A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 5


 * 'There was a rich man who dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day.At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
 * 'The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, “Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire."
 * 'But Abraham replied, “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us."
 * 'He answered, "Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for l have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment."
 * 'Abraham replied, "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them."
 * ' "No, father Abraham," he said, "but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent."
 * 'He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." '
 * Luke 16:19-31

Few words have been bandied around more freely in the last hundred years or so than the word 'equality'. Class equality, race equality, sex equality—such concerns have dominated the political agenda. Aristocrats have been executed, politicians assassinated, and governments toppled, all in the name of equality. Indeed, so universal is the egalitarian dream, that it is ironic that the world should have been so long divided between the West and the East. For the American Constitution and the Communist Manifesto have the word 'equality' in common. One calls for equality of distribution in a cooperative society, the other for equality of opportunity in a competitive society. The one calls for fair shares for all, the other for a fair chance for all. But both are fundamentally agreed that justice is essentially about equality. That being so, I suppose there are few stories that Jesus ever told which have quite the same obvious degree of relevance to our twentieth-century social conscience as that of the rich man and Lazarus. Here surely is Jesus' comment on the problem of inequality in our human society.

It is the story of two men, two destinies and five brothers. Of the two men, the first was phenomenally wealthy. It is a sad thing when the only obituary a person can have is the bold statement that he was rich, but that's the only one Jesus can find for this fellow. He tells us that the man dressed expensively, wearing the best and most fashionable clothes money could buy - 'purple and fine linen'. He lived sumptuously, not a day passing without some splendid banquet being held. And his dwelling was ostentatious. This 'gate' that Jesus mentions was not the normal sort of gate that you and I might have on the side entrance of our house. It was a huge ornamental portico such as usually adorned palaces or temples. Material prosperity oozed out of every pore of this fellow, then—his clothes, his food, his house. 'He was rich'—but that is all we are told. Nothing about his friends, achievements, or even conspicuous vices just 'rich' (Luke 16:19). Jesus' story implies that there is something very tragic about a person who can be summed up like that.

The second man could not have been more different.


 * At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table (Luke 16:20-21).

So Jesus paints a picture of abject poverty as extreme as the rich man's opulence. He was 'laid at his gate', he says. But this is too gentle a translation. The original literally says that he was thrown at his gate. As we might say, he was sprawled there to face the sneering contempt of passers-by. He had no fine clothes. The only things that covered his back were untreated sores; some skin disease, probably, resulting from chronic malnutrition. For he was permanently hungry. The mere sight of the garbage from the rich man's banquet brought saliva foaming to his mouth. But the only real compassion he experienced was shown by the mangy mongrels of the streets. 'Even the dogs... licked his sores' (Luke 16:21). Notice the stress on that word even. Just as in the tale of the lost son in the last chapter, Jesus uses the companionship of animals to emphasize how low this fellow had got. Almost dehumanized, his human dignity was trampled upon and disgraced.

There was one thing, however, that this poor man had which the rich man did not. Something so common its profundity is easily missed. This poor man had a name, Lazarus. It is most unusual for Jesus to give the characters in his stories names. In fact, this is the only occasion he does. So odd is it that some have been tempted to argue that this is a factual incident that Jesus is relating, and not a story at all. But there are no real grounds for claiming that. No, Jesus gives this poor man a name because in the context of his story the name is significant. It is there for a reason. You see, you need a name only if you are known to somebody. A name is an instrument of personal relationship. To know somebody's name is to distinguish that precious individual out of the seething mass of the crowd.

To have a name is to be a person, to be valuable, to be significant, to matter to somebody. The rich man had no name. This does not mean that there was a blank on his birth certificate. Indeed, in the daily newspapers of his day, I expect that he was 'well known'. The point is, however, that as far as Jesus' story is concerned, his name is irrelevant. For he was just rich, nothing else. He spent his money on material luxury. Other people didn't feature on his agenda. And as a result he didn't feature on theirs. He didn't need a name; he was just a faceless millionaire. That was his tragedy.

