenient “Ukrainians.” You cannot, they say, carry on your heart every day each figure of the shelled, the wounded, the killed, the missing, those in russian captivity, the widows and orphans, those who have lost their homes, every name, because the heart is not a stone and is not without limit… And here runs a thin, barely visible line: it is one thing to guard your heart so you can keep serving, even hiding bleeding in your heart to stay “convenient”… and quite another to grow so used to someone else’s pain that it becomes mere scenery and background informational and news noise. The first is exhaustion. The second is already a gate closing from the inside (and between 2014 and 2022 I heard this in many evangelical churches in Russia, abroad and the unoccupied territories of Ukraine, under the excuse, “it is not our war”).
For our family it is in no way scenery, because the russians have already killed five of us (including my own brother Andriy), and one nephew was killed by pro-russian snipers during the Revolution of Dignity in February 2014… As of today, 7 members of our family and close relatives are serving on the front itself… Six… Seven… In our family we cannot keep our “distance” to protect our “mental health,” as the “faith-based experts” advise…
And so, not to be abstract, what does this “distance” look like in numbers? No, not to stir up “flaming hatred toward russians,” as some other “evangelical post-soviet slavic peacemakers” accuse me of, those for whom the tender feelings of russian christians matter more than the souls of our families, killed, tortured, missing, and so on… But “distance” as the reality we live in. I counted the first ten days of June, from the night of the first to the morning of the eleventh. By official reports, over these 10 days 2,406 long-range strike drones and 80 missiles were fired across Ukraine. Along the front, almost three thousand battles, over three thousand guided aerial bombs, over 100,000 fpv kamikaze drones, over 36,000 shellings (not shells) of frontline towns and villages. About 250 struck locations… All together, more than 148,000 acts of russian terror in ten days, in the name of defending the so-called dehumanized traditional christian values that evangelical christians in russia speak and write about almost every day (I read a lot of that daily)… One “unit of weaponry” or shelling against Ukraine every six and a half seconds, around the clock, without a single pause…
And over these ten days, about 870 lives. 95 killed. 775 wounded. And these are only the least-verified, understated numbers, “a floor, not a ceiling,” in ten days… And behind them is May, with 275 killed and over 1,700 wounded, and behind May, April 2026, and on… all the way back to 2014… And the worst thing in this counting is that June already has more deaths in its momentum than May… It is russia’s aggression, under the mantra “peace, peace, the russians and russian evangelicals really do want peace”…
I cite these numbers not to shock with them, but because it is the very face of the modern chasm. Every single unit in these reports is somebody’s Lazarus at somebody’s gate, beside whom there is only the little dogs (an “unclean animal”)… And each of us stands before the temptation to read them the way the rich man read the view from his window: as something happening out there, beyond the threshold, in the news, to someone else, and not to me…
The number is merciful to the one watching the news: it hides the sores, the name, the face, the dogs, the kitties. Because some “post-soviet evangelical leaders” also told me that watching videos from your neighbors, who share with you the bloody realities of the war, is the dehumanization of your own soul, and that you must keep it in “purity and holiness,” so as not to see “those sores and dogs,” so as not to lose your salvation and “heavenly citizenship”…
This chasm is so easy to step across precisely because no one looks back at you from its bottom… especially when you yourself do not want to look, “in order to save your soul in purity”… The hardest one to walk past is the one who looks you in the eye. The other’s gaze stops you. It makes him present and inconvenient; by its very existence it demands a response. When the beggar lifts his eyes and meets your gaze, stepping over him becomes hard, because in that moment he stops being an obstacle in the road and becomes the face of another…
But a number in the General Staff’s daily report has no eyes. It does not look. “95 civilians killed” (to say nothing of the number of defenders killed by the russians since 2014 and 2022…) do not turn their heads toward me, do not look me in the eye, do not stretch out their hands, do not wait for me to stop… And that is exactly why it is so easy to pass it by… Between me and the number there is none of that resistance which the living gaze of another creates… So the statistics can be scrolled past with a finger, the way a feed is scrolled, whereas a living person in front of you cannot be scrolled past… well, actually they can, and some, or many, manage it, especially when you do not have a 6 and do not have a 7…
In this lies the danger the parable speaks of. The rich man passed Lazarus every day, but at least Lazarus lay at his gate: in the body, visible, with a name and a gaze. Past us, however, someone else’s pain more and more often passes not as a body, but as a number, and so it is even easier to step over than it was for the rich man… I repeat… the report on the shelling is merciful to the one who reads it: it hides the sores, hides the face, hides the gaze, hides the dogs and the kitties… And what does not look at us, we too easily stop seeing. The chasm deepens not where we turn away from someone’s gaze, but where there is no longer anyone to lift a gaze toward us, and we can calmly, with a clean conscience, move on… because, “at last”…
But here Jesus does in this parable what He does in none of His others. He gives the beggar a name. But He does not name the rich man… By logic the rich man should have the name: he is a respected person, a patron, a teacher, he is known, he is reckoned with, he is clothed in purple. And the beggar at the gate is nobody, a nameless heap of rags surrounded by dogs, part of the street scenery… But Jesus turns this over. The rich man stays nameless: “There was a certain rich man.” That is all. And the beggar is named: Lazarus (in Hebrew Eleazar, “God helps”). The one whom not a single person noticed is named by the lips of God. And the one whose name the whole town knew remains, before the face of eternity, simply “rich”…
