Luke 16:1-13
Last week, we discussed the parable of the unjust steward in Luke 16 and Jesus’ statement that “You can not serve God and mammon.” Mammon is anything besides God that you put your trust in, especially wealth and possessions. Today, we will discuss the next parable in Luke 16, in which the primary character is an example of a man who has done just that—put all of his trust in money and not in God.
Luke 16:19 “There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house— for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”
There are two scenes in this parable:
There is life now and the life to come. We must first recognize that the purpose of this parable is not to describe the life to come. This is not a lecture on the afterlife. This parable is no more a description of what the life to come will look like than our previous parable is a lesson from Jesus for how to be a good land real estate management company. Jesus is not giving business advice, and he is not giving a lecture on what heaven looks like. So, we will not spend time discussing a description of the afterlife in this story. If we were to spend what time we have with this parable debating if this is an accurate picture of the afterlife, then we would miss the entire point of the parable. It is what you do in this life that matters. Concern yourself with how you live today. It is what you do in this life that determines your placement in the afterlife. So we see the two characters in life now and then in the life to come, and they are separated in both scenes.
And in the life to come, there is a “great chasm” between them that “none may cross.” And the uncrossable canyon is the result of sin. The only way to cross the chasm is by repenting, accepting Jesus as the King of your life, and living as the king would have you live. As the wealthy man learned too late, repentance is only possible in this life. You see, in this life, they were also separated by a wall. But there was a gate. There was an opportunity to cross from one side to the other. But the rich man would not allow Lazarus to enter. If he had repented of his worship of the idol of wealth and had shared, loving his neighbor as his self, he could have opened the gate to Lazarus. This would be his repentance, a change in the direction of his life, a change in who directed his life, and thus a change in how he lived. But the separation in the life to come has no gate. The chance for repentance is past. So, we must not spend too much time focusing on how we will live after we die when our purpose on this earth is to live for Jesus now. As the rich man learned, we can’t change how we live after we die. But today, we can search God’s word and learn how he wants us to live. Today, we can repent and live differently. And we can then trust Yehovah, the God who loves us and has gone to prepare a place for us. So, let’s look closely at this parable.
The rich man- Notice that he is the character who does not have a name. This is a reversal of what was expected. Undoubtedly, in this life, everyone would have known the rich man’s name, but no one would know that the poor man had a name. We are told that he is not just rich but also extremely wealthy, for he is clothed in purple and fine linen, the clothing of kings. He feasted spectacularly every day. Again, this identifies him as being in the place of kings. But if you read carefully, you will find something about his character. He is not righteous. And we know this before we ever read about the poor man at his gate. How? He feasts every day. This means he is not righteous. God designed several feasts in the Biblical Calendar. Feasts and celebrations are important to God. We have discussed before the great Messianic Feast in the world to come. God loves a good party. God is all about celebrations. But every day in this life is not a feast. In God’s calendar, every day is not the same. For the Jews in Jesus’ day, the seventh day, the Sabbath, is different. It is special. You do not do work on the Sabbath. Nor do you ask any of your workers or slaves in your home to work. But this man feasts every day. So he is forcing his staff to work on the Sabbath. By Biblical definition, we know he is not a righteous man.
We also learn he is a man who can’t see very well. There is a poor man at his gate. In this life, the rich man does not see Lazarus. Oh, he may know that the poor man is at his gate. “What an inconvenience! How sad that all the guests coming to my sumptuous feast must pass by such a sight. How disgusting that they have to pass by this horrible man covered in sores on their way to my beautiful party.” The poor man’s dream is to have a few crumbs that fall from his table, but can you imagine what would happen if he gave this poor man food? “Why, then,” the rich man would say, “he would never leave. And worse yet, even more poor, miserable people might be encouraged to come to get my scraps. So I give the crumbs to the household dogs. Perhaps the poor man will leave or just go ahead and die and stop ruining the curb appeal of my mansion.”
He doesn’t really see Lazarus in the parable until verse 23:
Luke 16:23 and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.
Now he sees him. But still, the rich man does not see. He may have noticed Lazarus in life, but he didn’t truly see him. He didn’t see him as a human like him, created in the image of God as he was, in desperate need of love and care, starving while he feasted, suffering while he celebrated. Now, he only sees Lazarus as just another servant who might increase his comfort, just like his servants in his prior life.
