Tear Down this Wall

A- Hearing the Parable

We have been looking at the parables of Jesus, and we’ve seen how they are Christ’s way of revealing God’s character to us. Perhaps one of the biggest questions people have concerning God have to do not with God himself, but with heaven. What is heaven like? Where do we really go when we die? Is Hell a real place? If so, what is it like? Jesus spoke very little of these things, and we tend to grab on tightly to the few slips of information Christ revealed about these great mysteries. Perhaps that is why the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus has captured our imagination so much.

Now, there was a certain rich man, and he would dress himself in purple and fine linen, throwing extravagant parties each day. But a certain poor man named Lazarus was placed before his gate, covered in sores and longing to eat from the things that fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs would lick his sores. Now, it happened that the poor man died and he was cared by the angels to Abraham’s Bosom. Now the rich man also died and was buried.

A- Hearing the Parable

In Hades, raising his eyes upward and being in excruciating pain, he saw Abraham from far away and Lazarus reclining on his chest. He called out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus so that he might dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in anguish on account of these flames.” But Abraham said, “Child, you must remember that you recieved your good things in your life, and Lazarus likewise recieved bad things. But now here he is comforted, but you are distressed.

And besides all of this, a great chasm has been set between us and you, so that those wishing to cross from here to you cannot, neither can those wishing to come from there to us. .” But the rich man said, “I ask you, then, Father, to send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, and that they might not come to this place of torture!”

But Abraham said, “They have Moses and the prophets. They must listen to them.” But the rich man said, “No, father Abraham! If someone from the dead would go to them they will repent!” But Abraham said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone was raised from the dead.”

[Inference/Therefore]

B- The Point: Life After Death?

There’s a lot to learn here about the afterlife. Firstly, and most obviously, is that Jesus seems to teach us that what we do in this life really does matter for where we end up after death. Jesus has said before that it is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. This certainly seems to be true. And we know from various places in scripture that God has a soft spot in his heart for the poor, like Lazarus. Indeed, Lazarus is the only named character in any of Jesus’s parables! And yet, the rich man is not named at all. This, surely, was meant to give Lazarus what the rich man would not: honor and dignity.

So, when the two men died, they were each taken to different places: Lazarus to “Abraham’s Bosom”, and the rich man to “Hades”. So what exactly are these two places? Abraham’s bosom is likely a reference to the Jewish idea that the faithful Jews will go to be with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when they die. More than this, “Abraham’s Bosom” is a reference to the heavenly banquet. People in Jesus’s day didn’t eat at the dinner table (or on the couch in front of the TV) like we do today. Instead, they would recline at a special table and couch called a “triclinium”. They would lay down on their side and support themselves with one hand and eat with the other. They would also often lean back to rest on the person’s chest behind them. So, Lazarus is eating at God’s table, resting on the chest of father Abraham of all people!

We can see, perhaps, what a dramatic turn this is now. In life, Lazarus was begging for scraps from the rich man’s table, now it is the rich man in Hades who begs for a drop of water from Lazarus the heavenly table which Lazarus sits at.

This, of course, brings up some other questions though! For example, how do Lazarus and the rich man see one another? Aren’t heaven and hell supposed to be in two different places? This is a misconception. In fact, we should note that this parable doesn’t actually take place in Heaven and Hell at all. It takes place in Hades (Hell is usually referred to by the Greek, γεεννα), and at some other unnamed location, probably the same place Jesus refers to as “paradise” later on in Luke’s gospel. In Jewish thought, Hades and paradise were the places people were brought to before the final judgement. Hades was where wicked people awaited the judgement, and paradise is where all of the saints like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and now Lazarus, would await their judgement. Technically speaking, “paradise” was a part of Hades, which was separated from all of the other parts by a large chasm (just like what we see in Jesus’s parable!).

This place, Hades, is the same place often called “Sheol” in the Old Testament. Hades is simply the Greek name for it! So Lazarus and the rich man are both in Hades, or “Sheol”, waiting on the final judgement, which will then bring about the resurrection and the renewal of all of God’s creation. While they’re waiting, though, Lazarus gets the master suite, and the rich man gets to stay at the Red Roof Inn.

