– James Tissot (French, 1836-1902).
Le pauvre Lazare à la porte du riche, 1886-1894, at the Brooklyn Museum
The Rich Man and Lazarus: Getting the Main Point
By Fr Jonathan Tobias
Parables are stories
The Parables of our Lord are the most beautiful and meaningful talks in history. They are matchless in their depth. While the great third-century theologian Origen and the fourteenth-century poet Dante said that there were four levels of interpretation, G K Chesterton (the English Roman Catholic essayist from a century ago) said that he could count, in the Lord’s Parables, at least seven levels of meaning.
There’s no doubt about that.
Still, the Parables are simple and immediate. They “come at you” with personality, with familiar experiences and concrete images. In style and approach, these are not like St Paul’s epistles, which are filled with doctrinal and propositional presentations.
No, parables are meant to be experienced as stories, first and foremost. While one is meant to take St Paul’s epistles, and the Lord’s addresses (like the Sermon on the Mount), with every sentence as a proposition, the parables are different.
No matter how deep they are, the Parables of the Lord are always fresh, ever new.
With parables, one has to look for the moral of the story, which usually comes at the very end. Then, one reads that moral back into the story, and the whole thing opens up in depth and clarity.
This is important. It should be easy to tell the difference between a parable and a doctrinal exposition, because the simple experience of the two is sharply different. An exposition proceeds by logical argument, point by point.
But a parable proceeds by the building up of drama in the narrative. The listener or reader is meant to be “hooked in,” his attention focused on the characters and the chain of events. And then the crisis of the story and the climax, and the conclusion where everything is made clear.
The main point
I propose to read with you the great Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. We will try to pay attention to the story, and to look for the “main point,” the moral of the parable. What was the Lord’s main intent in telling this story? What does the whole parable say, the whole narrative? What is the main concern of this Scripture?
These questions differ from the unfortunately common attempt to construct a dogma about the afterlife out of details from the story. I understand that a number of writers in Holy Tradition have made inferences from this parable, and they have taken from the story a number of eschatological propositions.
Some writers in Holy Tradition have taken from this parable some difficult, if not unfeasible, eschatological interpretations: they teach that the angels take up the souls of the righteous to the “bosom of Abraham” … that the souls of the unrighteous are sent to torment in the fires of Hades … that there is an uncrossable chasm between the bosom of Abraham and Hades.
In general, such writers like to see this parable as referring to the “intermediate state of the soul” – that is, the bodiless existence of the soul in the interval between physical death and the general resurrection at the Last Day.
Such an interpretation is a difficult case to make. For one thing, it is attempting to force out a literalistic reading of a parable, which is a perilous thing. But at the same time these same writers interpret “the bosom of Abraham” in this parable as symbolically referring to the intermediate state of the soul in fellowship with Christ. So already, the strict “literalistic” interpretation is left behind.
But also, it is plain, for any reasonable eye to see, and any open heart, that parables must be taken in a literary sense, not literalistically. Stories are full of symbol and metaphor. They rely on rhetorical tropes like overstatement (hyperbole) and understatement (litotes). Everyone knows that in Aesop’s Fable, the fox moaning over sour grapes is not mainly about a fox denouncing grapes simply because he couldn’t get at them, but about an all-too-human and all-too-common defect.
Everyone knows that Jesus really did not expect someone to literally pluck out his eye because it offended them,
The key to interpretation
Which brings up a traumatic memory. In my old life as a Protestant preacher, I was doing a Bible study on this very passage (Matthew 5.27-30). When we came to “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away,” one guy in my study got all excited and said, “Well that’s a great idea! They do that to thieves in Saudi Arabia – we should do that here!”
The guy missed the point of the parable altogether. In that chapter, Jesus was talking about adultery, and how it starts in the heart long before it comes out in actual behavior. That is the place where the passions must be fought against – the fight against the passions is symbolized by the hyperbole of cutting off one’s offending member.
It is interesting to look at what lay behind this guy’s harsh, literalistic interpretation. It is not surprising that he was legalistic in his Bible reading. In his angry daydreams, he populated eternal hellfire and damnation with many groups of people who bothered him. He resisted the whole idea of the Gospel as a proclamation of divine grace. “Surely, someone has to pay,” he liked to say.
It was clear that the reason why he could not lay hold of the real message of that parable of “cutting off the offense” was because his heart was closed off to the central message of the Kingdom of God – that our love for our neighbor is the necessary fruit of our complete love for God, because “He first loved us” (1 John 4.9).
