The rich man and Lazarus

Scripture: Luke 16:19-31

Video Link: https://youtu.be/yi8J-TveAQc

Audio Link: Stream Sermon – 26 Apr 2026 – The rich man and Lazarus by tawabaptist | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

Structure:

• Introduction
• Jesus’ purpose
• The rich man and Lazarus
• The afterlife
• The rich man and Abraham
• Conclusion

Introduction:

Good morning everyone.

GPS stands for Global Positioning System. The GPS in your car or phone receives signals from satellites orbiting the earth which allow it to determine the latitude, longitude and altitude of your location within inches.

If your GPS only gave the latitude coordinates, then it wouldn’t be very helpful. You need all three reference points to be able to pin-point your position with accuracy.

Accurately interpreting Scripture is like finding the right GPS location. You need more than one coordinate. A single verse or passage won’t do. Scripture interprets Scripture.

Today we continue our sermon series on the parables of Jesus, this week focusing on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16. Also known as the parable of Dives and Lazarus. ‘Dives’ being the Latin word for ‘rich man’.

Fair warning, the content of this parable may disturb some listeners. It has the quality of a Stephen King movie. It plays on our worst fears about the afterlife.

We need to remember; the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is just one of many stories Jesus told in the gospels. We cannot expect to get an accurate picture of salvation and judgement based on this one parable alone.

That said, from Luke 16, verse 19 we read…

¹⁹ “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. ²⁰ At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores ²¹ and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. But the dogs came and licked his sores. ²² “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. ²³ In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. ²⁴ So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’ ²⁵ “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. ²⁶ And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’ ²⁷ “He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, ²⁸ for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’ ²⁹ “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’ ³⁰ “‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ ³¹ “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

May the Spirit of Jesus illuminate God’s word for us.

Jesus’ purpose:

The first question we need to ask ourselves is, why did Jesus tell this parable? What was his purpose? Understanding Jesus’ purpose prevents us from going down the wrong path with our interpretation. We discover Jesus’ purpose by looking at the context. The context gives us another coordinate.

In verse 13 of Luke 16, Jesus says: ¹³ “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” ¹⁴ The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. ¹⁵ He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.

Jesus then goes on to talk about the value and permanence of the law and prophets before telling the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

The immediate context shows us Jesus’ purpose. Jesus told this parable for the Pharisees, who were sneering at him because of his teaching about money.

This parable, therefore, is not about the temperature of hell. It’s about the Pharisees’ attitude to money and their interpretation of what we know as the Old Testament.

The rich man in the parable is a cartoon portrait representing what the Pharisees themselves believed. As you know, cartoon portraits tend to exaggerate certain features of the person being drawn. It appears Jesus is using hyperbole here to make his point.

Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, your interpretation of the law and prophets is wrong and therefore your attitude to money and people is wrong. You don’t value what God values. If you don’t repent, you will end up in a bad place, like the rich man. Let me give you two examples of how the Pharisees misread the Bible.

Firstly, they assumed they were automatically accepted by God because they were Jewish, descended from Abraham. Tough luck if you are not Jewish.

All those filthy gentiles are going to hell. That is severe prejudice, that’s racism, right? But, as we see in Jesus’ parable, being a descendant of Abraham does not help the rich man.

The Pharisees’ reading of the law and prophets also led them to believe (wrongly) that health and wealth are God’s reward for being righteous, therefore the rich and healthy must be righteous in God’s sight. Conversely, those who are sick or poor are being punished by God for their sin.

This belief is still around today. It’s sometimes called ‘cargo cult’ or ‘prosperity doctrine’. Jesus’ parable turns the Pharisees’ beliefs about money upside down.      

The confidence the Pharisees put in their ancestry and their wealth was misplaced.

Okay, so we can see (from the context) that Jesus’ purpose in telling the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is to correct the Pharisees’ misguided interpretation of the law and prophets. Now let’s look more closely at the parable itself.

The rich man and Lazarus:

Of all the parables Jesus told, this is the only one in which a character is named. The rich man is not named. When someone is not named in the Bible, it is often because they don’t deserve to be remembered.

The poor man, Lazarus, is named though. By giving the poor man a name, Jesus is signalling to his audience that Lazarus (even though he is poor and sick) is the hero of the story. Lazarus gets the honour of being remembered.

Lazarus is a Hebrew word which means ‘the one whom God helps’.

At first glance Lazarus’ name may seem ironic, because it does not appear that God is helping Lazarus, at least not in this life.

Lazarus does not enjoy good health. He is covered in sores and apparently cannot walk by himself. Verse 20 says Lazarus is laid at the gate of the rich man, which implies he must be carried. All of this means he cannot work or participate in gathered worship. He is an outcast, obliged to beg for survival.

By contrast, the rich man wears expensive clothes and lives in luxury, fine dining every day. The rich man is well connected.