A name in the Bible is not just the word people call you by (as, probably, it is for most of us…). It is also a sign that you are seen and known. And so it turns out that Lazarus, nameless to people, was named in Heaven before he died. This is the answer to our war of faces and recognizability. The well-known die, and they are written about, mourned publicly, their names on the front pages, their stories an inspiration. But beside them, every day, die those whose names no one will ever learn, except a few relatives and friends… A soldier whose photo never appeared in the news… A sick elderly woman from under the shelling whom our volunteers did not manage to evacuate in time… A displaced pensioner who died unnoticed in a strange city, in a strange apartment, or in a “dormitory”… A child who lost his father and goes unnoticed at school… They all have a name too, there where the true accounting of God is kept. God does not confuse Lazarus with the “informational noise of the news,” and does not round him down to a figure in a daily report…
The greatest challenge for me is Abraham’s words about the “great chasm” that cannot be crossed from here or from there. This abyss was not walled up by God on a whim, between hell and Heaven (many evangelicals may not like this thought, because, after all, “God is sovereign”…). The parable describes not the punishment of Judgment Day, but a daily pattern. The abyss after death is the same distance that existed during life, only now it is cemented forever… The gate the rich man passed through every day, choosing not to notice Lazarus, became after death a pit through which, from hell, you can no longer reach across to Heaven. He dug this trench himself, shovelful by shovelful, day by day, with every passage through the gate, with every “did not notice”… Death only did what made the chasm impossible to fill in anymore…
Even in hell the rich man does not see a human being in Lazarus, but only a servant: “Send Lazarus, that he may dip his finger…”, “Send Lazarus, that he may testify to my brothers”… He is still certain that Lazarus exists in order to wait on him, the rich man… The torments of hell changed nothing in the very way he looks at the other, just as during his life… The chasm between hell and Heaven turned out to be only the imprint of a chasm that had long been inside his heart and mind. Eternity does not so much create our fate as reveal and cement what we built in this life, decision by decision…
At the same time, this parable does not say that everyone, by his own deeds, earned his own eternity with his own hands: the rich man eternal torment for a lack of good deeds, and Lazarus heavenly rest for excessive suffering. The Gospel does not teach this. Lazarus is not saved because poverty is a virtue, otherwise it would be enough simply to live in poverty in order to receive salvation and inherit Heaven. The parable does not describe a “bookkeeping of merits”… it is about the state of our heart and faith, which a person’s deeds reveal.
It was not the gate closed to Lazarus that brought the rich man to hell; it simply showed that hell already lived in him, and in his heart, and in his attitude. Deeds do not create the state of our heart before God; it is our heart that forms our deeds… Deeds… they expose our heart, the way a temperature exposes an illness without being the illness itself. Salvation is always a gift we receive from God with an open palm. But the hand of a person who has plenty, and which is truly stretched out to God, always opens to his neighbor as well. You cannot at the same time clench your fist before Lazarus and hold your other palm open before God…
And so that this thought does not sound like a condemnation of wealth, it is worth remembering one more thing that is easy to miss. Abraham himself, on whose bosom the beggar Lazarus now rests, was a rich, prosperous man, with herds, silver, gold, and a multitude of servants. Wealth in itself did not close Heaven to him, because it was never a sin.
As with Job, a man “greatest of all the people of the East,” owner of thousands of head of livestock, and at the same time the one who, by his own testimony, was “eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame,” who did not eat his morsel alone without feeding an orphan along with it. Job had everything the rich man of the parable had, but the doors of his house always opened outward, and people probably hardly even had to knock… Although later something terrible happened: Job himself ended up in Lazarus’s condition (on the ash heap, in sores, scraping them with a potsherd), and lived through yet another chasm, finer than poverty. The chasm of human contempt from his own friends. For those same friends who had honored him before now sat beside him and argued that he himself was to blame for his misfortune and his poverty. Job came to know both shores in his own skin: what it is to have and to see, and what it is to lie and be unnoticed by those who only yesterday shook your hand…
Jesus told quite different parables too, about how people multiply what is entrusted to them and manage it wisely, and He set this up as an example. In the parable of the talents the one condemned is not the one who traded, lost, learned and gained more, but precisely the one who buried the silver in the ground “to save” and did nothing wrong. In the parable of the steward, praise goes to a foresighted competence in affairs. So the point is not how much you have, but where and in which direction your gates open.
And the clearest proof of this is two men who came to Jesus after His death. Joseph of Arimathea, a rich and honorable member of the Sanhedrin, did not spare his own brand-new tomb, hewn in the rock, and laid in it the Body of the Crucified One. And the rich Nicodemus, the same one who once came to Jesus by night, brought a generous, almost royal gift of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred liters, a fortune that would have been enough for the burial of a king.
