Dear Sisters, dear brethren, the contrast between the two main characters, the Rich Man and Lazarus the poor man, is very great, and terrifying in its finality. As so often when our Lord tells a parable, He is inviting His audience to identify themselves with the characters. Who am I? The rich man or the poor man? Well, we need to examine closely what is meant by rich and poor in our Lord’s own telling of this story.
Shortly before this parable begins, we hear that the Pharisees were laughing at some of our Lord’s teaching regarding the danger of excessive wealth. It was part of the customary belief of that time that to be rich was a sign of God’s blessing, and to be poor was a sign of a curse or of some kind of punishment for sin – and indeed the sin might not be one’s own but a parent’s. Do you remember the Man born blind in St John’s gospel? The Apostles ask Jesus in all seriousness, ‘Lord, who sinned? This man or his fathers, that he should be born blind?’ Jesus replied, ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned.’ Yet this was a common assumption. If you were unfortunate enough to be poor, or sick, or blind - then you must have committed a sin yourself, or were taking punishment from God for your parents’ sin. It seems strange to us, and it is thanks to our Lord teaching both in the healing of the Blind Man and in the telling of this parable of the rich man and the poor man after death, that our understanding of the true meaning of riches and poverty has been given to us.
Now something else should be said which seems obvious but is not really so when we bear in mind all that we have heard about beliefs in our Lord’s time concerning riches and poverty. In the story, the one who was rich and thought to be blessed in life is now in hell. The one who was poor, neglected and despised on earth is now in heaven. But Our Lord is not saying that the rich man is condemned for being rich, nor that the poor man is in heaven simply because he was poor in life; rather, their states in life are surprisingly and shockingly reversed in the afterlife. Why?
Our Lord teaches in many places in the Gospel that riches are no guarantee of a place in heaven. ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven’. Remember how shocked the Apostles were to hear that. ‘In that case, who can be saved?’ they honestly thought that being rich made it easier to get into heaven than being poor, and here was the Master telling them most emphatically the opposite, And He had also told a parable about a rich man who had more than enough to keep in his stores, who decided to build bigger stores and take it easy from now on: ‘eat, drink and be merry!’ . But our Lord then bursts the bubble of expectation of an easy life: ‘Fool’ He exclaims, ‘Your soul is to be demanded of you this very night.’ In other words, the rich man must not only leave behind all the riches he thought he was going to enjoy for years to come, but must also face judgement before God.
Now back to this story and its particular lesson. The rich man lives an easy life, of material comfort, a life with no demands on him to do anything. He has plenty to eat drink – the best money can buy. But he totally ignores the poor man who is so near, yet so far. The poor man is not actually part of the rich man’s life. He is outside the gate that keeps riff-raff away, that stops the rich man from being bothered by the inconvenient needs of the poor man. And so, when he dies, he is clearly judged by God on that. Now the poor man apparently makes no particular demands on the rich man. He is not knocking on the door. In a sense, he is not even making things difficult for the rich man, as he might do if he made his presence felt. But just because the poor man is easy to ignore doesn’t let the rich man off the hook. The poor man has to put up with terrible degradation due to the neglect of his rich neighbour.
So now, they are both dead and the rich man goes to hell – Hades being the name for the place or condition of torment. But Lazarus goes to what is called ‘the bosom of Abraham’, a figure of speech meaning the place of the blessed. The rich man is in torment which he never expected, never gave a second thought to while he was enjoying himself. What can he do? Ah! There is Lazarus, and the rich man remembers him now. Surely Lazarus will help him and bring him a bit of comfort, just a little drop of water! But he can’t address Lazarus directly, only Abraham, who answers with the terrible truth that, even if Lazarus wanted to help only a little bit, he can’t make the crossing from heaven to hell. It’s an utterly impassable gulf. The rich man’s next effort is to get Lazarus to go back to earth and warn his rich brothers to avoid what he is now irrevocably stuck with. This is where our Lord makes the first of two great statements: Abraham replied to the rich man: ‘they have the Law and the Prophets, let them take heed of them!’ In other words, all this is not something I am revealing for the first time: this terrible gulf between heaven and hell; this terrible punishment for neglecting the needy – it’s all in what we call the Old Testament! Far from it being the case that being rich gets you automatically into heaven, our Lord is warning His hearers that all this He is telling them is in Scripture, which they can and should read and study every day!
It is time we noticed something else that we haven’t mentioned so far, but it is very significant. The rich man is never named. Sometimes in some retellings of this story, such as a famous English folk song, he is called ‘Dives’, but then we remember that this isn’t a name at all, it is simply the Latin word for ‘a rich person’! He has no name. In his life, we must assume that he was well known, respected, a citizen looked up to and often referred to by name. But not now. Now he is in hell he is just a nameless soul in torment. On the other hand, the poor man, although despised in life and taken no notice of, is now enjoying heaven and his name is known to us: Lazarus. This is the Greek form of the Hebrew name ‘Eleazer’, meaning ‘God has helped’. It is a name full of meaning which we can understand when we see what has happened to Lazarus after the misery of his earthly life. Moreover, it is a name which is known in heaven. Remember how our Lord said to the Apostles on one occasion: ‘Do not rejoice that the devils submit to you, rejoice rather that your names are written in heaven’. Lazarus’s name is written in heaven, but not the rich man’s.
And so we come to the final point that our Lord makes, and it is a very significant one indeed. When the rich man replied to Abraham, after hearing that his brothers must take notice of the teaching of Scripture if they wish to avoid joining him in hell, he says to Abraham, ‘but they will believe if someone comes to them from the dead’, meaning Lazarus coming back from the grave as a solemn warning. But Abraham refuses this, too, saying: if they will not believe Moses and the Prophets, then they will not believe even if someone should rise from the dead.’ Well, the rich man had not said anything about rising from the dead, just returning, presumably as a vision, or as a ghost. But our Lord has put into Abraham’s mouth something very important. How often do we wonder at the Resurrection of our Lord, how after His very public death, His resurrection was witnessed by only a few. Is that not strange? Would it not have been better for Him to have been seen at least by those who had killed Him, so that they would be converted? Well, no! Our Lord says here quite clearly that there are people who would deny even that evidence, because they absolutely would not be prepared to accept the consequences of believing in the risen Jesus. They would have to change their lives, they would have to be like the rich man ought to have been; they would have to be just in their judgements; they would have to love their enemies. All this would be too much and they would simply find ways of not accepting the plain evidence before them. Instead, our Lord knows that we must come to faith in Him and act on it, and on that faith and on our acting on it we will be judged. May we live according to the faith we have been given by God, and act according to His teaching, so that we may be given a merciful judgement and live for ever with God and all His angels and saints.
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