Luke 16:24 (my paraphrase) Father Abraham, send Lazarus like a slave to comfort me, have him bring me some cold water. Oh, Lazarus won’t mind walking through the flames to come serve me. He won’t care; he is just a slave.
And when told that it is impossible for Lazarus to go where he is, the rich man asks Abraham to send him back to warn his brothers to repent. “Oh, Lazarus won’t mind leaving heaven to go back and do some service for me.” Notice that he never directly addresses Lazarus. In his mind, Lazarus is still someone beneath him. Just another person to do his bidding. He says, “Father Abraham… Come on, Abraham, we are family.” But He fails to see Lazarus as part of the family. He is just a lowly servant, someone to bring him comfort.
Even in the flames of torment, he is unrepentant, for there can be no repentance after you die.
In 2 Timothy 2, Paul instructs Timothy on how to deal with opponents of the gospel.
2 Timothy 2:25-26 Opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.
We pray that God will grant repentance. “Grant” means to bestow as a gift. Jesus told us in John 16:8 that it is the Holy Spirit’s job to convict people of sin. Repentance is a gift from God that, unfortunately, not all choose to accept. On our own, none of us would ever repent. And we see this rich man is now beyond repentance and beyond salvation.
And then there is Lazarus.
This is the only one of Jesus’ parables in which a character is named. He is Lazarus, the Greek form of the name Elazar, a common name in the Old Testament that means ‘God is my help.’ Jesus chose this name because this is a man who does not receive help from those around him; his only help comes from God.
He is described as a “poor man.” There are two Greek words for poor. Penes and ptochos. The penes are the working poor. Those who are surviving day to day. They are living in a shelter or a run-down shack. They never have enough to eat, but they aren’t starving yet. Their clothes are worn out, but they are not naked. They have little hope that things will ever improve, but they are surviving. This is the majority of the poor in Jesus’ day. They lived in a foreign occupied country where work was scarce and taxes were oppressive. These were hard times for the poor. They were barely surviving.
But that is not who Jesus is talking about in this parable. Jesus doesn’t use the word ‘penes’ but the other Greek word for the poor, the ‘ptochoi’ (singular ‘ptochos.’) They are the completely destitute who own only the ragged clothes on their back and have no other possessions. This Greek word comes from a root meaning “to cower in fear or cringe.” They are not the working poor. Due to physical problems, they can not work. They can only beg. They are not surviving. They are dying in front of your eyes. They have no hope. Life will never get better. For them, there is only suffering and then death.
The New York Times published a picture in 1993 that I think best illustrates one who is ptochos, the hopeless poor. It is a difficult picture to look at. We instinctively do not want to look at the ptochoi. But we must look. This is a picture of a little boy in Sudan, Africa, who was one of many who was starving to death and attempting to walk to a UN feeding station. Kevin Carter, a photojournalist, caught this picture of the child after he had collapsed on the way. Just steps away is a hooded vulture, waiting on the child to die for its next meal.
This is the ptochoi. This is the poor man at the gate in Jesus’ parable. Starving, hopeless, dying.
Kevin Carter said he scared the vulture away before he left, but he did not know if the child ever made it to the feeding station. [We later learned the child did make it and lived that day but died as a teenager of “fevers.”] Kevin Carter committed suicide 4 months after he took this photo. His suicide note said: “…I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners…”
This is a difficult picture to look at. How are we supposed to respond when we lift up our eyes and see a child like this? Are we supposed to be sad? Should we mourn?
In the Old Testament book of Joel, the people had suffered a terrible tragedy. A swarm of locusts devastated the land, destroying most crops. Many would be hungry due to the resulting famine. It was terrible. And Joel said, because of your sin, Israel, even more devastation is coming. An army will come to conquer you. It will be an even more terrible time. How should people react to such news?
People in those days usually reacted to terrible news by mourning and tearing their clothes, as Jacob did when he was told Joseph was dead, or as David tore his clothes when he heard of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. But Joel tells them the proper response is not simply tearing their clothes and mourning.
Joel 2:12-13 “Yet even now,” declares Yehovah, “return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning, and rend your hearts and not your garments.
