#BeingHuman. The chasm we dig for ourselves, and a distance that cannot be measured in steps.
My sermon today at Skelya Church in Rivne, for those interested in what we preach during this war. People sometimes ask what is left to preach when the sirens and the 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 war has simply moved them closer, so close that the text now reads us. Our sermons are not escapes from the shelling reports but attempts to stand inside them honestly, before God, without looking away from the wounded or from Christ. This is one of them, on the rich man and Lazarus.
There are parables that frighten with images of hell. This one frightens me with something else: in it, hell begins at the gate of my own house rather than after death. At a distance you can cross with your foot and never cross with your heart.
The rich man and Lazarus live a single threshold apart, and not in different towns. Lazarus lies at the gate of the rich house, covered in sores that 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, and every day he steps over Lazarus without noticing him. He does not beat him, drive him off, mock him or curse him, so he does not sin against him by his actions. He simply never pays him any attention. And it is exactly this ignoring, rather than some loud crime, that will later turn out to be the chasm nobody can cross.
I have thought for a long time about why this story gives me no peace now, in the fifth year of the full-scale invasion and the twelfth of the war. I think it is the question of distance, because distance is what we have been living in. The distance between the one under fire and the one reading about it. Between the one in the dugout and the one scrolling a news feed. Between a name that is publicly mourned and the nameless and the missing, of whom nobody will ever learn. Between the one for whom the siren is the norm of life, and the one for whom it is a sound in someone else’s video. Between a home that no longer exists and another home where it is mentioned in passing over dinner before the conversation moves on to more positive news about hope and forgiveness and reconciliation.
The first thing that strikes me in this parable is what is absent from it. The rich man commits no active crime. The sin here is of another kind, a sin with no verb like stole or struck or drove off or insulted. The verb here is simply did not see. And this is the kind of guilt almost impossible to feel in yourself, since the one who stole knows he stole, while the one who steps over someone else’s pain every day sleeps soundly, because after all he did nothing wrong.
One detail horrifies me more than the rest: the rich man knew Lazarus by name. Already in torment he calls out, send me Lazarus. He knew what the man was called. He knew that this man lay at his gate beside the stray dogs. He knew, and walked past anyway. This is the indifference of knowing rather than of ignorance, dressed in purple: 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, and it has to teach you, or, as the counseling experts say, our mental health will not survive and we may become inconvenient Ukrainians. You cannot carry on your heart every day each figure of the shelled, the wounded, the killed, the missing, those in captivity, the widows and orphans, every name, because the heart is not a stone and it is not without limit. And here runs a thin, barely visible line. It is one thing to guard your heart so that you can keep serving, even while it bleeds. It is quite another to grow so used to someone else’s pain that it becomes scenery and background noise. The first is exhaustion. The second is a gate closing from the inside, and between 2014 and 2022 I heard exactly that in many evangelical churches, in russia and abroad and in unoccupied Ukraine, under the excuse that this is not our war.
For our family it is in no way scenery, since russians have already killed five of us, my brother Andrii among them, and one nephew was killed by pro-russian snipers during the Revolution of Dignity in February 2014. As of today, seven members of our family and close relatives are serving at the front. Six. Seven. We cannot keep our distance in order to protect our mental health, whatever the experts advise.
So what does this distance look like in numbers? Not to stir up a flaming hatred of russians, as some post-Soviet Slavic peacemakers accuse me of doing, those for whom the tender feelings of russian Christians matter more than the souls of our families, killed and tortured and missing. Numbers 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. According to official reports, over those ten days 2,406 long-range strike drones and 80 missiles were fired across Ukraine. Along the front, almost three thousand engagements, over three thousand guided aerial bombs, over 100,000 FPV kamikaze drones, over 36,000 shellings, meaning incidents rather than shells, of frontline towns and villages, and about 250 struck locations. Altogether more than 148,000 acts of terror in ten days, carried out in the name of defending the dehumanized traditional Christian values that evangelicals in russia write about almost daily. One unit of weaponry or shelling against Ukraine every six and a half seconds, around the clock, without a single pause.
And across those ten days, about 870 people, 95 of them killed and 775 wounded. These are the least verified and most understated numbers, a floor rather than a ceiling. Behind them stands May, with 275 killed and over 1,700 wounded, and behind May, April, and so on back to 2014. And the worst part of this counting is that June already has more deaths in its momentum than May had. All of it under the mantra that russia and russian evangelicals really do want peace.