In many ways Lazarus reminds us of righteous Job who lost everything, through no fault of his own, and ended up sitting by the rubbish heap scraping his sores with a piece of broken pottery. Lazarus does not scrap his sores with pottery, but he does (apparently) make friends with the local dogs who lick his sores.  

Unlike Job though, Lazarus does not complain to the Lord or to anyone else. Lazarus sits in silence. He does not call out for help from the people who pass by him every day on their way to the rich man’s banquets. He says nothing, all the time quietly longing to eat the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table.

But no food comes his way.

According to the internet, 1% of the population in New Zealand own 16% of the wealth. And according to the 2023 census, over 112,000 people (or 2.3% of the population) are severely housing deprived. 14.3% of children live in poverty.  

Growing up in the 1970’s, I don’t recall seeing anyone begging or sleeping rough in New Zealand. Now we see it all the time and we live in a welfare state. How did this happen? How do we turn it around?

There was no state funded welfare system for Lazarus. He was literally on the bones of his bum, dependent on the kindness of others.

The afterlife:

In time Lazarus dies and the angels carry him to Abraham’s side where he is comforted. The rich man also dies but he doesn’t go to the same place as Lazarus. The rich man finds himself in torment.

By the Pharisees’ reckoning the rich man should have been with Abraham, but Jesus turns their belief on its head.

Now, if all we had to go on was this one parable we might think the poor go to paradise when they die and the rich go to hell. Fortunately, the Bible offers other points of reference, other coordinates, that give us a more accurate picture of judgement and salvation.

We know from a wider reading of the Scriptures that the rich man did not go to hades because he was rich. He ended up in hades because he did not love God or his neighbour.

When asked, what is the most important command in the law, Jesus replied:     

³⁰ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ ³¹ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’There is no commandment greater than these.”

The rich man loved luxury and fine dining more than he loved God or his neighbour. If he had loved God and his neighbour, he would have trusted God’s word and helped Lazarus in some way. He had the resources and he could see the need. Lazarus was right on his doorstep. But the rich man didn’t seem to care.

By the same token, we know being poor does not give you a free pass to paradise. Abraham was accepted by God because of his faith. In Romans 4, Paul writes: ³ What does Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”

That Lazarus found himself by Abraham’s side in the afterlife shows that Lazarus was justified by his faith in God, just as Abraham was justified by faith. God, who looks at the heart, could see Lazarus’ patient faith, even though Lazarus looked to everyone else like he was rejected by God.

Suffering and poverty, in this life, are not proof of God’s displeasure. Nor is health and wealth proof of righteousness. This life is not always fair.  

Returning to Luke 16, in verse 23 Jesus says the rich man was in torment in hades. Some English translations use the word ‘hell’, but the original Greek says ‘hades’, which is not exactly the same as hell.

What then is hades? According to Greek mythology (which is not supported by the Bible) the souls of the dead went to hades, a place characterised by darkness and gloom (sort of like Wellington on a bad weather day).

The Greeks imagined different zones within hades. For example, a neutral zone, where ordinary souls are kept, neither a place of reward nor punishment. There was also a paradise zone, where heroes and righteous people are rewarded. As well as a zone of torment where evil doers are punished.

Lazarus, it seems, was in the paradise zone with Abraham, while the rich man was in the place or torment.

There is a Greek myth about hades which shares some similarities with Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus. In this myth, a man by the name of Tantalus did a few things to anger the gods, so they sent him to the torment zone in hades where he was forced to stand in water with a fruit tree above his head.

Whenever Tantalus tried to bend down to drink, the water receded. And whenever he tried to reach up and pluck some fruit from the tree, the branch would spring away. This meant Tantalus was always thirsty in the presence of water and always starving in the presence of food. It is from this myth, about Tantalus, that we get the English word tantalise.   

The rich man’s punishment, in Jesus’ parable, was similar to that of Tantalus. The rich man could see Lazarus in paradise with Abraham and longed for a splash of water to cool his tongue. He was being tantalised.  

Now, just because Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus bears some similarities with aspects of Greek mythology, it does not automatically follow that Jesus endorsed Greek mythology. We know the Greek gods are not real because the Bible tells us there is only one true God, the Lord, Yahweh.

Likewise, we cannot base our understanding of hell on this one parable.

The New Testament employs a variety of different images and metaphors to describe exclusion from the kingdom of heaven.

Sometimes we come across the phrase outer darkness, and other times we are given the picture of a fiery furnace. Jesus also used the image of Gehenna, which was the rubbish dump outside of Jerusalem.

Where does that leave us? Well, if we take the Bible seriously, then we know there is a final judgement and there is a hell. We know hell is a place to avoid, but we cannot say with any certainty what hell is like. Is it a place of eternal conscious suffering? Or is it a place of total annihilation? Or is it a bit of both, some punishment before a second death? There are many theories but honestly, we don’t know.