The poor man, however, was not anonymous. Somebody knew him personally, and Jesus gives us the name Lazarus to tell us who that somebody was. In the Hebrew, Lazarus is Eleazar, and it means Tie whom God helps.' It was God, then, who cared for this man. A pauper like him might have plotted revenge or harboured bitterness. He might have blamed his misfortune on God, and cursed him for his misery. But by giving him the name Lazarus, Jesus is indicating that this poor man did none of these things. By his patience and faith he proved himself to be the man who looks to God alone for his vindication. He was one whom God helps, a man in whom trials have bred not resentment, or self-pity, but faith.

Here then are two totally unequal men—the one with wealth but no identity, and the other utterly poor, yet known personally to God. Ask yourself, which would you rather have been? There is, you see, such a thing as spiritual as well as material inequality. And the purpose of this story is to warn us that very often they are inversely proportional to each other. 'Blessed are the poor in spirit,' Jesus said, 'for theirs is tire kingdom of heaven' (Matthew 5:3). 'What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?' (Luke 9:25).

That brings us to the second aspect of the story. The two men have two very different destinies.


 * The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire' (Luke 16:22-24).

We have to be very careful how we interpret the horrifying elements of these particular verses.

First of all, this is a parable, and a parable is a literary device for teaching spiritual truths by allegorical means. Parables, therefore, are not meant to be read like history. Even more important, as far as this particular parable is concerned, Jesus is quite clearly here accommodating himself to the conventional Jewish ideas of that period about the afterlife. I don't think there can be any other explanation for his strange description of going to heaven as being carried by the angels to Abraham's side. That's a metaphor without parallel in the rest of the New Testament, but it's common enough in the rabbinical writings of Jesus' own day. In fact, scholars have discovered a story quite similar to this one. It probably originated in Egypt, and was very popular among Jews in Palestine in the first century. It is far from impossible that Jesus is deliberately using that common folk tale in order to make a point of his own here.

For both of these reasons, therefore, it would be unwise to press the details of this account of the afterlife too far. Some, for instance, have questioned whether Jesus is describing here some intermediate state, in which the soul survives after death before the general resurrection. The implication of the story certainly seems to be that life is continuing as normal on planet Earth while the rich man and Lazarus enter their experience of the afterlife. Yet if they are disembodied souls, why does Jesus speak as if they had physical bodies? He mentions the rich man's tongue and Lazarus' finger. At the very least, we have to say there is a high degree of probability that Jesus' language here is symbolic, and that we had better not read it as if it were a literal account of what the afterlife is like.

Having entered that cautionary note, however, it is very hard to imagine Jesus casting his story in this form, or even repeating an existing story like this, if he didn't intend to endorse, at least in outline, the picture it gives us of human destiny. Indeed, the story falls apart if certain aspects of it are not an accurate picture of the afterlife. Maybe he isn't intending to detail the real nature of heaven and hell to us. But it is surely his intention to warn us that heaven and hell exist. He surely suggests that our personalities survive death in a conscious state. He certainly implies that a distinction between human beings occurs at death. The personalities of the dead are sustained by God in two quite different states: the one a state of bliss, in company with the redeemed of every age (represented by Abraham); the other a state of isolated anguish, represented by the lonely rich man in hell. If these things are not true in outline, then the whole point of Jesus' story is lost.

And that of course is a very sobering observation. People sometimes remark that death is the great equalizer. No matter how great or wealthy you may have been in this life, no matter how high you may rise over the heads of your fellows, there's no evading that final horizontal repose by which all people are reduced to a common level. Remember the famous words of Thomas Gray's Elegy:


 * The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
 * And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
 * Awaits alike th'inevitable hour,
 * The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

It is true, of course, that death recognizes no class distinctions; it mocks them by its grim indiscrimination. Yet this story does not speak of death as equalizing people's fortunes. It portrays rather a great reversal of fortune. Society beyond the grave, according to Jesus, is no more egalitarian than this one is. It is riven, he says, by a barrier a thousand times more polarized and uncrossable than any social distinction this world has ever known. Notice how Abraham puts it in the story:


 * 'Besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us' (Luke 16:26).