Our Lord’s linking of the Two Greatest Commandments confirms this undeniable fact: that there is no way to love one’s God without loving one’s neighbor. The Apostle John says this explicitly: “If any one says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4.20).
Love is the door into understanding the Kingdom: it is the prerequisite for “knowing the secrets of the kingdom of God.” Refusal to love is the reason why some people – like this guy, like the Pharisees and the scribes and the Sadducees – just can’t get it. “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand” (Luke 8.10).
That love is the “key” to understanding shouldn’t come as any surprise. God is Love is simply and only because God is Trinity – an infinite, eternal procession of mutual Self-emptying, from the Father’s processing of the Holy Spirit to rest upon His only-begotten Son in complete Self-revelation, and the Son completely returning Himself to the Father (and all that He has) through the Holy Spirit.
Gregory the Theologian called the angels the “second suns” of the Holy Trinity in reflecting the Light of Divine Love. We humans are the “third suns.” Insomuch as we love, we participate in the Trinitarian divine nature (2 Peter 1.4).
Love, obviously, is the only key to the Kingdom, and to its story and proclamation.
The audience of the Pharisees
The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus opens up to us if we know, going in, this “exegetical key” of divine and Fatherly love. And we can contrast that love with the resistance of the Pharisees to that love. The Pharisees, along with others, had been attempting to confine the Kingdom of God to themselves. They were, in other words, shutting off grace from the very people that God wanted to hear about grace most.
Jesus, the Good Shepherd, came to open up grace to the sheep: “When He saw the crowds, He had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9.36).
This Parable, then, takes a different tack from what we have come to expect.
The Rich Man is described by Jesus as obviously rich – he “was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day” (Luke 16.19).
You and I, from our vantage point, immediately take a negative turn toward the Rich Man. But that would not have been so with Jesus’ first audience, which Luke tells us included the Pharisees. To them, this linen and feasting would have been the marks of not only worldly success – but of religious success. To them, these obvious marks of riches were marks of divine blessing, amost like God’s endorsement of being “better than” other less successful people.
Poor folk like Lazarus, lying at the Rich Man’s gate, were interpreted by the Pharisees as being not only “un-blessed,” but even deprived of God’s grace. Obviously – to them – the abject poverty of Lazarus was somehow his fault. Maybe he was prodigal, or wasteful, in his spending and made poor financial decisions.
Even his physical affliction – his body covered in sores – was his fault, too. “Who was it that sinned, that this man was born blind?” the disciples asked Jesus about Bartimaeus (John 9.2), echoing the common presumption that had infected Israel since the Book of Job. The presumption was this: bad things happen to people because they must have been bad enough to deserve it.
That’s exactly how Job’s friends tried — and failed — to comfort him (and that’s exactly how we should not).
Some unlocking clues
But even here, with Lazarus, we get clues that the Parable is going to differ from expectations. The very name – Lazarus – would have been immediately associated by early Christians with Jesus’ good friend in Bethany, the one He raised from the dead after four days. The mention of the poor man begging for crumbs from the table and having his sores licked by the dogs is a heartbreaking reference to the Canaanite Woman: when Jesus initially refused to heal her daughter, He explained:
“Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7.27-28).
It is beautiful poetry that in one Parable, Jesus recalled this touching event: both the bread crumbs and the dogs are remembered.
Many times, we moderns are so familiar with Parables that we forget that we are pretty far removed from the first immediate hearing of the story. We don’t get shocked or rattled by the surprising turns, when the Story-teller lowers the boom.
The lowering of the boom: slamming Pharisaical eschatology
The boom fell precisely at the moment when the two characters, Lazarus and the Rich Man, died and entered into the afterlife. Jesus totally and profoundly and radically turned the eschatology of the Pharisees upside down:
“The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus in his bosom” (Luke 16.22-23).
This was all wrong. According to the usual religious opinion, it was the Rich Man who should have been carried by the angels to the bosom of Abraham – the final home and destination of all of Abraham’s children. His “election” had been confirmed by success, health and wealth – surely, God had favored him with His providence. And Lazarus should have been the one who had sunk down to Hades, because that’s exactly what he deserved. After all, the poor man had been practicing up for Hades all his life.
