Text: Luke 16: 19-31
Slanted and Enchanted IV: The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus
During the season of Lent, we’ve been focusing on the parables of Jesus, the slanted and enchanted stories that he tells throughout his ministry. We need to know what Jesus does throughout his ministry, but it’s equally important to learn from what he says. As often as not, he teaches by telling stories that work like a shard of light cast on crystal, diffusing it in multiple directions. It’s a kind of code, he tells his disciples, something that has to be worked out and played with. And so throughout this season of Lent, as we journey toward Jerusalem, we’ve been working and playing with those stories. We encountered the parable of the sower, and the parable of the Good Samaritan. We encountered the parable of the talents, all found in the Gospel of Luke. Today we come to yet another parable found in the Gospel of Luke, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It seems both mysterious and terrible at first reading, a parable of comeuppance and eternal judgment. But if we let it, it may open toward something gracious and lovely if we linger long enough in the chasm, and in the fire, that the parable depicts. It’s said that the devil is in the details, but here, it’s God who is found in the details of the story. Where is God to be found in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus?
Let’s start with the basic elements of the parable. It’s divided into two parts. The first has to do with what we now call economic inequality, what, in our time might be termed class warfare. The second has to do with an apparent judgment upon that inequality, as well as what we might think of as a pedagogy of the heart. Because the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is ultimately about discovering the humanity we share with others. It’s about the stewardship of the painful experiences we’re sometimes forced to undergo, learning to use those experiences in order to become wiser and more compassionate people.
We’ll start with the scene of inequality that Jesus sketches. It has to do, obviously, with a nameless man of enormous wealth – a subject that circulates through many, if not most, of Jesus’s parables. The text conveys that enormity by telling us four important details – a kind of shorthand that first century readers and listeners could have recognized. First, the man wore garments of purple, the costliest of all dyes, and also the color of royalty. Second, he dressed in linen, one of the most expensive textile imports of the Mediterranean world in the first century. Third, we’re told that he feasted sumptuously every single day, not only on feast days or special occasions. And then fourth, and most important: the man had a gate. With that detail, Jesus makes plain that the man would have been a part of the landowning elite of the Galilean countryside. Recall that the world that Jesus lived within and spoke to was a world of peasant farmers and fishermen, where villages and entire territories would have been controlled by elite households. A medieval fiefdom or a plantation from the antebellum south would be apt comparisons here. And so the detail of the gate suggests an estate governed by one such landowner. Taken together, each of those four details suggests a person of cultivated taste and enormous personal extravagance, especially when contrasted with Lazarus, who dwells at the rich man’s gate.
Lazarus is a name that, in the original Greek, means “helped by God,” an ironic twist within the story Jesus is telling. Here too Jesus provides some important details that furnish some clues about who we’re encountering. Lazarus is crippled, and he’s destitute. He’s hungry, and he has a skin condition that gives him ulcerating sores across his body. That would have made him unclean in ancient Jewish law, an untouchable, worthy of being shunned. Not only that, dogs are in a better position than Lazarus. He doesn’t even have the energy to ward off the dogs who come to lick his sores. To add insult to injury, those same dogs are treated to table scraps from the rich man’s parties. Lazarus is, in other words, a beaten, humiliated man. If the figure of the rich landowner would have been familiar to first century readers, so too the figure of Lazarus would have been all too common, a familiar sight in the biblical world. How did he come to be that way?
The text uses a verb, ballo, to describe Lazarus’s condition. It implies one who has been thrown down or cast down into a precarious position by fate, or in this case, by an economic order. We can discern something about that order, and how it may have affected those like Lazarus. Someone in Lazarus’s position may well have had the misfortune of being born the second or third son of a peasant household. There would have been only enough land or work for the eldest son to inherit something, and second, third, or fourth in line were often forced to seek a life elsewhere – as a day laborer, or as a merchant in one of the larger cities. Likewise, Lazarus could at one time have been a farmer who lost his mortgage through a foreclosure to one of the households that governed the region. The household would have added the small plot to its own estate, leaving the peasant farmer destitute. From there, one in such a position would have become a day laborer, competing for wages with other such men – the destitute and the extraneous sons. Eventually, we might surmise that time ran out for Lazarus, as his body deteriorated from the punishing conditions of his existence. He could no longer compete for work. He was vulnerable to disease. His wounds wouldn’t heal. In time, even begging became difficult, which seems to be the state in which we discover Lazarus in the parable.[1]
That’s the first part of the parable. It depicts a scene of economic disparity common throughout history, whether in the first century, in the medieval era, or in our own 21st century gilded age. What are the implications of such a scene? Better yet, where is God to be found in such a scene? Hang on to that question just a little bit longer.