What we do know, from the Bible and from our own experience, is that God is good. He sees the whole picture and he looks at the human heart. He is just and merciful, slow to anger, full of compassion and rich in love. He won’t treat anyone unfairly. God has provided for our atonement through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Forgiveness is available for all who repent and believe in Jesus.

The rich man and Abraham:

We see God’s fairness worked out in the rest of Jesus’ parable. In verse 24 of Luke 16, the rich man calls out: ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’  

What we notice here is the rich man’s attitude toward Lazarus has not changed. He still thinks of Lazarus as beneath him, someone to be used like a slave or a servant. He doesn’t seem to understand that the social status he enjoyed while he was alive has no currency in the afterlife.

The rich man is willing to put Lazarus in harm’s way just so he can cool his tongue momentarily. The rich man’s sense of entitlement is incredible.

What the rich man should have said was, ‘Lazarus, please forgive me. I’m so sorry’. But he doesn’t. The rich man remains unrepentant.

²⁵ “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.

The thought here is not that people who receive good things in this life are automatically destined to receive bad things in the next life. No. That’s hardly fair. Besides, the reality is we each receive a mixture of good and bad things in this life. The point is, the rich man is being judged by his own standards.

In Matthew 7, Jesus says the measure you use for others is the measure God will use for you. The rich man neglected to care for Lazarus and now he himself is being neglected.

From verse 27 the rich man says to Abraham, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, ²⁸ for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

This is the only glimmer of virtue we see from the rich man. Sadly though, he still fails to see Lazarus as one of his brothers. Yet again, the rich man thinks he can boss Lazarus around like a slave.

Through all of this, Lazarus remains silent. There is no angry outburst from Lazarus. No resentment. Lazarus does not tell Abraham what to do. Lazarus has forgiven the rich man, harbouring no bitterness toward him.

Abraham refuses to send Lazarus back from the dead saying, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

There it is. The law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets make it clear what God wants; for people to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly. The rich man and his brothers have no excuse.

Jesus is telling the Pharisees here that his teaching about how to use money (and everything else for that matter) is in accordance with the law and the prophets. So when the Pharisees sneer at Jesus’ teaching, they are putting themselves at odds with Moses and the prophets.  

Like the Pharisees who keep arguing with Jesus, the rich man continues arguing with Abraham, insisting that if his five brothers see someone rise from the dead, they will repent and be saved. But Abraham is not having a bar of it.

‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”.

How true that turned out to be. When Jesus raised his actual friend, Lazarus, from the dead (in John 11), the Pharisees and other religious leaders did not repent. They became more determined to kill Jesus and Lazarus. That’s how badly they misread the Scriptures.

Conclusion:

So what can we take from Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus?

Here’s three things:

Firstly, what we do in this life has eternal consequences. Our choices matter. When we love God and love your neighbour, money becomes our servant, something we can use to help others. If we don’t love God and our neighbour, money will inevitably become a cruel master that oppresses us and others.

Secondly, when we fail to love God and our neighbour (and we will fail at this), we need to repent and put our faith in Jesus. Salvation is not an entitlement. Getting into the kingdom of heaven is not automatic. God is looking for ways to get us into his kingdom, but we still need to repent and believe in Jesus.

Thirdly, we need to be very careful how we interpret and apply the Bible. Remember, we need more than one coordinate. Scripture interprets Scripture. If we read the Bible in a self-serving way, we risk ending up in a very bad place.

Let us pray…

Jesus, you are our righteousness and our hope. Empower us by your Spirit to love God and love our neighbour as we love ourselves. We ask you to deliver us from evil that we may enjoy fellowship with you forever. Amen.  

Questions for discussion or reflection:

1. What stands out for you in reading this Scripture and/or in listening to the sermon? Why do you think this stood out to you?
2. Why is our interpretation of Scripture important? How can we check that our interpretation (and application) of Scripture is accurate?
3. How does Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus make you feel? Why do you think it makes you feel this way?
4. Why did Jesus tell the parable of the rich man and Lazarus?
5. Why did the rich man end up in a place of torment after he died? Why did Lazarus end up being comforted by Abraham?
6. What does the rich man’s dialogue with Abraham reveal about the rich man? What does Lazarus’ silence throughout reveal about Lazarus? What does the parable reveal about Jesus and God?
7. What is your key takeaway from this message? What might you do differently? How might you think differently?  

Bibliography:

• William Barclay, ‘The Gospel of Luke’, 1965.
• Leon Morris, ‘Tyndale Commentaries: Luke’, 1976.
• Fred Craddock, ‘Interpretation Commentaries: Luke’, 1990.
• Darrell Bock, ‘NIV Application Commentary: Luke’, 1996.
• Joel Green, ‘New International Commentary on the New Testament: The Gospel of Luke’, 1997.
• Kenneth Bailey, ‘Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes’, 2008.