I cite these figures not to shock but because they are the face of the modern chasm. Every unit in these reports is somebody’s Lazarus at somebody’s gate, with only the dogs beside him. 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.
This chasm is so easy to step across precisely because nobody looks back at you from its bottom, especially when you would rather not look. Some post-Soviet evangelical leaders have told me that watching the videos your neighbors share of the bloody realities of this war dehumanizes your own soul, and that you must keep it in purity and holiness so as not to see those sores and those dogs, and not to lose your heavenly citizenship.
The hardest person to walk past is the one who looks you in the eye, since another’s gaze stops you. It makes him present and inconvenient, and by its very existence it demands a response. When a 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 a daily report has no eyes. Ninety-five civilians killed, to say nothing of the defenders killed since 2014, 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 by, since between me and the number there is none of the resistance that a living gaze creates. Statistics can be scrolled past with a finger the way any feed is scrolled, whereas a living person in front of you cannot be scrolled past. Although, of course, some manage even that, especially when they do not have a six and a seven of their own.
Here lies the danger the parable speaks of. The rich man passed Lazarus every day, and at least Lazarus lay at his gate, in the body, visible, with a name and a gaze. Someone else’s pain passes us more and more often as a number rather than a body, and so it is even easier to step over than it was for him. What does not look at us, we too easily stop seeing. The chasm deepens where there is no longer anyone to lift a gaze toward us, and we can move on with a clean conscience.
But here Jesus does something He does in none of His other parables. He gives the beggar a name and leaves the rich man without one.
By any ordinary logic the rich man should have the name. He is a respected person, a patron, someone people reckon with, clothed in purple. And the beggar at the gate is nobody, a nameless heap of rags among dogs, part of the street scenery. Jesus turns this over. The rich man stays nameless: there was a certain rich man, and that is all. And the beggar is named Lazarus, in Hebrew Eleazar, God helps. The one whom nobody 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 more than the word people call you by. It is a sign that you are seen and known. So it turns out that Lazarus, nameless to people, was named in heaven before he died. And this is the answer to our own war of faces and recognizability. The well known die, and they are written about and mourned publicly, their names on front pages, their stories an inspiration. And beside them, every day, die those whose names nobody will ever learn beyond a few relatives and friends. A soldier whose photograph never appeared in the news. A sick elderly woman under 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. A child who lost his father and goes unnoticed at school. Each of them has a name too, where the true accounting is kept. God does not confuse Lazarus with the informational noise of the news, and He 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 either side. God did not wall it up on a whim between hell and heaven, whatever many evangelicals may prefer to think, since God is sovereign. The parable describes a daily pattern rather than the punishment of Judgment Day. The abyss after death is the same distance that existed during life, only now cemented forever. The gate the rich man passed through every day, choosing not to notice Lazarus, became after death a pit across which nobody can reach. He dug that trench himself, shovelful by shovelful, day by day, and death only made it impossible to fill in.
Even in torment he 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 remains certain that Lazarus exists in order to wait on him. The torments changed nothing in the way he looks at another person, and so the chasm between hell and heaven turns out to be the imprint of a chasm that had long been inside him.
At the same time, the parable does not say that each man earned his eternity with his own hands, the rich man torment for a lack of good deeds and Lazarus rest for excessive suffering. The Gospel does not teach that. Lazarus is not saved because poverty is a virtue, since otherwise it would be enough to live in poverty in order to inherit heaven. This is not a bookkeeping of merits. It is about the state of a heart, 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. Deeds do not create the state of a heart before God; the heart forms the deeds, and the deeds expose the heart the way a fever exposes an illness without being the illness itself. Salvation is always a gift received with an open palm. And the hand of a person who has plenty, if it is truly stretched out to God, always opens toward his neighbor as well. You cannot clench your fist before Lazarus and hold your other palm open before God at the same time.
So that this does not sound like a condemnation of wealth, it is worth remembering something easy to miss. Abraham himself, on whose bosom Lazarus now rests, was a rich and prosperous man, with herds and silver and gold and a multitude of servants. Wealth in itself did not close heaven to him, because it was never a sin.