Return to Yehovah your God, for he is gracious and merciful
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and he relents over disaster.
Fasting, weeping, and mourning are all appropriate responses to disaster. But Joel says the outward show of mourning, which was common in their day, tearing their garments, was not the most important response.
Rend your hearts and not your garments.
Yes, be sad at the terrible plight of the poor, mourn that children are dying, and shed a tear when you see a child in such a state. But don’t just tear your clothes. Tear your heart. He says, “Return to me with all your heart.” Return – the Hebrew shuv, which we translate as repent. Your heart should change. You should make a decision to repent when you see such a disaster. Return to God for his patience, grace, and mercy are stronger than his justice. (Notice that Joel is quoting the passage we looked at last week in Exodus 34, where God describes himself.)
The appropriate response to seeing this horrible picture of poverty and famine is not just mourning or crying. Rend your hearts. God expects us to react with broken hearts that lead to repentance. Our hearts should be broken by the things that break God’s heart. And broken hearts should lead us to return to his ways. As he is a God of grace and mercy, he expects his children to act like their father and respond to disaster with grace and mercy. Broken hearts that lead to actions of mercy through repentance. But our rich man in this parable does not really see Lazarus. His heart is hard. He does not repent and give Lazarus mercy and grace.
They both died. Death is the great leveler.
Ecclesiastes 9:2 All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean,
Hebrews 9:27 People are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment,
Luke 16:22 The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried,
Is there any significance that the poor man dies first? It was no surprise that this starving man covered in sores died soon. A 2016 study by the National Institutes of Health showed that the extremely poor in the US died on average 15 years sooner than the average wealthy person. The gap is even wider in third-world countries. If a celebrity dies, it makes the news. But the news is silent on the 20 homeless people who die in our country, on our doorstep, on average every day, most of them early, preventable deaths. And notice this detail in the parable: Words are added to note that the rich man was buried. Those words are missing when Lazarus dies. The rich man likely had a magnificent funeral with a beautiful silk-lined coffin, the best vault, and a lovely granite marker. There is no mention of even a burial of Lazarus. He dies and is forgotten. He was unnoticed in death as he was in life. Not even a statistic.
Now look at the rich man’s last request. He asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to convince his five brothers to repent before it is too late. Abraham tells him that all they need to know is written in the books of Moses and the Prophets. But the rich man is convinced that if only Lazarus would return from the dead and warn them. Then they would repent and not discover the truth too late as he did. Abraham responds:
Luke 16:31 “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”
When Jesus is teaching this parable in 27 AD, it will be just a few days before he will be informed that his real-life friend Lazarus is ill. Lazarus will die, and Jesus, 4 days later, will bring him back from the dead. Just as the rich man in the parable asked, a man named Lazarus will come back from the dead. And you think that would be enough to convince every person in Israel that Jesus was indeed who he said he was. But Abraham in the parable was correct. Even when the actual Lazarus returned from the dead, some refused to believe. And just a few months later, when Jesus was crucified and after three days rose from the dead. There were still those who refused to believe, refused to repent. And there are people today who still refuse to believe, still those who refuse to repent.
This is a story of two people who lived extremely different lives in this world and then, in a great reversal, were placed in very different positions in the afterlife. This is not about the “Haves” and the “Have Nots,” but rather the “Have more than they could possibly ever need” and The “Have Nothing, Need Everything”. And the sad truth is that this happens every day in our time. There are millions of the extremely poor, the ptochoi. Some right at our doorstep. Some are dying or starving while others feast sumptuously. Like Lazarus in the parable, they are unseen.
When we began a program for the homeless in Alabama, many of those we first approached were resistant to starting services for the homeless in our county. They said we don’t have any homeless people in Marshall County. There is just no need. But we had already identified hundreds of homeless people in our town and homeless children in our schools. They were there, but no one wanted to see them. They could not see that they were already at their doorstep. (There are entire webpages dedicated to educating tourists on how to avoid the homeless people in San Francisco, New York and other cities.)
After showing people in our county the data on our homeless population, they said if we were to begin to offer services to people without homes, it would just encourage more homeless to come to our town. We will attract more homeless people and just have a bigger problem. All they could see was the bigger potential problem for themselves. They could not understand the need. Like the rich man who refused to give crumbs from the table to Lazarus, they didn’t want to encourage the homeless to stay by giving them shelter or food or comfort.