What Jesus is describing is a common understanding of the way God’s favor and displeasure unfold in the world, one in keeping with much of what we discover in the Bible, and in conventional religion. Consider the words of the Psalmist, speaking of one who adheres to the way of God: “he will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season…in whatever he does, he prospers.” Would that not be the rich man of the parable – thriving, flourishing, prosperous? Consider as well words from the book of Proverbs, chapter 13: “The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the soul of the diligent is made fat.” Or, from the same chapter, these words: “Adversity pursues sinners, but the righteous will be rewarded with prosperity.” Would Lazarus not be the sinner or the sluggard on that understanding, and would the rich man not be diligent one planted by streams of water? In those terms, it would be all too tempting to equate the scene as sanctioned by God. Not only that, the ulcerating sores on Lazarus’s body would have been understood as a punishment for some transgression or other – one more prodigal son wasting away from his poor decisions. Conversely, the behavior of the rich man suggests that he enjoyed his privilege as an entitlement, as a right, something bestowed upon him by God because of his industry, because of his talent, because of his wisdom.
It’s a theology that hasn’t disappeared or abated even after two millennia. You can still hear preachers and TV hucksters wishing to convince you that God is itching to fulfill your every material desire if only you’ll live by these seven essential precepts of a highly effective person. But it’s not a theology that requires God for it to function as a theology. It has its secular variants as well, in the guise of self-help gurus and management experts. The implication, whether among the TV preachers or the self-help gurus is this: you’re the master of your destiny, and God, or life, or the universe, rewards you for your initiative, for being who you are. And there is, of course, some small measure of truth to that, but only a little. Because note what falls out from that assumption: if you don’t experience success, if you’re not flourishing, if material rewards elude you, the fault is ultimately yours, and God, or life, or the universe will not respond to you. That’s why voices that blame the poor for their condition are so widespread. They’re lazy, they’re indolent, or they’re shiftless, we sometimes hear. Because they too are the masters of their own destiny, and God, life, the universe is simply responding to their character flaws. If only they’d dress right, talk right, pull their pants up, get reskilled, get off their asses, take a class on personal finances, they’d get ahead.
We ministers even hint at such a theology sometimes – God has blessed us abundantly, we say, and so it is right to give back some of what has been given to us. The wider truth in that statement is that nothing, really, belongs to us, for there exist upon the earth no hearses with luggage racks. That’s worth affirming. But by stating that God has given us what we have, do we not also insinuate that God has sorted the world economically, that it is God who doles out favors for some, while choosing to visit misfortune upon others? Does that not land us back in the middle of Jesus’ parable, where the rich man enjoys what he enjoys because it has been gifted to him by God, and where poor Lazarus suffers what he does because of God’s displeasure? Isn’t one point of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus that such theologies are questionable at best? Isn’t one point of the parable that God doesn’t sanction or bless economic inequality? Put more strongly, isn’t one point of the parable that economics and the blessings and misfortunes that befall us bear absolutely no relationship to God whatsoever? Isn’t one point of the parable that God identifies first and foremost with those at the bottom of the economic order, not those at the top?
Yes, but there’s more. Now we come to the second part of the story. And here we’re forced to contend with a number of difficult questions about the rich man and Lazarus. After they both die, the scene shifts, and Lazarus rests on the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man is tormented in the fire of Hades. Questions abound: is this just an expression of class resentment and reversal, rewarding the poor and punishing the rich? From a storyteller reputed to have a message of grace and mercy, that would seem cruel. But more than that, is this not the sort of text that fuels all the fire and brimstone sermons that have given Christianity such a bad name over the years? Is this not precisely the “you’ll burn in hell” imagery used to scare the vulnerable into accepting Jesus as savior, lest they too wind up in the agony of eternal torment? Congregationalists in Puritan times may have embraced such imagery, and there are versions of Christianity that continue to trade in threats of damnation, but churches such as ours haven’t generally found much to like in that imagery. That’s because it doesn’t sound like what we know to be true about the storyteller, who a few chapters later, winds up forgiving his tormentors from the cross. And yet there it is, the flames, right in the center of one of Jesus’s most famous parables. How are we to understand it all? Does mercy extend even to the hard hearted rich man? It does.
