Lazarus and the Rich Man: What It Teaches (8 of 26)

This parable gets used to build a floor plan of the afterlife, and that is not what it is doing.

The geography is scenery. The argument is about what two men did with what they were handed, and the rich man’s behaviour after death is the detail that gives it away.

What Happens in the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man?

A rich man dresses in purple and fine linen and feasts every day. At his gate lies a poor man named Lazarus, covered in sores, wanting the scraps, with dogs licking his wounds.

Both die. Lazarus is carried by angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man is in torment, sees them at a distance, and asks Abraham to send Lazarus with water. Told that is impossible, he asks for Lazarus to be sent to warn his five brothers. Abraham answers that they have Moses and the prophets, and that if they will not listen to those, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.

Why Does Only the Poor Man Have a Name?

Because the name is the argument.

The rich man is never named, which reverses every expectation the original audience had. In a story of that kind the man of substance is the subject and the beggar at his gate is furniture.

Lazarus is Eleazar, which means the one whom God helps. Bailey builds on that. The name is a verdict about which of the two men was actually being helped, delivered before anyone dies.

And notice how the rich man knows him. Speaking to Abraham he asks for Lazarus by name, which means he had known who the man at his gate was the whole time. It was never ignorance.

Is the Parable About Reversal of Fortune?

Partly, and Bailey argues that is not the primary theme.

The reversal is obviously there. But read as a straight reversal the parable implies that being poor gets you comfort and being rich gets you torment, which turns the story into a formula in the opposite direction and is contradicted elsewhere in Scripture.

Bailey’s reading is that the question the parable answers is not why did this happen but what did each man do with what happened.

The rich man met good things with self-indulgence, indifference, and class pride. Lazarus met pain with patience and endurance, and the story shows him accepting help from a community that carried him to that gate every day.

Two men, two sets of circumstances, two responses. The circumstances are given. The responses are not.

What Two False Formulas Does It Destroy?

The two that were common then and are common now.

That wealth is proof of God’s blessing. And that suffering is proof of sin.

The parable takes an arrogant rich man whom God is plainly not blessing and a sick poor man whom the dogs, the neighbours, the angels and Abraham all serve and honour, and it puts them side by side.

Bailey calls the story the New Testament Job, and marks the difference. Job was wealthy, lost everything, suffered, was vindicated and recovered. Lazarus dies in the middle of his hunger and his sores with nothing restored. The mystery of suffering is not solved here either, but the formulas that pretend to solve it are removed.

Why Does the Rich Man Keep Giving Orders?

Because nothing about him changed, and this is the sharpest detail in the parable.

In torment he does not address Lazarus. He addresses Abraham, and asks him to send Lazarus. Twice. Send him with water. Send him to my brothers.

He is still treating the man as staff. He has learned that he is in trouble and he has not learned anything about the person at his gate, whom he still regards as available to run errands for him.

He also reaches for the credential. Father Abraham. A family claim, offered as though descent should count for something, which is the same assumption John the Baptist attacks when he warns people not to say they have Abraham as their father.

Does the Parable Teach That No One Can Repent After Death?

It says the gap is fixed and nobody crosses it, and it makes that point in service of another one.

Abraham’s answer is not a lecture on the mechanics of the afterlife. It is a refusal, and the reason given is about the brothers rather than about the rich man.

They have Moses and the prophets. If they will not hear those, a resurrection will not move them.

That line is doing something specific in Luke’s Gospel, written by an author whose whole book leads to a resurrection. The parable is saying, before the event, that the evidence problem was never a shortage of evidence.

What Should Not Be Built On This Parable?

A doctrine of the intermediate state.

The chasm, the flames, the sight across the divide and the conversation between the two sides are the furniture of the story, and much of that furniture was standard in the popular storytelling of the period. Jesus is using a recognised scene the way any storyteller uses a recognised scene.

That does not make the parable careless about eternity. Bailey notes it affirms life after death plainly, against the Sadducees, and it insists that this life is connected to it.

What it will not support is a diagram. Read for architecture, it answers questions nobody in it is asking. Read for its actual subject, it asks whether a man who steps over someone every day at his own front gate has noticed anything at all.

Is the Story Based on an Older Folk Tale?

Something very like it was already circulating, and Wright argues that the borrowing is what makes the ending legible.

Stories about wealth and poverty trading places in the next life were common in the ancient world, and Jesus was not the first to tell one. A familiar pattern lets an audience feel the moment it breaks. In the standard version, when a man in torment asks permission to send word back to the living, the permission is granted. That is how those stories end. Here Abraham refuses.

Which sharpens the point made above about the furniture. It is borrowed furniture, and it is borrowed so that one piece can be moved where everybody will notice.

Wright takes a further step. Since the story adds nothing new to what people already believed about reversal after death, he argues the afterlife cannot be its subject, and that a parable working with stock scenery is using the scenery to talk about something else.

How Does the Parable Connect to the Prodigal Son?

Through the last line, which Wright reads against the last line of the story a chapter earlier.

In Luke 15:32 the father says of the younger son that he was dead and is alive again. Here Abraham says they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead. Same vocabulary, opposite outcome, one chapter apart in the same block of teaching.

The rich man then lines up with the older brother. Both want a ragged relative kept out of sight, and both end the story outside a celebration that has already started without them.

Luke has told us who is listening. Earlier in this same chapter the Pharisees are described as lovers of money, and on Wright’s reading they are treating the people Jesus welcomes exactly the way the rich man treated the man at his gate. The parable is a portrait of its audience.

That reading and Bailey’s are aimed at different distances rather than at each other. Bailey asks what the two men in the story did with what they were handed. Wright asks who the story was told at. Both answers can stand, and a reader can hold them together without forcing a choice.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the parable of the rich fool and the prodigal son, which ends a chapter earlier on the same words.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 30. Supports the reading of the primary theme as response rather than reversal, the significance of the name Eleazar, the rejection of the two formulas, the comparison with Job, the reading of the rich man’s continued orders as evidence of no change, and the treatment of the racial claim on Abraham. Supplied in full.

N. T. Wright, Luke for Everyone (SPCK and Westminster John Knox, 2004), on Luke 16:19-31. Supports the identification of the story with a widely known ancient folk tale, the observation that Jesus reverses its usual ending by refusing the request to send word back, the argument that the parable is picture-language about Jesus’s own work rather than a description of the afterlife, and the link between the rich man and the older brother of Luke 15. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 16:19-31, Luke 15:32 and Luke 3:8.

Where the sourcing stops: Wright asserts the folk-tale background and the reversed ending without naming the specific tales, and I have not traced them independently, so that claim is his rather than one I have verified against a source outside him. The parable’s bearing on the intermediate state is contested and this post argues a limit rather than a position.

Footnotes

1. The rich man asking Abraham to send Lazarus is the whole character study in one sentence. He is in torment, he is speaking to a patriarch, and he still cannot conceive of the man at his gate as anything but someone to be dispatched on errands.
2. That Abraham’s final answer is about the brothers rather than about the rich man changes where the parable is aimed. The rich man’s situation is settled and the story stops discussing it. What remains open is the situation of people still alive who have the same texts and the same gate.
3. The folk-tale point and the intermediate-state point are doing different jobs and should not be collapsed. One says the scenery was borrowed. The other says the borrowed scenery will not carry a doctrine. A reader can accept the second without accepting the first.