Luke 16:19-31 (The Message)
19-21 “There once was a rich man, expensively dressed in the latest fashions, wasting his days in conspicuous consumption. A poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, had been dumped on his doorstep. All he lived for was to get a meal from scraps off the rich man’s table. His best friends were the dogs who came and licked his sores.
22-24 “Then he died, this poor man, and was taken up by the angels to the lap of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell and in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham in the distance and Lazarus in his lap. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, mercy! Have mercy! Send Lazarus to dip his finger in water to cool my tongue. I’m in agony in this fire.’
25-26 “But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that in your lifetime you got the good things and Lazarus the bad things. It’s not like that here. Here he’s consoled and you’re tormented. Besides, in all these matters there is a huge chasm set between us so that no one can go from us to you even if he wanted to, nor can anyone cross over from you to us.’
27-28 “The rich man said, ‘Then let me ask you, Father: Send him to the house of my father where I have five brothers, so he can tell them the score and warn them so they won’t end up here in this place of torment.’
29 “Abraham answered, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets to tell them the score. Let them listen to them.’
30 “‘I know, Father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but they’re not listening. If someone came back to them from the dead, they would change their ways.’
31 “Abraham replied, ‘If they won’t listen to Moses and the Prophets, they’re not going to be convinced by someone who rises from the dead.’”
The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus does not tell us it is a crime to be rich.
Or that those who have a good time of it here will get their suffering in eternity.
It sounds like it does, but it doesn’t!
Nor does it give us a clear picture of the way it is in heaven.
Anymore than our jokes about heaven do.
“To use this story as warrant for a doctrine of a brimstone hell, or to deduce from it the dogma of the absolute and irrevocable separation of the good and the bad hereafter, is to transplant it violently from its native soil of parable to a barren literalism where it cannot live.” Parables of Jesus, Geo. Buttrick, p. 140
The point of the parable is that life is to be lived, not evaded. The rich man was guilty of evasion; running away from real life into his pretend world where he didn’t have to see Lazarus - really see him. He was afraid of the smell of poverty and used his riches to evade facing the poverty all around him.
Like it or not, we are the rich man. We too run away from life, evading those places and people where our God has chosen to meet us, even as God meets us in Jesus who said, “What so ever you do for the least of these, you do it unto me.”
Living in the Kingdom of God is not a matter of having heaven all figured out; or the mysteries of death and eternity solved. It is a matter of loosing oneself in life, giving oneself away, hurting with those who hurt, weeping with those who weep, laughing with those who laugh, and discovering that life comes not by evading but by jumping in.
This takes faith; faith which comes by hearing the Word of God, and doing it.
Faith for living, not just for dying.
The parable of The Rich man and Lazarus
is about indifference and idolatry;
about how easily we ‘miss the mark’
for which life and possessions are intended.
Prayer thought for the week: “Lord, help me figure out how to lose myself in living, so life becomes more than just consuming. And what I have, who I am , (my riches) becomes a gift to someone somewhere, close or far away.”
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