In overturning the Pharisees’ eschatological “map” of the bosom of Abraham and Hades, the Lord used a few features of this map to drive home His point of “reversal,” of turning all the common expectations upside-down. Besides using the term “bosom of Abraham,” the Lord described the Rich Man as being in torment from the flames – a feature that seems to have been a favorite theme in the doctrine of the Pharisees. It may be that they were famous hellfire-and-brimstone preachers, who used the prospect of eternal torment to their rhetorical advantage. For them, God was a God of wrath Who demanded perfect adherence to the Law, punished any infraction, and looked upon any sin as a “debt” that had to be paid.
This system of penal satisfaction was described terrifyingly by the Lord in another parable: “Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing” (Matthew 5.26). You can almost hear the implicit echo of critique: “You threaten My sheep with perdition, but with what judgment you give out you shall receive” (Matthew 7.2). And this same theme runs through the Lord’s many mentions of Hades and Gehenna.
Another feature of this eschatological map was the “uncrossable chasm” that separated the places of the righteous and the unrighteous: “Between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us” (Luke 16.26).
It is Abraham, in the story, who is saying this. This “chasm” may have figured prominently in the legalistic doctrines of the day, that there was simply no hope after death. Here is another feature of the Pharisees’ rhetoric that is turned upside down, and sent like a boomerang back to those who hurled it. “If you’re so confident that there is a hopeless sentence in the afterlife, and you use this to terrify your following, then that sentence may very well be your lot.”
Always hope
The fact remains that with the God of infinite and eternal Love, there can be no hopelessness anywhere or anytime. Surely, this is the meaning of Psalm 138 LXX: “Where could I go from Your Spirit? Where could I flee from Your countenance” (vs 7). Or “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19.26). Or “[Nothing] shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.39).
Another related fact remains that there are numerous accounts, in Orthodox Holy Tradition, of souls moving from Hades to Paradise. The story of Xenia of St Petersburg is one fine example of this.
In any case, it is a general principle, in Orthodox Tradition, that any suffering in the afterlife is only for the purpose of therapy and education, not for retribution and the satisfaction of wrath or honor: “For the Lord disciplines him whom He loves, and chastises every son whom He receives” (Hebrews 12.6, quoting Proverbs 3.12).
God loves everyone, and hence, this discipline and chastisement pertains to everyone – no matter who or when, or even what religious affiliation. Note that in this Parable, there is no mention of the circumcision (or, for that matter, the baptismal) status of Lazarus that qualified him to be in the bosom of Abraham. In the Parable of the Last Judgment (Matthew 25.31-46), there is not a single mention of whether the “sheep” were Christian or Jewish.
Besides, several Fathers have pointed out that it is demeaning to Christ to ascribe to Him so worldly a motive as retribution.
The utter absence of such qualifications or affiliations or identity underscores the universality of the Lord’s Parables, especially this one.
Now if the legalistic Pharisees were correct in their penal satisfaction eschatology, and their deterministic doctrine of health and wealth blessings, then yes, the chasm would need to be eternally uncrossable, and there would persist – for eternity – a realm of hopelessness and evil. God would have to permit evil to be as eternal as He.
But here is the central irony of the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man: while the character Abraham said that the great chasm was uncrossable, the Storyteller Himself actually did cross over that chasm on Holy Saturday – that great and mysterious interval between the Crucifixion and Resurrection on the Third Day. In every Vesperal service for the Resurrection (ie on Saturday evenings), there are multiple emphases that the Lord descended into Hades and destroyed its gates.
The Sadducees once attempted to entrap Jesus with an absurd afterlife question – a question that was not only absurd but also cynical (as they did not believe in any life after death). It was one of those ridiculous outlier questions that casuistic sophists just love: if a woman marries a man, and then he dies before giving her a child, and then she marries a succession of his six brothers, all with the same result, then who is she going to be married to in heaven?
Jesus answered them with this slam: “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22.29).
And Jesus is saying exactly the same thing to the Pharisees: “You don’t really get the scriptures – Moses and the Prophets – and you certainly don’t understand the power of God to do the impossible.” To us, Hades will seem hopeless and impossible. Not to God.
“God will save a lot more people than you think, maybe even ahead of you.” That’s not an exaggeration: “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you” (Matthew 21.31).
A succession of reversals
This Parable has been a succession of shocking reversals – especially for the Pharisees. Here was Jesus, an itinerant preacher who was attired in the impoverished philosophical simple garb of an agrarian prophet, denouncing their flowing vestments, their hunger for wealth and power by putting the Rich Man – someone who looked and lived very much like them – in Hades.
