“The Rich Man and Lazarus”

Luke 16:19-31

Pastor Deb Troester, STHPC, September 28, 2025

An engineer died and was mistakenly sent to hell.  Fairly quickly, he had redesigned the place. Hell cooled down considerably thanks to the air conditioning he installed. The escalators and elevators worked just fine. Manual labor was quickly becoming a thing of the past. God looked down one day and noticed all the changes. He called down to the devil to ask how these improvements came about.
The devil replied, “That engineer you sent me.”
“What engineer? You’re not supposed to have an engineer. Send him back up here!”
The devil’s answer was simple… “No.”
“If you don’t send that engineer back right now, I’m going to be very angry. In fact, I’ll sue you!”
The devil replied, “And . . . where are you going to get a lawyer?”

There have been stories about people getting what they deserve in the afterlife for ages; in fact this parable may have originated in ancient Egypt, but Jesus gives his own emphasis to it. I don’t think Jesus meant for this parable to be an exact description of what happens after we die. Rather, it is more about what we do in this life and what God values most.

Jesus tells this parable after saying “You cannot serve God and wealth.” Some pharisees who heard this laughed at Jesus’ words probably because in ancient tradition, both Jewish and Roman, people thought that if someone was rich, they were favored by God or the gods. Like the preachers of the prosperity gospel today, these Pharisees saw their wealth as a clear sign of God’s blessing. They saw others’ poverty as a sign of God’s judgment. Some people still think that being rich is a sign of success, even if one’s personal life is in shambles. Most people pay great deference to the wealthy, even if they got their money by inheritance or just good luck. People often jump to the conclusion that the poor are lazy, that their bad fortune is the result of their poor choices. The idea that the whole system is unfair, and in need of overhaul is hard to swallow. With this story Jesus wants to set the record straight: just having money does not mean having God’s approval. It is what you do with the money that counts.

The Pharisees Jesus was addressing certainly thought that being wealthy showed that they were righteous people.

Jesus told them, “God knows your hearts, for what is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God.”

In this parable, the rich man has traditionally been called “Dives.” That name comes from the Latin Vulgate Bible, which was used during the Middle Ages. It says, “a certain man was rich” - “homo quidam erat dives.” Out of this phrase the name Dives evolved. But the parable does not give the man’s name. Yet it names the poor man: Lazarus, meaning “God helps.” In the Bible, and in other literature, usually important people are named, and unimportant people are not, but in this parable, it is the wealthy, important man who has no name, while the poor and supposedly insignificant man does. This is only one way in which the parable echoes Jesus’ well-known saying that “Some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” (Luke 13:30)

This theme was echoed in the spiritual the choir sang: “Rich man Dives, he lived so well, and when he died, he went straight to…” well, you know where he went! Dives’ wore purple and fine linen – the best money could buy.

He feasted lavishly – not just on holidays, but every day. He lived behind a gate, meant to keep those like Lazarus out. All of these details are signs of great wealth. But why did God judge him? Was it because he was rich? William Barclay’s commentary explains:

“What was the sin of Dives? He had not ordered Lazarus to be removed from his gate. He had had no objections to Lazarus receiving the bread that was flung away from his table. He did not kick Lazarus in the passing. He was not deliberately cruel to him. The sin of Dives was that he never noticed Lazarus, that he thought it perfectly natural and inevitable that Lazarus should lie in pain and hunger while he wallowed in luxury.”  Barclay concludes: “…the sin of Dives was not that he did wrong things but that he did nothing.”

Dives’ is totally indifferent to Lazarus’ plight. He never took time to see him as a human being, equal in worth to himself, valuable as a child of God, someone who was suffering, who needed help, and he never did anything to ease that suffering. Theologian Scott Bader-Saye comments that “Lazarus seems invisible to the rich man.”