And the Red Roof Inn is no place you want to stay. The Rich man mentions that he’s thirsty, because according to Jewish tradition there’s no water at all in that part of Hades. He also mentions flames and fire, and he uses two Greek words that are often translated as “pain” and “anguish”. To be more accurate, these words should probably be translated as “unbearable torture” and “extreme emotional distress”. There is no peace, neither physical nor mental, in the place that the rich man waits. And yet, even the rich man seems to agree with Abraham that he deserved to be there. “Remember that in life you recieved good, and Lazarus likewise the bad...” The rich man doesn’t argue at all with this, and seems to accept his fate. Though, of course, he begs Abraham to warn his brothers so that they, too, might not earn their place where he is.

[Counterpoint/But-Rather]

C- The Point: Mercy Now

All of these little details about the afterlife are fascinating. They capture the imagination, and we could probably spend all day trying to dive into the mysteries of the afterlife. And yet, to do so would be to miss the whole point of this parable. Jesus did not want us to focus on the afterlife at all in this parable (which is, perhaps, why we don’t get many details about it!). Yes, there is a good place and a bad place in the afterlife. Yes, there is a final judgement where God will reward the righteous and punish the wicked. But these were all well known things for most Jews, and even for most Christians today. There was no reason for Jesus to teach on these things because they were already known.

What wasn’t known, apparently, was how to treat the poor. The real point of the parable comes at the end.

“I ask you, then, Father, to send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, and that they might not come to this place of torture!”

But Abraham said, “They have Moses and the prophets. They must listen to them.” But the rich man said, “No, father Abraham! If someone from the dead would go to them they would repent!” But Abraham said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone was raised from the dead.”

This parable is primarily a warning to people who, like the rich man’s brothers, still have time to repent. We are meant to learn from the life of the rich man in what not to do. This rich man dressed in the finest of clothes. He wore purple linen every day, which today means he has a Louis Vuitton or Gucci outfit for every day of the week. He has a few Desmond Merrion hand tailored dinner suits for when he’s feeling extra too. This is an extravagantly wealthy man.

But let’s be clear: he wasn’t necessarily a bad person by modern standards. He was rich, but Jesus never said he was evil or abusive towards Lazarus. He simply didn’t pay him any attention. Apparently he did know of Lazarus, because he called him out by name from Hades. But he tried his hardest not to think of him while sitting down for dinner each night.

This was a man who was aware of the poverty and dire needs of the community, and who decided to ignore that distress and hide away in his own little world. Jesus tells us that Lazarus was so sick that he had to be carried to the rich man’s gate each day, he couldn’t get there on his own. He was carried to the rich man’s gate every day to sit and wait, hoping someone may bring him some of the scraps from the table. But, like giant chasms. gates are meant to separate. The rich man had built his gated community precisely so that he wouldn’t ever have to see Lazarus. This was the rich man’s attempt at ignoring the poverty and deep need of the community around him. It wasn’t that the rich man was cruel to Lazarus, or did anything particularly evil. In fact, he seems to have even been a religious man: he recognized Abraham as “father” after all. But he simply put Lazarus out of mind, and built a wall around his house to make sure it stayed that way.

And while people like Lazarus were outside the gates suffering, starving, dying, the rich man could party the day away because he made sure he couldn’t see what was going on around him. He didn’t want to see it. But God did see it.

Lazarus’s name comes from the Hebrew אֶלְעָזָ֔ר, which means “God will save”. And this is certainly true: there will be a day where God rights all wrongs. In God’s kingdom, “blessed are the poor”. But what if the rich man had listened to Moses and the Prophets? What if he’d tried to participate in the kingdom of God while he’d been alive, rather than waiting until he was dead?

No doubt, this story was aimed at the pharisees and other Jewish leaders who were listening to Jesus teach. The ones who weren’t necessarily bad people: they didn’t kick lepers as they passed by or shout insults at the beggars. They were just content to sit behind the metaphorical walls of tradition and the physical walls of the temple that helped them ignore the poor. They didn’t abuse the poor, they just tried to pretend that they didn’t exist at all. Meanwhile they went and studied the scriptures: Moses and the Prophets. They speculated about the afterlife, they debated over the nature of souls, debated over what Hades, Paradise, Heaven, or Hell might be like. They searched for all of these things in the scriptures while managing to overlook God’s clear commandments to care for the poor.