What was it about the rich man that merited such an appalling judgment—that his destiny was fixed in that awful place for eternity, with no way out? What was it that could possibly have deserved such a fate? What had he done wrong?

We need to be careful in analysing why the fates of the rich man and the poor man were so different. Some, I suspect, will be tempted to read into this story some kind of quasi-Marxist critique of economic disparity in society. Lazarus going to heaven, and the rich man to hell, is a spiritualization of the victory of the working classes over the exploitative bourgeoisie. Such an interpretation would be very appealing to many, but it is quite out of step with the Bible, and would be totally unjustified from this story itself.

There is not a hint in this story, for instance, that wealth per se is immoral. Jesus is not suggesting that heaven exercises some kind of positive class discrimination towards the poor. Indeed, there's one element of this story that proves that beyond doubt—the presence of Abraham in heaven. No-one could ever represent Abraham as a representative of the down-trodden proletariat. The Bible makes it quite clear that the patriarch was fabulously wealthy by the end of his life; a very powerful, rich man. Abraham in heaven rules out any kind of naive, Robin Hood idea, then, that all rich people are bad and all the poor are good. Jesus in this story does not suggest that the rich man got his money by improper means. There is no suggestion that he exploited or defrauded people. He may have got his wealth from his parents. If so, Jesus voices no complaint about the perpetuation of class privilege through the laws of inheritance. He might have earned his wealth in the market-place. If so, Jesus issues no denunciation of the capitalist system. The reason the rich man merited judgment must lie elsewhere. Jesus can't be saying that because he was rich he had to go to hell, or Abraham would be there too.

Now a good rule when you've got a problem in understanding the Bible is to examine more closely the context of the passage. When you do that, you discover that the section of chapter 16 before our story is in fact devoted to the subject of wealth. Jesus stresses there how important it is that we treat wealth as a trust, something we're responsible for using wisely. He says:


 * If you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else's property, who will give you property of your own? (Luke 16:11-12).

The true treasure of heaven, Jesus argues, is going to be given only to people who make proper use of their worldly treasure.

To explain what a 'proper use' is, Jesus actually told another story. It's quite an amusing one. It tells of a manager of a company who is dismissed by the owner of the company for wasting resources. Having been given his notice, the manager decides that with unemployment looming on the horizon he could do with a few friends. So he writes around to all the people who owe money to the company and tells them that he will settle their bills for half what they owe. When the owner discovered what he had done, Jesus says he had the good humour to congratulate the manager—not of course for his dishonesty, but for his shrewdness. Jesus draws this lesson:


 * Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed [or they will welcome you] into eternal dwellings (Luke 16:9).

Jesus' point seems to be that the manager had used the influence he had in regard to material things to bring blessing to other people, so that when that influence had gone, he had plenty of friends to speak for him and look after him. In the same way, says Jesus, make friends for yourself by the way you use your money, so that when material things fail, those friends will welcome you into heaven. Jesus isn't arguing for distributive justice of the Marxist kind, then. He's arguing for a concept of wealth which is largely ignored today—the concept of stewardship. Wealth, Jesus teaches, is a trust from God to be used not for yourself, but for the benefit of other people. If you want to invest in eternity, the only thing you can invest in is people. For people last, but money does not.

