Hi First Presbyterian Church,
It’s time for our Mid-Week Meet-Up! Between September and March, many children and youth from within and outside our congregation gather for LOGOS on Wednesdays. I have the privilege of teaching the middle-school-aged students for Bible study. This year, we’ve been discussing many of the parables of Jesus recorded in our Gospels. Last Wednesday, we looked at Luke 16:19-21, where Jesus tells the “Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.” I’d love to take a moment to take you with me into that parable.
In this parable, Jesus describes a rich man who is enjoying all the finer things in life, while a poor man named Lazarus sits outside at the gate by the rich man’s home. In the first century, there were no homeless shelters or soup kitchens. There were no social welfare programs. The only way for people living in poverty to survive was by the kindness and generosity of others. However, this rich man totally neglected Lazarus. Jesus says that dogs would come to Lazarus and lick his sores. If you’ve ever had a dog with a sore or stitches after a surgery, you know that they lick themselves as part of an instinct to heal their wounds. Jesus is telling us that even the dogs were trying to help Lazarus by licking his sores. The dogs were paying more attention to the needs of Lazarus than the rich man who was neglecting him.
Jesus then says that after they both died, the rich man went to hell and Lazarus went to heaven. The rich man, who was in agony, wanted Lazarus to come to him and help him or, at the very least, to have Lazarus go to his family to warn them to change their hearts before they ended up where he was. In the parable, Jesus essentially says that if people cannot see past their own comfort and pleasure when someone like Lazarus sits before them every day, it won’t do them any good for Lazarus (let alone anyone else) to come back from the dead to warn them.
What’s Jesus’ point? Is he trying to tell us that rich people go to hell and poor people go to heaven? I don’t think so.
I think he’s trying to tell us that our capacity to show mercy and compassion to others is directly correlated to our capacity to see our own need for mercy and compassion. In other words, since the rich man in the parable (who was a sinner just like any of us) could not see his own need for God’s mercy and compassion to save him from sin, he was unlikely to feel any mercy and compassion to someone else in need. The problem with the rich man in the parable was not his wealth but his self-centeredness and lack of humility.
We might also see a connection to what Jesus says in Matthew 25:40, “Whatever you did to help someone in need of mercy, it’s like you did it to me” (paraphrasing). The point Jesus is making is all humans are made in God’s image. That doesn’t mean we are all like God without any flaws or any sin. It does mean, however, that each of us is made for the same purpose, to reflect the nature and character of God, which Jesus did perfectly. Jesus loves us so much that he became one of us. He came to live among humanity, despite all our flaws, in order to show us the mercy and compassion all of us so desperately need. The point of the “Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus” is that we will never completely understand Jesus until we see him in the faces of others.
Who is the Lazarus that is sitting at your proverbial gate? Do you see Jesus in their eyes? What would it look like for you to treat them like you would treat Jesus himself? These are good questions for us to reflect on to examine our spiritual lives.
Peace,
Pastor Aaron