28 They Brought Their Sick to Him The preacher stands before the crowds, sparing no one’s complacency. “You array your bodies and your homes with luxury,” he cries, “but the most glorious creature that God ever made, your fellow man, you allow to go in tatters! Hear what the rich man in the parable says. He will pull down his barns and erect a great granary, a monument to his pride, and then he will live at his ease. Fool! That very night the Lord will require of him his life.” His name is Basil, “king.”That name is both apt and deeply ironic. You’d never look upon his spare form and think of royalty. For clothing he owns but a cloak and sandals. He lives mainly on bread and water. But by his very poverty and piety he gains an authority over his congregation that kings can never know, in all their regalia and their trailing retinues of favorites and flatterers. For Basil, poverty was not merely a social problem, to be addressed by distant and impersonal measures. The poor man who borrows as a last resort, and who then scrambles under his bed when he hears his creditor’s knock on the door—that is your brother. The boy who survives in the street by stealing, he is your own son. Other preachers might
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