Lazarus – the poor diseased wretch – was sent to the good place after death. There, he inherited the legacy of Abraham. There he was fed and received healing – everything that the Rich Man, who was his neighbor, had denied him. There he had entered the Kingdom of God, which is the full realization of God’s righteousness and the opening up of Eden again.
Interestingly, the Rich Man recognized Lazarus and asked Abraham to send Lazarus to comfort him: “Send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame” (Luke 16.24).
This is poignant, and unpleasant for the Pharisees: the very thing the Rich Man denied to Lazarus in their lifetime was what the Rich Man now wanted from Lazarus in the next. Abraham made this point explicit: “Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish” (Luke 16.25).
Everything is going to be turned around and upside-down, the Pharisees were told. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Don’t use speeches about the afterlife to reinforce your own power and wealth, the Lord was warning them.
A foreboding prophecy
But there is one more reversal. And it’s a tragic prophecy to boot. Having been told that Lazarus would not be sent to minister to him, the Rich Man begged Abraham to send Lazarus to his surviving five brothers.
He wanted Lazarus, coming back from the dead, to minister to them – “so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment” (Luke 16.28).
This interchange is laden heavily with meaning. The mention of Lazarus coming back from the dead could not fail to anticipate the fact that Jesus would indeed, in the near future, raise His own friend Lazarus from the dead.
And just like in that event, the raising of Lazarus would fail to persuade those whose hearts were closed off to Divine Love: “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead” (Luke 16.31).
The most tragic meaning of this sentence is its inescapable foreboding prophecy. The Storyteller Himself would do just that – rise from the dead. There had been no greater sign or proof of the Kingdom, nor would there ever be again, than Jesus Christ rising from the dead on the third day.
Signs, as Jesus had said, are never enough: “A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign,” He told the Pharisees and the Sadducees, “and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas” (Matthew 16.4).
Even that sign – the emergence of Jesus from the “great fish” of death after three days – would not be enough for those who could not hear Moses and the prophets.
Surely, Jesus was foretelling the reality that many would shut their eyes and stop their ears from His own Gospel, even with its confirmation in the Resurrection, even with the amplification by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
The last reversal
Still, there is hope. At the end, the Rich Man had shown, for the first time, concern for others. He didn’t want his five brothers to suffer in his place. He was now experiencing the force and consequence of his rejection of Divine Love – and the interval of that experience was now indefinite.
But he wanted to warn his brothers away from this place.
And too, he recognized goodness in Lazarus, who was shown to be his brother, who was now shown obviously to be “also is a son of Abraham” (Luke 19.9).
Are we reading too much into this Parable? That there might be hope for the Rich Man, who began this story – at least for us – clearly unsympathetic, clearly the villain?
The moral of the story
The lesson of the Parable is clear. In this life, the Rich Man should have recognized Lazarus as his brother. He should not have ignored his brother’s starvation and pain. He should have been like the Good Samaritan and tended to his sores. He should have been like the little boy at the Feeding of the Five Thousand and offered him at least five loaves and two fishes.
He failed at this. And why? Surely he had enough and to spare. What is it with wealth and power that blinds a man to the suffering of his brother? What makes him so senseless, so devoid of pity and carefulness? What makes him “exalt himself and justify himself before men,” while cutting off even the closest relationship possible — one’s spouse — out of mere expediency?
“You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts; for what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God. The law and the prophets were until John; since then the good news of the kingdom of God is preached, and every one enters it violently. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one dot of the law to become void. Every one who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery” (Luke 16.14-18).
The Law – Moses and the Prophets – was rejected by the Rich Man, and by implication, the Pharisees and Sadducees “who were lovers of money” and who were concerned mainly to exalt themselves. In that rejection, brothers and wives – who were closest in the neighborhood – were disregarded and discarded, left to suffer at the gate.
But now the Gospel is turning — violently — the old eschatology upside down. People like Lazarus populate the Kingdom of God.
In Hades the Rich Man suffered. But perhaps, the Rich Man was already in Hades. His rejection of Divine Love is precisely what Hades is.
It is always to be hoped that the Rich Men of this world – all the would-be Pharisees and Sadducees, those lovers of money who exalt themselves, who turn away from their neighbors and family, who break covenantal ties of love – will wake up one day and come to grips with the fact that they are in the Hades of their own making. After all, the Prodigal Son, when he came to his senses, recognized the fact that he’d been in the pig pen from the moment he left his Father’s house. And look — he turned out okay.
It may be that one day they will ask Jesus then, “Please have someone go tell my brothers.”
And Jesus might say, “Well, then, go ahead.”