Luke tells us there were some Pharisees listening in to this story of the shrewd manager. They did not like what Jesus was saying, and for obvious reasons. They loved money. And Jesus' response is to launch one of his Stealth bombers again. This story of the rich man and Lazarus is told with his eye on those Pharisees. Beware, he's warning them, you can't serve God and money. Show me a man or woman dedicated to material acquisitiveness, claims Jesus, and I'll show you a hell-bound pagan. No matter how respectable they appear on the surface, or how regularly they attend church, or how well-thumbed is their Bible, they cannot serve two masters. They are going to be devoted either to the one or to the other. If you're devoted to money, by definition you hold God in contempt. Their love of money proved that the Pharisees' hearts were not with God, and that therefore their destiny could not be with God.

Our story then is a cautionary tale designed by Jesus to demonstrate the peril of a life dedicated to acquisitiveness. The rich man had every opportunity to lay up treasure in heaven by investing his material resources in this poor man and thus making him his friend. He then would have been using his wealth as a wise steward for the benefit of others rather than for his own self indulgence. But he conspicuously failed to do so. His condemnation was not a verdict on the way he became wealthy, or on the fact that he was wealthy. His tragedy was that he was just wealthy. There was nothing else to write in his obituary. He committed no murder, no adultery, no theft. If you had accused him in the street he would have shrugged his shoulders indignantly and said, 'I've done nothing wrong,' and it would be true in a sense. For it was not for the bad things that he had done, but for the good things he had left undone, that this man went to hell. You had your good things, says Abraham, but the beggar at your gate never benefited from them. You had the opportunity to use your wealth to help him and you refused. That's why you are there, rich man. Money mattered more to you than people. Heaven would be hell for a person like you!

Often we take refuge in our negative righteousness—all those 'thou shalt nots' that we have so carefully observed. Jesus here expresses the hollow mockery of the goodness which such negative righteousness represents. Sins of omission, he says, are just as damning as sins of commission. 'Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me' (Matthew 25:45).

Notice the irony of the rich man's words in hell: 'Send Lazarus...' This self-sufficient man had never before needed anybody, least of all that beggar at his gate. What use was a beggar to him? Now suddenly he needs someone; and of all people, he needs Lazarus. But now there is nobody to satisfy his need. His independence of others has been hardened into a fixed and unchangeable isolation.

Sometimes I've heard people say that they wouldn't mind being in hell. They would have plenty of their mates to keep them company. Where were the rich man's mates? Such isolation is the pathos of hell. T. S. Eliot wrote: 'Hell is oneself, Hell is alone.' Hell is the agony of being unable to love or be loved. Hell is the realization of one's need of others, but a need that can no longer be met and which leaves us only with the regret of lost opportunity. Notice too Abraham's charge to the rich man to 'remember'. Once, the gap between him and Lazarus had not been insuperable; a channel of communication had been available between them at one time. But things have changed now. A great void had been fixed by the decree of God. All that was left, therefore, was the tormenting knowledge of the opportunity he had forfeited. Sometimes you hear people talk about purgatory as a place where we can atone for our sins, and then win a second chance. Jesus doesn't seem to give any such hope here. This great chasm of which Abraham speaks is the end of chances. We are on probation here and now; we are sealing our destinies here and now.

Notice, further, that Abraham replies to the rich man as 'son'. There's something very tender about that, but also significant. This man was a son of Abraham; a Jew, in other words; a member of God's covenant people, at least by birth. He was a son of Abraham, and yet in hell. This was unthinkable to the Jews then and perhaps unthinkable for some of us today. How can God send me to hell? I'm a Christian; I'm a church-goer; I've got a Christian Union membership card. We need to heed the warning of Jesus. The fire and physical torture may be symbols, but they symbolize something real, dreadful and final. Most disturbing of all, they symbolize something which a person can slide into by no more than a sin of negligence, while being a so-called Christian all the time.

How can I test whether my Christianity is the genuine article or not? According to Jesus in this story, one criterion is to ask what use I am making of my material resources. If I belong to God, then so does my money. I will see myself as a steward of what I have. I will see myself as entrusted with what I have, and will desire to use it in a way that will please God. If our hearts are not God's, then we will view ourselves as owners, and use what we have without reference to him or the values he represents.