Who do we encounter in our daily lives who is invisible to us? There are also people begging on our streets, many of them unhoused or mentally ill, or both. There are others who are almost invisible as well: someone who works or lives in the same building who never says a word and keeps to themselves, a kid with no friends, a troubled teen, a lonely elder, the immigrants who tend our fields and pick the fruits and vegetables we eat. If we look, there are invisible people all around us. One of our tasks as Christians is to look for the invisible people, to really see them, and to respond to their need. No, we can’t fix everything, but we can do something.

Sadly, even in death Dives still thinks of Lazarus as less important  than himself - a servant or even a slave that he can boss around. When he finally sees him in Abraham’s bosom – maybe really noticing him for the first time, it is only to think about what Lazarus can do for him and his family. He views him as an instrument he can use to get what he wants – to bring him water, to serve as an errand boy to take a message to his brothers.

Lest we condemn Dives, do we ever look at people only as a means to an end, or do we really see them for who they are, recognizing our common humanity?

This may be part of what Jesus meant when he said, “As you have done it unto one of these the least of my brethren, you have done it unto me.” So, who is Lazarus? He is Christ, lying at our gate, hungry, thirsty, disabled, in prison, a refugee, an undocumented immigrant, unemployed, sick with no health care, lonely, abandoned. There is a great gulf between rich and poor, but it exists already in this world. We don’t have to wait for the next.

According to Bread for the World, over a quarter of the world’s people face food insecurity, and some 10% experienced severe food insecurity—going days without eating. In the U.S. the percentages are lower 13.5% are food insecure and 5% sometimes go days without eating. That is too many people for a country as wealthy as ours, especially considering that 14 million of the food insecure are children. This, in a country where supplemental nutrition assistance has recently been cut and made more difficult to access.

Former U.S. Congressperson John Lewis, who was active in the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s, encouraged people to speak out against injustice and take action to bring about change, saying “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” He added, “If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it.” Acting on Jesus’ words may require us to change the way we do things, and change is always difficult. It can even cost money, or friends. Yet, small changes can turn into big ones, given time, patience, and effort. But we can’t do it alone. That is one reason God established the church. Together, as the Body of Christ, we can accomplish much more than we can alone.

I’ve been encouraged by what is happening down in Watsonville, where Westview Presbyterian Church’s tiny homes village broke ground this past summer and is expected to open by November.

Thirty-two tiny homes will be supplied with shared showers, a laundry room, a communal dining area, even a pet run. This project didn’t happen overnight. Westview struggled for several years to plan and get it approved, but now their dream is a reality, and will help their local “Lazaruses” to have decent housing and help from social workers.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “There is enough for our need, but not for our greed.” Dives never figured out that his riches were a gift from God, entrusted to him to do good in God’s world. He was too absorbed in his own life to notice the needs of those around him. Instead of seeking God and serving his fellow human beings, he sought happiness in material things. He served wealth rather than God.

In the end it is Dives who becomes the beggar, not Lazarus, as he begs for just a drop of cool water to ease his agony. He asks Father Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his five brothers, “so that they will not also come into this place of torment.” But Abraham refuses, telling Dives that if his brothers “do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

But someone has risen from the dead: Jesus Christ. Because of Christ, we have been given what we need to live faithful lives. It is all there in the Bible, in the words of Jesus. We can either listen, or like Dives, we can ignore what God is saying to us.

The good news is: God has not forgotten us. God notices and cares about each one of us. God is not like Dives, focused on himself, up somewhere in heaven far away, but rather he is Emmanuel, God with us. He sent Jesus to make a way for us to live in relationship with God and with each other. It is not God who separated himself from Dives, but Dives who separated himself from God.

Today I want to challenge all of us to ask ourselves if our values align with God’s values. What absorbs our time, our attention, our heart? If we agree that we need to notice and to help those who are invisible to the world, what are we doing about it, individually and collectively? With God’s help we can make a difference, if we choose to. Let us pray:

“Lord, increase my hunger for you and for your way of happiness. Make me rich in the things of heaven and give me a generous heart that I may freely share with others that which you have given me. Amen.”

Sermon ©Deborah Troester 2025