We serve a God who sees. When Abraham and Sarah horribly mistreat Hagar, their Egyptian slave, first sexually abusing her and then, after she was pregnant, treating her harshly, she flees to the wilderness. In her despair, when she feels she has no hope, God comes to her and promises to care for her. She calls God “El–Roi” the God who sees me. God sees affliction, and he responds. He sees the affliction of the children of Israel in Egypt.
Exodus 3:7 Then the LORD said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters.
I have a friend who suffered many years under an emotionally abusive husband. She prayed for decades that he would come to repentance. No one, other than her children and closest family, had any idea what she had endured. But God saw her affliction and came to her and clearly told her that he saw her. He was Yehovah El Roi to her. This was the month before she was diagnosed with terminal cancer that was supposed to have ended her life several months ago. She is still very much alive and has been delivered from the man who abused her. When others could not see her in her distress, God saw her.
Know that whatever you face in this life that God sees you. He sees your affliction, he sees your sadness, he sees your family trouble, he sees your despair, he sees your grief, he sees you troubled by the same temptations. The rich man did not see Lazarus in this life, but God saw the poor man. And the God who sees is the God who heals, Yehovah El Roi is Yehovah rapha (Exodus 15:26.). He is the God who provides Yehovah yireh (Genesis 22:14.) And as the rich man in the story discovered and as many will discover one day, he is Yehovah Tzidkenu the God of righteousness, the God who judges. (Jeremiah 22:6, Jeremiah 33:16)
God sees us, and God cares for us. This is certain. The big question for us is, do we see as God sees? Do we see the forgotten people on our doorstep? Do we lift up our eyes now and see the needs around us? Do we really see them as created in the image of God, as members of the family, as brothers? Do we see ourselves as we are, and do we repent while there is still time to repent?
In Luke 7, Jesus is dining at the home of a Pharisee named Simon. The dinner is interrupted by a woman, a known sinner, who comes in and breaks an alabaster flask of ointment and anoints Jesus, and washes his feet. Jesus takes that opportunity to tell the parable of the debtors. One owed 50 and the other 500. Neither could afford to pay, so both debts were written off. Jesus asked Simon, “Which will love him more?”
Luke 7:43-44 Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.” And he said to him, “You have judged rightly.” Then turning toward the woman he [Jesus] said to Simon, “Do you see this woman?
Well, of course, he saw her, Jesus. She caused a big commotion, upsetting his dinner party. But he did not see the same woman Jesus saw. He saw a sinner. Someone less righteous than him. Someone who would never be invited to his home. Someone who was unclean.
Jesus recognized that she was a sinner; he later tells Simon, “her sins, which are many…” But who Jesus saw was not simply a sinner, but a repentant sinner who acted out her repentance. And he tells her she is forgiven. She is a sinner who has repented, acted out her repentance, been forgiven, saved by her faith, and will depart in peace. “Do you see this woman?”
Matt. 7:3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?
Klyne Snodgrass, in his excellent book, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, says it well:
“The ability to see is the mark of Christian discipleship.”1
This parable of Jesus is, in some ways, the story of the blind man who was never healed.
If only we can look at others and ourselves with our Father’s eyes. If only we could see our own sins instead of focusing on the sins of others. If only we could see the needs at our doorstep, If only we can see how loving, how forgiving, how patient, and how merciful our Father is to his children. Then perhaps we would be swift to repent, swift to forgive, swift to share, and swift to worship. Like the man in John 9, there are lots of things I do not know or understand, but this I know. Once I was blind, now I can see, and Jesus made all the difference.
Let us not spend our time in this world talking about heaven and the life to come. It will come, and your destination in the world to come will be determined by your repentance or your lack of repentance today, by how you treat others, and by how you treat the poor. Everyone reading these words is in the same situation. We are all sinners, every one of us. We may have different sins, but we all fall short of the glory of God. I fall short daily. As long as we breathe, we have another God-given opportunity to repent of whatever stands between us and God and to live today more closely following our Savior. This is the day Yehovah has made. Let us repent and be glad in it.
1. Snodgrass, Klyne R.. Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (p. 434). Kindle Edition.
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