This is where the five brothers come in. The rich man pleads:


 * 'I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment' (Luke 16:27-28).

So the Stealth bomber drops its load. Up to this point Jesus' audience would not perhaps have been greatly surprised by the story. The familiar tale from Egypt had a similar kind of ironic reversal in the afterlife too. But this closing part of the story is unique to Jesus. Here is the sting in the tail, typically incisive. The five brothers of course are you and me, tire Pharisees in his audience, or indeed anybody else listening to the story. The destiny of Lazarus and the rich man is now determined, but not that of the five brothers, and not ours. We are still here, and have opportunity. The rich man would like to send us a ghostly emissary to warn us of the reality of the life to come. Like Dickens in A Christmas Carol, he is sure that a suitable apparition will work a conversion on our Scrooge-like hearts. Notice heaven's verdict on such a stratagem:


 * Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.'
 * 'No, father Abraham... if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’
 * He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead' (Luke 16:29-31).

Jesus' story of the rich man and Lazarus teaches some very sobering lessons: the dangers of using wealth selfishly, the seriousness of sins of omission, and the reality of heaven and hell. But the last, I suggest, is the most crucial lesson of all. What turns a person's heart from selfishness, greed, complacency and indifference to the love of God? What works repentance and faith in a person's heart and puts him or her on the pathway to heaven? Some people answer that spiritualism can do it. Going along to a seance, and meeting your departed relative, imparts a certainty about the afterlife. Others believe that signs and wonders are the answer. Perform a few healings in church on Sunday night, and people will be clamouring to become Christians.

Jesus' claim is rather the reverse. He insists that even if someone rose from the dead, it would not guarantee the conversion of the world. There's only one thing, he argues, that has the power actually to create faith and repentance in a person's life. Perhaps unexpectedly, he says it is the Bible. If people won't listen to 'Moses and the Prophets', nothing else will work, not even somebody rising from the dead. And he should know, of course, because he did!

Jesus tells us, then, that we seal our destiny by our response to the Bible. Signs and wonders may establish the faith of the faithful, and may confirm the spiritual blindness of the unbelieving. But it is the Word of God that awakens spiritual life.

Every time we open God's book, we stand before the gates of heaven and hell. That is the measure of how serious it is to hear the Word of God. It is not like reading a novel. For this is a word that calls us to change. No ghost is going to warn you of judgment to come. No miracle is going to prove to you the power of unseen things. Like the five brothers, you can have an open Bible in front of you; that is your privilege.

Not all tire world has that privilege, I freely acknowledge. For some, the Bible is still an unknown book. What Jesus would say of those more remote brothers of the rich man, we don't know for sure. Perhaps he would say that they have the book of nature and the light of conscience. The point is, however, that this is not addressed to people like that; it is addressed to people like us who have a Bible.

And what Jesus is saying to us on that score is quite simple. If we will not listen to the Bible we will listen to nothing. If we will not be changed by it we will be changed by nothing.

Perhaps Jesus is rather more realistic about the question of equality than our modern world tends to be. People today speak of equality of wealth in places where there never has been equality of wealth, and I doubt whether there ever will be. Jesus once commented, 'You will always have the poor among you' (John 12:8). Equality of opportunity is also elusive, I'm afraid, if you press it too far. People are born with a huge variety of potential; as Jesus himself put it, to one five talents, to another two, to another one. But does it matter? In Jesus' mind, wealth and opportunity are gifts within the providence of God. We don't own them, but are entrusted with them. It is what we do with that trust, the opportunity or the wealth that we are given, that determines the spiritual calibre and spiritual direction of our hearts. Five brothers: some rich, some poor, some able, some incompetent, some lucky and some unlucky. But all of them equally responsible to heed the warning of the Book and choose the way that goes to heaven.