But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented (St. Luke 16:25).
We begin today with a confession: I really hate most modern pictures of our Lord. They usually fall into three annoying genres. There’s “super cool” Jesus or “political” Jesus or (my least favorite) “sensitive-hunky” Jesus; interestingly, these romantic depictions of our Lord correspond with the explosion of female vs. male attendance in church, and they are also part and parcel with those creepy love songs to Jesus which sound exactly like a pop queen’s latest bubbly ode to hot dudes, except, of course, the songs are about Jesus. Now, one genre of these modern, airbrushed pictures of our Lord tends to show an immaculately groomed Savior speaking to a smiling audience hanging on His every word (I call this TED talk Jesus). In reality, people were usually shocked and scared and angry when Jesus spoke to them—it could be counted on that some portion of the audience were thinking of the best way to kill Him (otherwise known as the mark of a good sermon). Of course, when Jesus spoke people were moved to love, but they were much more often moved to hate. Why? Because our Lord lovingly and mercilessly attacks the false gods of our world, and people don’t like to see the gods in which they trust mocked and broken in front of them. It’s hard to change; it’s far easier to murder the messenger, and if one is too cowardly to do that, it’s simply easier to ignore him.
With that in mind, we shouldn’t be surprised when Jesus attacks humanity’s insane trust in money. Jesus knows He is talking to wounded creatures made in the image of God—we share this wound with the Pharisees—and so this parable is meant to make them and us uncomfortable; it is meant to draw us all away from the self-destructive temptations of the flesh, including the seductive myth that the more money we have the safer we are. That little truism only makes sense in a hopeless world where you and I must try to buy heaven, but even in that world, our money can only ever buy a temporary shelter from the howling winds of mortality we see sweep away the rich and the powerful every day. One sees it in the Wall Street Journal obituary section: titans of industry, dead as doornails; men who had everything, now have nothing. As the Psalmist says, “Be not thou afraid, though one be made rich, or if the glory of his house be increased; For he shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth, neither shall his pomp follow him. For while he lived, he counted himself an happy man; and so long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will speak good of thee. He shall follow the generation of his fathers, and shall never see light. Man that is in honor but hath no understanding [of God] is compared unto the beasts that perish” (Psalm 49:16-20). Money, honor, the praise of men, and worldly happiness are not the things which elevate us above the brute beasts—none of that is what makes us truly human. Jesus has come to show us what does.
Before we get to that, we do need some context: Jesus has been hammering His audience with a series of parables and commandments designed to cause a crisis in the hearts of men. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, He reveals the impossibility of putting God in our debt and the incredible, undeserved mercy and grace which flow from the Almighty Father to His children. He then tells the parable of the Dishonest Steward which ends with the famous observation, “No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (St. Luke 16:13). Mammon here being the shorthand term for money when it becomes our idol—a lifeless thing we love and serve instead of the Living God. He then goes on to deny that a married woman can be handed around between men like property: a live example of the idolatrous love of money transforming marriage from a holy covenant into a mere act of commerce. All this hard teaching leads to today’s parable.
It is good to remember that the parables are not our Lord’s version of Aesop’s fables, nor are they little devotional stories we can read or ignore with no great peril; no, these parables are a kind of picture language of what is going on in the real world and what is going on in the new world Jesus is inaugurating through His righteous invasion. That being said, it might be helpful to compare today’s parable with Aesop’s fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper—a pagan story told to far more children than today’s bit of divine revelation. In the tale, written about 500 years before the birth of Christ, the grasshopper plays all summer while the ant diligently gathers food, but when winter comes, the grasshopper begs for food from the ant, only to be refused, and so, the grasshopper starves while the ant survives. The moral is usually stated as, “If you want to succeed tomorrow, you have to start working today,” that is a good lesson, but what lesson does it also teach? The hungry beggar is getting what he deserves. This moral makes perfect sense in the Greek pagan world of Aesop where this temporary existence is everything, and therefore, “to the strong go the spoils.” But, we know that the ant’s bounty is a gift from the God who has created a natural world where hard work is rewarded; surely, the grasshopper is guilty of the sin of sloth, but does that deserve a death sentence? Hasn’t the ant been given the gift of a hard-working spirit in order to help the grasshopper, in order to make the fallen world a little less horrible and to reveal the love and mercy of his Creator? In the real world that Creator made flesh is revealing, the pagan moral logic which says, “Let the grasshopper die,” is merely a symptom of our fallen brokenness. For Jesus, the ant isn’t the hero in the story—he is a monster because he hasn’t shared with the grasshopper. The ant is the rich man, and the rich man is in hell.
Remember, it isn’t the riches which drag the rich man to hell (they are lifeless, inanimate objects); no, it is the love of them and the misuse of them. As St. Jerome says, “The rich man is not accused of being greedy or of carrying off the property of another, or of committing adultery or in fact of any wrongdoing. The evil alone of which he is guilty is pride.” Or St. Augustine, “Christ did not object to the riches of the rich man but to his impiety, faithlessness, pride and cruelty.” Or, St. James, who is almost certainly commenting through this parable, “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you” (St. James 5:1-5). The rich man’s sins are those of idolatry and hard heartedness: he has worshipped his money and neglected the poor and needy, and in this story of Jesus, that is all which is necessary for damnation.
And then there’s Lazarus, whose name means, “the one God has helped.” Unlike the rich man, Lazarus has put his faith in the endless grace and mercy of God, and it is he, anonymous and uncared for in this world, whose name is known by God and Abraham and the other saints he joins in the next life. By contrast, the rich man, surely well-known and celebrated in this life has no name in Jesus’ story both to illustrate the pregnant absence of his name in the Book of Life, but also to lay on the hearer’s heart the real possibility that his name is ours. Lazarus, despite seemingly having every reason to give up his faith rests his heart in those words of King David, “[The unrighteous] lie in the grave like sheep; death is their shepherd; and the righteous have dominion over them in the morning; their beauty shall consume in the sepulcher, and have no abiding. But God hath delivered my soul from the power of the grave; for he shall receive me” (Psalms 49:14-15). Lazarus had nothing, and so the path to wholly trusting in God was clearer, while the rich man’s path was cluttered with the sparkling distractions and temporary pleasures which fool men into thinking they don’t need God, fool men into thinking they are gods.
And so, what is that which elevates us above the beasts? It is nothing less than the gift of faith through which we surrender our sinful priorities and personal control, so we can love as God loves. Notice again, salvation does not come by being rich or poor, but through a true and unshakeable trust in the promises of God, and that lively faith will always be visible in the sacrificial love which follows. We must take our Lord’s words seriously, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?” But he said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God”(St. Luke 18:24-27). Jesus here and in today’s parable is not saying that salvation is difficult; no, He is saying that salvation is impossible on our own, and absent a true faith—planted and cultivated through the Word and Sacraments of Christ’s church—even a man coming back from the dead will not be enough to convince us to love with the dangerous abandon Christ reveals from the Cross. To paraphrase St. John, “Herein is love, not that we earned God’s love, but that He loved us and sent His Son to die for our debts.” If we know and believe that truth, we can become living revelations of all the prophets foretold; we can already live as if we are in the righteous age to come unencumbered by the guilt and desire which plague both rich and poor. As Jesus says, “…Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh” (St. Luke 6:20-21). Let us live in the blessed knowledge that we are being given a kingdom of love and abundance where pain and death will be forever abolished: a kingdom where our money will be no good.