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Good morning.

Being poor is bad for your health – so says the data from a ten year study published in the Journal of Gerontology on Tuesday, suggesting that wealth is the most significant factor determining your chances of future years of healthy life. So, a wealthy 50 year old male in England can expect on average another 31 years free of disability and pain, whereas a 50 year old in the poorest group, can expect only 22 or 23 years. Women can look forward to slightly more healthy years than men – but the gap between the expectations of the wealthiest and the poorest women is just about the same at 8 and half years or so.

I’m inclined to think that the fact that poverty affects your health has probably always been common knowledge, even if we couldn’t always quantify the difference it makes – and in the story Jesus told about a certain rich man and the beggar at his gate, the beggar, Lazarus, is not only poor and hungry, but covered in sores.

Of course, when both beggar and rich man die, the inequalities in well being here on earth are reversed. So now Lazarus’s rests in the arms of Abraham, while the rich man suffers the torments of hell. But the reversal of circumstances goes deeper still, for now the rich man becomes a beggar – first of all begging that Lazarus might come to him with a drop of water to cool his tongue, and then, when he is told that that is impossible, begging that Lazarus should be sent to his five brothers to warn them against sharing his sorry plight.

But if the rich man experiences a radical reversal in his fortune, it is by no means obvious that he really learns to see things in a radically different way. It seems to me that in his readiness to have Lazarus sent on various errands, the rich man, even in hell, is as willing as ever to lord it over the poor. I suppose in his concern for his brothers the rich man shows a touch of fellow feeling – but like the feeling he showed on earth, it doesn’t seem to reach beyond his garden gate.

Inequalities in healthy life expectancy can be looked at from various angles – and the authors of the study point out that improving healthy life expectancy for the poorest in our society will reduce public expenditure on medical services and long term care, whilst also keeping experienced workers in the labour market for longer. In the parable, however, the angle from which the rich man needed to view the suffering of Lazarus was not that of political economy and its calculations, however telling those may be, but of a more generous fellow feeling. Christians – and not just Christians - have signaled their commitment to the widening of such feelings by their generous use of the terms ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, way beyond the boundaries set by biological niceties. To put it another way, the rich man needed to learn in life, what he unfortunately failed to learn even in death, that he really had more than five brothers and a wider family to look out for.

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