If they managed to ignore God’s call to care for the least among us in the scriptures, odds are they would have found a way to ignore it coming from the mouth of a ghost too. Even if someone were raised from the dead, would they really listen? Indeed, even the rich man still didn’t seem to understand after having died and gone to Hades! While he talks to Abraham, he still doesn’t even acknowledge Lazarus’s dignity or humanity. “‘Send Lazarus to do this for me, send Lazarus to do that for me.” The rich man can’t seem to see Lazarus as anything more than a servant, even in the afterlife. The problem was not a lack of clarity, as if they didn’t already know what God demanded of them. That had been made clear through Moses and the prophets. It was a lack of will, because in their hearts they really had no desire to help the poor. In their hearts, they hardly even considered the poor as people at all.

They had no desire even to see the

[Application/What Now?]

D- Crimes Against the Poor: Hearing the Parable for Today

E-

Earlier I mentioned that Lazarus is the only person ever given a name in any of Jesus’s parables. This was because Jesus, unlike the Pharisees and the rich man, saw Lazarus as a human being, deserving of dignity and respect. Yet, surprisingly, he does not give the rich man a name. Perhaps this is Jesus’s way of inviting us to supply our own!

F-

You see, we all know Lazarus. We walk by him when we go into the city. We drive by him, holding up cardboard signs and rattling tins by the highway. We see Lazarus pushing shopping carts down the road, trying to sleep on a park bench. We may even know where Lazarus lives: perhaps underneath the overpass, or even right down the street in the run-down old house. Maybe he lives in a distant, poor country, and we’ve heard about him on the news. We all know Lazarus. He is our neighbor. Some of us may be rich, and walk by him without even noticing. Some of us may not be so rich, but we’re still much better off than him. He’d trade places with us in a heartbeat, and we’d be horrified to trade places with him even for a day.

Yet often we give excuses, though, when it comes to helping Lazarus. “If I give him money, he’ll jut use it on drugs.” “If we take in those refugees, what will happen to our people?” “He probably deserves it anyway, he’s just lazy.” In doing this we build not only physical barriers between us and the poor, but also mental and social barriers as well. Such excuses are little more than an attempt to distance ourselves from Lazarus, so that we can go about our own business “dressed in purple and fine linen, celebrating and eating all day,” without having to worry about the man sitting outside our gate.

This isn’t to say that solving poverty is an easy task. Jesus calls us to private charity, but he also calls us to challenge the systems in government and society that create situations like the one Lazarus faced. In his day, the rich often abused the poor, using their money and power to take what little the poor had. The economic situation of Jesus’s day was certainly different than our own, but not without its similarities too. Now as then, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The poor work hard and aren’t paid enough for it. The poor are born into poverty and rarely leave it (statistics show that each year in poverty decreases one’s chance of ever leaving poverty by about 6%). If we have any hope of helping the poor, we will have to fix not only ourselves, but also the society and government systems that help perpetuate poverty and take advantage of the poor.

This is no small task, though it is what Christ calls us to do: to see the Lazarus’s of this world, before it’s too late for us to do anything about it. To bring God’s kingdom here on earth, instead of waiting too late and being left behind. So how do we go about doing that? How do we go about ending poverty, helping those God has a heart for? Perhaps, this parable gives us a rather simple answer: we just need to see them. We cannot, as the rich man did, build walls to separate the poor from ourselves. We cannot, as the rich man did, fail to see the poor as people too. This means keeping our eyes open for Lazarus, because we’ve created personal habits and even a whole society that makes it so easy for us to ignore him. So, perhaps the next time we see Lazarus on the street corner holding up that sign as we make our way to lunch, instead of rolling up the windows and staring into space as if he weren’t there, we should step out of the car, sit next to him, invite him to dinner, and treat him as a neighbor and brother ought to be treated.