This Week: Proper 21C
Gospel: Luke 16:19-31
One of the truest things we can say about Jesus’s parables is that how we read them can effect what we get out of them. And people in very different starting places will get out very different things.
It is also common to speak to the diversity within our own perspectives, casting ourselves in different roles. This can be useful and essential, too.
What we probably ought to stress, however, is that, just like there isn’t one essential truth in the reading we should probably avoid assuming all of the different renderings are the same to us. Not just equal, but kind of individualized and personal without anything holding us and one another together.
While we often refer to a lot of different readings of last week’s parable, this week’s seems to hit more straightforward. This has more to do with the narrative characters being on more familiar ground, I suspect. And that people really have their own fleshed-out ideas about hell.
Regardless, there are some important things to consider when diving into this text:
Perspective
It is interesting that the perspective of this parable is primarily the rich man. The one character with no name. The one that feels most like us. Except that he’s a jerk, which means he can’t be me. Or you, I suppose. Maybe Joe. OK, not me anyway.
This does something to the reading if we start inside the “bad” character, because it puts Lazarus, the poor man, at a distance. It means that we don’t get to be the righteous one here. And that seems to be by design. Which makes Jesus’s statements about the man’s family having the witness of others to keep them out of Hades all the more poignant. Because we presently aren’t in Hades and don’t want to go there!
Hades, not Hell
This feels like it doesn’t need to be said to you, but really is the kind of thing our people ought to have the opportunity to notice and not shrug emoji about. Jesus tells a parable that includes Greek mythology rather than Dante’s poetry. That’s a little literature/church history joke right there.
We shouldn’t fold this into a vision of hell as if this parable Jesus is telling is secret knowledge about the afterlife. In essence, this is the opposite of reliable intel. It is the setting of a short story.
The setting could be fleshed out out further, too, to become a greater part of the story. I like to think about how much of the scene I assume is there, but isn’t. Is there a river? How far away, physically is Lazarus from the rich man? What would he have to do to bring a drink of water to the rich guy?
Don’t forget the mammon!
In the previous parable, Jesus says that one cannot not serve both God and Mammon. And one of the things that informs my reading of that parable is the reminder that usury is wrong. That the business that the dishonest manager was in was wrong. That the work expectation from the master was wrong. So before the dishonest manager could even do anything dishonest, he took a job where he was expected to do something dishonest in the sight of God.
I haven’t heard a lot of sermons about this passage, to be honest, but I never hear anyone bring that aspect up. And yet it is the first thing that comes to my mind. That the whole set up, the very nature of what is happening here, is founded on a kind of dishonest relationship with God and neighbor.
Jesus tells that parable to the disciples and the Pharisees mock him. So he responds with this one. So I think usury is still on the menu.
The story doesn’t start with the rich man in Hades. It starts with the rich man ignoring the plight of the poor man. And yet, both of them die. Mammon doesn’t save the rich man’s life. But it informs the way he thinks of Lazarus in death.
More good stuff between
I recommend reading my piece covering the gap between the two parables. There are only a few verses, but they are full and inform this moment so very much.
The gist of how I read this section is that it seems to inform how Jesus responds to the Law. We already know that he has a more intuitive sense of the Law, as he has taught already that we have to break some rules to fulfill the broader intent. Here, he makes that argument in a way that is less abstract and a bit more troubling, I suspect. It is more rubber-hitting-road than theoretical potentiality.
The TL;DR is that the Pharisees are obsessed with control, so their obsession with policing the rules is because they want to be the cops. Jesus’s vision is of the rules as helping us find universal freedom together. So we align ourselves to their intent rather than their letter.
This leaves me connecting the rich man with the Pharisees and Lazarus with all of those people the Pharisees ignore because the rules! And Jesus goes, yeah, but the rules!
Lazarus is only in John
I don’t know why you’d want to preach on this idea, but I can’t read your mind, so maybe it is something you are interested in. Have at it. But the character of Lazarus, the buddy of Jesus, brother of Mary and Martha, is only found in John. This parable character having the same name seems totally coincidental. I also suspect it predates John’s gospel by less than a decade.
Consider Abraham
I mean, I really don’t take a great interest in some of these kinds of ponderings personally. But I do consider them and often include them. Like Abraham, for example. What is he doing here? Why him and not someone else? It probably has to do with the Covenant and with the birth of the Hebrew people. The Abrahamic tradition and all that.
I also connect this with the rules, with the giving of the rules under Moses. The development of what comes after. The things Jesus’s detractors obsess about. It should be lost on nobody that the one that Abraham, the father of the people is walking alongside is Lazarus. Meanwhile, the rich man is on the other side, pissed off.
Where are you right now?