The same is true of Job, the greatest of all the people of the East, owner of thousands of head of livestock, and at the same time the man who by his own testimony was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame, and who did not eat his morsel alone without feeding an orphan along with it. Job had everything the rich man of the parable had, and the doors of his house always opened outward, so that people hardly even had to knock. And then 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 another chasm, finer than poverty. The chasm of contempt from his own friends, the same men who had honored him before and who now sat beside him and argued that he had brought his misfortune on himself. Job came to know both shores in his own skin: what it is to have and to see, and what it is to lie there unnoticed by people who only yesterday shook your hand.
Jesus told other parables too, about people who multiply what is entrusted to them, and He held that up as an example. In the parable of the talents the one condemned is not the man who traded and gained more, but precisely the one who buried the silver in the ground to keep it safe and did nothing wrong. So the point is not how much you have, but in which direction your gates open.
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 new tomb, hewn in the rock, and laid the body of the crucified One in it. And Nicodemus, the same man who once came to Jesus by night, brought a generous, almost royal gift of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds, a fortune enough for the burial of a king. Both were prosperous, and both used exactly what they had, money and position and a tomb and spices, not to fence themselves off from someone else’s pain but to serve inside it. Their wealth opened gates where the wealth of the man in the parable closed them. The same purple, and a different heart beneath it.
Jesus could have stopped the parable at the word about the abyss. But He carries the dialogue further. The rich man, having lost hope for himself, asks about his five brothers: send Lazarus from that world, so that a risen dead man may warn them, and then they will repent. And Abraham answers what ought to strike everyone who today waits on God for impressive signs: they have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them. They already have everything they need. There is the Word, and there is no need for risen dead men or voices from the other side.
The rich man does not relent: no, but if one goes to them from the dead, they will surely repent. And then comes the line: if they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead. These words, spoken by Abraham inside the parable, come from the One who will Himself soon rise, and He knows in advance that His own resurrection will not force belief on those who did not wish to hear the Word. And so it happened. The empty tomb did not convince the Sanhedrin, while those two rich members of it, Joseph and Nicodemus, who believed before the resurrection, believed after it too. A miracle rarely changes a hardened heart; it gives it a new pretext for excuses, since unbelief comes from an unwillingness to hear what has already been said, and not from a lack of proof.
Lazarus could not cross to the rich man through that abyss, nor the rich man to Lazarus. And yet there is One who crossed it: Christ, who went down willingly to the other side, to the very bottom, into death and abandonment, into hell itself, where nobody arrives by his own strength. He is the 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 and the hunger and the abandonment, among the dogs that treated those sores instead of doctors. The rich man in the parable did not stretch out his hand, and the chasm was cemented for him at that. God in Christ stretched His hand across the same chasm, and holds it stretched out still.
The parable shows a rich man who passed through his gates every day and never let Lazarus in through them. The cross shows God stepping over His own threshold toward us while we still lay at His gate in the sores of sin, and inviting us in.
This war has made the inequality of suffering visible as never before. Someone is in a twelfth year under fire, and someone watches it from a distance, even from inside Ukraine, as a news feed. This is no reproach to those who left or to those in the rear, since in a war everyone has his own place and his own burden, and it is not for me to weigh them.
The parable is a sober reminder, first of all to myself, because the rich man settles easily inside each of us, as that ability to grow used to things, to step over, to round off, to reduce someone else’s pain to an informational report, and to sleep soundly, because after all we are doing nothing wrong.
This is why I do not ask myself where today’s rich man will end up and where Lazarus will. As I see it, the parable is about two states of my own heart rather than two types of people. 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 and now the good ground, now the elder son and now the younger, now the Pharisee in the temple and now the tax collector. Today I am full, inside the house, beyond the threshold, and I easily become the rich man who does not see the other. Tomorrow I may end up under someone’s gate myself, wounded or displaced or grown old or forgotten, and then it will be my sores the dogs lick, and people will pass me by, knowing my name and not stopping. The whole matter is which of the two is dearer to me.
For all its taste of hell, the parable 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 own 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, for people in war-affected countries and not only in Ukraine.
The rich man ended in hell not because he was rich, but because he put his heart off until 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 this war, with our sores and our losses and our reports of the killed and our graves and our tears, and lay down beside us, unashamed before the members of the Sanhedrin who laughed at His parables.
And if He stepped over His threshold toward me while I still lay at His gate, then I have Someone to learn from in opening my own. Not out of fear of hell, but out of gratitude to the One who has already passed through it and risen.
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