Both were prosperous. Both used exactly what they had: money, position, a tomb, and spices. But not to fence themselves off from someone else’s pain, rather to serve within it. Their wealth opened gates where the wealth of our “hero” from the parable closed them. The same purple as on Joseph and Nicodemus, but the heart beneath it was different…
Jesus could have stopped the parable at the word about hell and the abyss between it and Heaven. But He tells the story further, continuing the dialogue between the rich man and Abraham. The rich man, having lost hope for himself, asks concerning his five brothers: “Send Lazarus from that world, that the risen dead man may warn them against eternal torment, and then they will repent.” But Abraham answers what should strike all who today await impressive miracles and signs from God: “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.” That is, they already have everything they need. There is the Word. There is no need for risen dead men or voices from “that world”…
Yet the rich man does not relent: “No, no, Abraham, but if one goes to them from the dead, they will surely repent.” And then comes the line: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” These words, on Abraham’s lips in the parable, are spoken by the One who will Himself soon rise. He knows in advance: His own resurrection will not force those to believe who did not wish to hear the Word: the Pharisees, the scribes, the priests, and the chief priests of that time. And so it happened: the empty tomb did not convince the Sanhedrin, while those two rich members of the Sanhedrin, Joseph and Nicodemus, who believed in Him before His resurrection, believed in Him after His resurrection too… A miracle usually does not change a hardened heart; it only gives it a new pretext for various excuses. For unbelief comes not from a lack of proofs, but from an unwillingness to hear what has already been said in the Word…
Lazarus could not cross over to the rich man through the abyss between Hell and Heaven, nor the rich man to Lazarus. And yet there is One who crossed over: Christ, who willingly went down to the other side, to the very bottom, into death and abandonment, into hell itself, there where a person cannot reach by his own strength… He is that true Rich Man who, having everything, went out beyond His gates, emptied Himself and lay down beside all the Lazaruses of the world: in the sores, in the hunger, in the abandonment, among the dogs who, instead of doctors, “treated” Lazarus’s sores… The rich man in the parable did not stretch out his hand to Lazarus, and the chasm in eternity was cemented for him at that… But God in Christ stretched out His hand across that same chasm, and holds it stretched out still.
The parable shows a rich man who passed every day through his gates into the outer world, but did not let Lazarus in through them. The Cross, however, shows God, who stepped over His own threshold toward us while we still lay at His gate in the sores of sin, and invited us into His Estate…
russia’s war, since 2014 and especially since 2022, has made the inequality of suffering visible as never before. Someone is in a twelfth year under fire, and someone watches it from afar (even while inside Ukraine), as a news feed. This is in no way a reproach to those who left, or to those in the rear, in war everyone probably has his own place and his own “volunteer” burden, and it is not for me to weigh them, if we keep chanting, “this is not our war”…
This parable, for me, is a sober reminder, first of all to myself, because the rich man easily settles inside each of us, like that ability to grow used, to step over, to round off, to ignore someone else’s pain down to an “informational report,” and to sleep soundly, because “after all, we are doing nothing wrong.”
And this is why I do not ask myself where today’s rich man will end up and where Lazarus will. Because this parable, as I see it, is not about two types of people, but about two states of my heart… of my heart at different seasons of life. Yes, Christ builds many parables exactly like this: He does not divide humanity into the “good” and the “evil,” but shows how the same heart is now the soil by the road, now the good ground; now the elder son, now the younger; now the Pharisee in the temple, now the tax collector… And here it is the same. Today I am full, in the house, beyond the threshold, and I easily become the rich man who does not see the other. And tomorrow I myself may end up under someone’s gate, wounded, displaced, grown old, forgotten, and then it will be my sores the dogs lick, and people will pass me by, knowing my name and not stopping…
The rich man and Lazarus live in each of us by turns. And the whole matter is which of them is dearer to me… The parable, for all its taste of hell, gives me a quiet promise: as long as I am alive, the abyss is not yet cemented. As long as my heart beats, the trench I dug with my indifference can still be filled in… with at least one noticed face, one name, one stop where it would have been simpler to walk on, one donation (and better many, as far as is possible from “our wealth,” for the people in war-affected countries, not only Ukraine…).
The rich man ended up in hell not because he was rich, but because he put off his heart “for later.” For now, I still have that “later.” It is called “today”…
And one last thing. The greatest hope of this parable for me is not that I will manage to become a good rich man. It is that the One who told it did not Himself stay on the other side of the chasm. He went down to where we all lie during the ongoing russian war, with our sores, our losses, our reports of the killed, our graves and tears, and lay down beside us, not ashamed of the members of the Sanhedrin who laughed at His parables…
And if He stepped over His threshold toward me, to invite me into His Estate while I still lay at His gate, then I too have Someone, and something, to learn from in opening my own… No, not out of fear of hell, but out of gratitude to the One who alone has already passed through it and risen…
Keep your children away from war… Taras Dyatlik, Ukraine
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