The first thing to note is the way Abraham addresses the rich man. He calls him “Child.” It’s a term of affection, a sign that the man remains one of Abraham’s beloved offspring. It’s not a term that would have been used to address one subjected to an eternity of torture. In other words, it’s not a scene of abandonment that’s being described. Even so, note as well just how the rich man behaves toward Lazarus. He continues to believe in his own entitlement. He continues to be wholly self-involved. He continues to believe that Lazarus is his personal steward, and that he can bring him a glass of refreshing water. He continues to believe that Lazarus can be ordered to run a personal errand for him, to warn his siblings. He fails to see his kinship with Lazarus, his common bond with the beggar at his gate. Is the giant chasm that separates him from Lazarus, and from Abraham, something of his own creation? Might it be that the chasm has little to do with the architecture and floor plan of the afterlife, but rather reflects the unbridgeable separation of social classes that tends to imprison people everywhere, then as now?
We finally need to return to our original question: just where is God in the story? We’ve accounted for Abraham, and the rich man and Lazarus are in their appointed places. But where is God? Here we need to return to the flames, beloved by hellfire preachers everywhere. Perhaps we too need to take the flames seriously, but for different reasons. Might it be that the flames themselves are where God is? Might it be that the flames themselves are God? That’s how it was for Moses when he encountered a burning bush. God was in the flames. That’s how it was for Ezekiel when he encountered a burning wheel. God was in the flames. Maybe the flames aren’t about punishment at all, but about the refiner’s fire that the prophet Malachi spoke about? “For he is like a refiner’s fire,” the prophet says, words that the early Christians believed had to do with Jesus himself, words that we hear sung every Christmas season in Handel’s Messiah. Maybe sometimes, that’s what it feels like to undergo God: a burning, refining fire that makes us twist in discomfort. That’s how St. Augustine spoke of his own conversion in his Confessions. He wrote that he was in agony as God’s spirit went to work within him. Might it be that the rich man is undergoing God in the parable? Might the flames be a metaphor for the refining that can and does take place within human spirits? To put a finer point on it still, is the truth of the parable about what it means not to hide from pain, as the rich man evidently did throughout his life, but to yield to it somehow, and to learn and grow from it? Is the truth of the parable that God is somehow at work within each of us, especially within painful moments, refining us into more compassionate and soulful people?
Frederick Buechner suggests as much when he tells the story of his troubled childhood. Buechner is a novelist as well as a minister, one of our finest public theologians. He writes movingly about his father’s suicide, and what it did to his family, and to his own sense of self. After a reading in which he shared much of that story, a man approached Buechner and offered that it sounded as though Buechner had had a good deal of pain in his life. But the man ventured further that Buechner had been a good steward of that pain. Stewardship, of course, is a churchy sort of word that we usually trot out around here when we’re worried about balancing the budget. But in its widest sense, it means to care for something, to cultivate it. What would it mean to take care of the hurtful things that happen to us? What would it mean to be a steward of the difficult things that you have suffered?[2]
If that sounds gloomy, I don’t mean it to. Because perhaps that’s what is required, finally, to bridge the chasm that separates the rich man from Lazarus. Maybe that’s what’s required for communion and joy to actually occur between the two of them. Perhaps that’s what is required, finally, to bridge the chasms that separate so many of us, black folks and white folks, conservatives and liberals, the wealthy and fortunate from the poor and less fortunate. Maybe that’s what’s required for joy to occur between us. Perhaps that’s what’s required to bridge the chasm that separates teachers and students, parents and children, preachers and congregants. Maybe that’s how communion and joy are discovered among everyone.
Perhaps, finally, the parable has to do with learning to speak, and more importantly, learning to listen to one another, from our depths, the places of our most painful growth. Maybe that’s how we find one another across unbridgeable chasms. Maybe that’s how we find ourselves across the cliffs that separate us from our best selves. Maybe that’s how we find God across all that removes us from the source of life and joy: by learning to become stewards of the flame.
[1] Much of the above is dependent upon William R. Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), especially chapter 7, concerning the rich man and Lazarus.
[2] See Frederick Buechner, “Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain,” found in Secrets in the Dark (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), pgs. 205-220.
