The parable reveals how blind the rich man is to reality. And in reading it, Jesus hopes we won’t continue to share the same delusion.
Lazarus and the rich man: a parable of hope
Proper 21C
Luke 16:19-31
A rich man, a poor man, and a chasm between them.
It’s an evocative image and exceedingly relatable.
We know money divides us. That money brings power and that power is the greatest vehicle of division.
We know it and yet that is still novel to us. We hear about the corrupting influence of money over and over and we nod along. Yes, yes. Money corrupts.
And yet we fall for its corruption. Over and over. Then we have the audacity to say Wow! I don’t know what happened.
It’s like their’s a veil which blinds us. Or, more deceivingly, it creates an illusion, a mirage. That looks just like a chasm between us.
A parable about wealth
Jesus tells this story with perfect embellishments.
First, he shows us a rich man, who has all the trappings of the super-rich. Multi-Billionaire with a B. The 1%. And he walls himself and his home to protect it.
And then we get the poor man, named Lazarus, who is dumpster-diving and getting licked by mangy stray dogs.
The chasm between them is already literally established by a wall. It is also figuratively established by their separation into stations: rich and poor. And this separation is not exclusively because one man has money and the other does not. But more as a natural consequence of the siren song of wealth.
Fresh on Jesus’s lips:
“You cannot serve God and wealth.”
But wealth has a real knack for tricking us into service.
So before anything has happened, the rich man is hoarding wealth and walling himself away from the poor man.
So then they die.
The roles reverse. The first becomes last and the last becomes first. And the rich man hates it.
But here’s the question. Why doesn’t he leave?
Abraham and Lazarus are there. They can walk around, obviously. But then it says the chasm is fixed.
Then: Why doesn’t he ask them to help him get out?
He asks for one of them to come to him to bring water. And then to get the word out—tell his family. So this doesn’t happen to them.
And then: Why Lazarus? Why should he help? Does the rich man get why that’s in-credible to ask? And why does he ask Abraham to ask Lazarus? Why not ask him himself?
The wall he built around himself in life is around him in death. But it doesn’t seem to literally be there. The failure of his imagination is providing the means of his torture.
This isn’t a story of what could happen in the afterlife. This is about right now. In a way, the rich man is torturing himself.
The rich man’s family
Abraham’s second response to the rich man says everything.
The rich man thinks that if Abraham would just scrooge his family—scare them Dickens-style, then maybe they’d turn their lives around.
But Abraham isn’t convinced.
“If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”
David Lose suggests that this isn’t a parable about a rich man or a poor man. It’s about us.
“We are those who, along with the community for whom Luke originally wrote, know the resurrected Lord. We are the ones who have the law and the prophets and have seen God’s compassion embodied in the life and ministry of Jesus. We are the ones who gather each week to celebrate his victory over the grave, forgiveness of sin, and the possibility of living in light of God’s grace, mercy, and abundance. We are those who follow the crucified and Risen Lord.”
We’re the rich man’s family!
So we have everything we need to avoid this same fate. We have gospels which reveal the love of God and the prophets which compel us to be better.
We don’t have to imprison ourselves, walled off from a world of possibility.
Notice there’s no devil in this parable. We’re the devil. And the savior. We built the walls—we fixed the chasm. So we can change it and leave this prison.
Remember
Think back to these things Jesus has been preaching. He was imploring the powerful to widen the circle and for the crowds to sacrifice. He names the true cost of discipleship is commitment and its treasure is mercy. Jesus told parables about finding lost things and celebrating every time. And then that money blinds us and separates us from God.
Then he told this story.
Compare this to those parables of finding lost things, particularly the third one about the two sons. How one squandered his inheritance by living without love for himself. And the other squandered his inheritance by living without love for his father.
Remember the blinders which prevent mercy and provoke jealousy.
Imagine how desperate we are to be heard and known and loved that we’d lock out those who need it more than we do. We look like we’re afraid God will love them more. As if God couldn’t possibly love us all.
Think of how we wall off ourselves, cut chasms into the bedrock, build fortress walls for our castles and moats to drown children. We dynamite bridges and pick off the poor with drones (we often don’t even know their names or count them among the dead). We overthrow other people’s leaders and count the consequences inevitable.
And we pretend there isn’t any other way to live. We’re stuck, trapped, imprisoned in this way of life.
Imagine Instead
Imagine the bridge across. Unfix the chasm. Tear down the wall.
A rich man need not ignore the poor. Or ignore the economic systems which produce poverty.
If he knows his name, (he does) he can care about him. Not as a slave or a servant or even a savior. But as a friend. Like a kin-dom-building co-conspirator.
There’s no need to lead with fear. We can start with love. Hope. Concern. Grace.
The sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls it scaling an empathy wall. She suggests that we can overcome the obstacles preventing us from connecting with each other. But it seems Jesus invites us instead to eliminate our own wall, not climb over someone else’s. Because that wall wasn’t always there. God didn’t put it there. Someone built it. And not that long ago! And they are afraid of anyone coming near them.
We need to deal with our walls because they become our prisons.
Imagine grace instead of fear. Mercy instead of fear. Hope instead of fear.
Consider this.
There’s something to freedom that feels scary, too. Remember when the Hebrew people were rescued from Egypt and God gave them something to drink when they were thirsty. And then they got hungry and God said I’ll give you enough food every day. You don’t need to hoard anything. But they do anyway? And it rots.
This failure of imagination can seem baked into our condition.
But God kept giving them enough every day. Until they could feed each other.
And we have enough food in our world to feed everyone. And we employ a thousand excuses for starving Lazarus.
But if we start to imagine…
As the late prophet, John Lennon sang
“It’s easy if you try.”
Our imaginations break our fear. And combining our courage helps us see what wealth really gets us in this world is poverty of community, of relationship, and of hope.
David Lose is right.
This parable is for us.
Because we need that hope. And we need to be reminded of our own exile. We can’t be disciples of Jesus without it.
That is the point, after all. To follow this way of love, widening the circle, sacrificing in love, sharing so we all have enough.
Walking with Abraham, not separated from him.
So we can help make a different kind of kingdom. Without walls and chasms, war towers and weapons, where prisons outnumber schools.
The one we imagine together, full of the Spirit. Like a party (or a picnic), eating, celebrating, giving thanks for all God has done. All God is doing. Full of joy and with unbound grace.