Luke 16:19-31 "They Have Moses" Scott Hoezee

One of the twentieth century's more intriguing theological movements was the school of thought that became known as Liberation Theology. One of the salient characteristics of Liberation Theology is that it emerged from the context of the Third World where poverty and unjust oppression of the poor are hallmarks of many nations. The people who, based on the Bible, advocated granting the poor release from their bondage to poverty knew what they were talking about. They were there in person. They spoke from experience. Genuine Liberation Theology felt deeply authentic.

True, some European theologians like Jürgen Moltmann and others tried to pick up the Liberation Theology standard and trumpet the virtues of this brand of theological reflection. But that more urbane touting of this thought did not seem as authentic as the writings that emerged from the Ground Zero of poverty in Latin America. In fact, some branded the European version of this as "Liberation Theology in a Volvo." But when you read the genuine article from theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez and other indigenous writers, there is no denying that Liberation Theology has something to teach us all.

However, like almost anything you could name, so also this stripe of theology had its faults and its excesses. One common criticism has been that sometimes Liberation theologians make it sound as though whereas the rich and most other ordinary people need to be saved by grace in order to forgive their sins, the poor get saved simply by virtue of being poor to begin with. If you are oppressed by some unjust socio-economic system in Nicaragua or Belize, then you are automatically in with God in ways that most certainly would never be true of rich and powerful people. The poor don't have sins that need forgiving by grace, only wrongs done against them in need of redress.

That is a caricature of Liberation Theology, I admit, but in truth this thinking does at times veer in the direction of equating poverty with automatic salvation. That doesn't seem right and yet you have to admit that a parable like the one we just read from Luke 16 most certainly could be held up as a quasi-prooftext for this. We are not told anything about the religious faith of either the poor beggar named Lazarus or the anonymous rich man.

Yet when each man dies, Lazarus gets a quick pass into heaven even as the rich man goes straight to Hades and its fiery torments. What's more, in this parable's imaginative conversation between Abraham and the rich man, once again there is not a whisper here that Lazarus is getting his heavenly reward on account of grace or by virtue of the fact that he had always been a devout worshiper of God. Instead Abraham says that this kind of reversal of fortune is just how it goes: he who received nothing on earth gets everything in the great hereafter even as those who had it all on earth lose it all on the other side of the grave.

So does this parable teach that at the end of the day, the afterlife is mostly about a reversal of fortunes? Is it the case, as Liberation Theology at times almost says, that the poor get rewarded and the selfish rich get punished sheerly on account of the economics of this life? Well, certainly one could draw such a neat and tidy conclusion based on the surface of the parable alone. But if we look a bit more deeply into what is said here, we may discover there is more going on in Luke 16 than a fable-like reversal of fortunes--the kind of delicious upending of expectations that most people smack their lips over at one time or another. Who among us could plausibly deny that we, too, have at times fantasized how great it would be to see certain selfish or evil people get their comeuppance one day even as us "little people" get rocketed straight into the stratosphere of glory? But things are not quite that simple in Luke 16, first impressions notwithstanding. So let's give the parable a more careful look this evening.

In this story the pre-death scenario is sketched by Jesus very quickly and in very bold and broad brushstrokes. There is nothing subtle about the set-up. The first man is flat-out said to be rich. He wears purple linen clothing (a royal color and fabric that in Jesus' day reeked of money the same way a tailored silk Armani suit would do on a rich man today). He lived in the lap of luxury. Even the Greek word for "gate" in verse 20 was not the word you'd use to describe a small gate on someone's white picket fence but was the word reserved for soaring portals--the kind of huge and heavy wrought-iron gates you see if you drive around Beverly Hills. Jesus wastes no time painting with a broad brush. We've got the picture. This isn't merely someone who is comfortably well-off. This man is super-rich.

The depiction of Lazarus and his lot in life is no-less subtle. He's not just a panhandler beggar he also appears to be lame and so only can lay at the gates. Worse yet, he's diseased and so is covered with such dreadful open wounds as to attract the sniffing, and then licking, attention of the neighborhood's stray dogs. He would have been happy to eat table scraps or even floor sweepings from the rich man's dining room but you get the impression he didn't get even those.

Again, Jesus is being deliberately extreme. Trying to picture Lazarus in your mind may lead you to say, "Yuck!" Have you ever seen a poor person pull a half-eaten sandwich out of a garbage can and promptly eat it? Your jaw instinctively tightens, doesn't it? How bad off would you have to be to flick off pieces of coffee grounds and dirt from a stranger's castoff cheeseburger before eating it? Well, you'd be as bad off as Lazarus, for one thing. And for every one of us here tonight who finds such a situation frankly unimaginable, that alone is an indication of how very much we do indeed have to be thankful for.

In any event, in Luke 16 we have the heights of riches and the depths of abject poverty. No shades of nuance here. The men then die and their roles are reversed. Again, there is no subtlety: Lazarus could not possibly have it better and the rich man could not possibly have it worse. But it is only now that this parable really takes off. It goes without saying that we should not conclude from Luke 16 that people in hell really will be able some day to see those in heaven (or vice-versa). There is an intentionally fable-like element to Jesus' words here, and so let's not for a moment think that Jesus is sketching for us a literal map of heaven and hell.

For this parable to work these two men need to see each other. And when they do, the first thing you should notice is that the rich man recognizes Lazarus and, more strikingly still, even knows his name. He had not been ignorant of the man who had long laid at his gates. So there's the first zinger: the rich man at first appeared to be guilty of no more than a sin of omission, a passive failure to address a situation he maybe didn't even know about in the first place. But his sin starts to look a whole lot more aggressive and active once you realize he was aware of this man, even to the point of knowing his name.

As an aside, notice also that of all Jesus' parables, the character of Lazarus is the only parabolic character ever given a name by Jesus. It seems Jesus is intent on putting a very human face on the poor. "The poor" are not a socio-economic category to be talked about in the abstract. They are people, human beings, God's imagebearers. They have names. In this case, even the rich man knew the name. Maybe this is Jesus' way of saying that for most of us, claiming we just didn't realize there was compassionate work to be done in our neighborhood won't wash. We all know more than we let on.

The rich man knew Lazarus. But he's still thinking of only himself. Lazarus has now been beatified and glorified but this rich man still asks Lazarus to serve him! After being told that can't happen, the man then goes on to worry once again about only his own kith and kin, his own rich brothers. It seems that once selfishness and self-centeredness and a world-class sense of entitlement gets deeply ingrained into one's soul, not even the fires of hell can burn off that baseline attitude. Even this conversation with Abraham is all about the rich man and those of his ilk with Lazarus playing the role of servant.

Of course, it's not quite that bleak. The man wants Lazarus to beam back down to earth to save his brothers but the implication is that this salvation would come by virtue of their then reaching out to the poor. But it will never get that far because Abraham says it won't work. For one thing, even a resurrected Lazarus might well have just as hard a time getting past the front gate as had once been true. An anonymous person whose name is not on the social registry of the rich and famous is not going to get ushered into the parlor even if he tells the gatekeeper some wild story of being just back from the dead. The hard-hearted of life who are not moved by the sight of the kind of abject poverty in which Lazarus once lived will likewise not be moved by miracles.

But the notion that the rich man's brothers won't buy Lazarus' story is not the main reason Abraham refuses the request. In the end it's not that Lazarus might not get through to them and so why bother but rather the idea that Lazarus would be superfluous. "They already have something better than a man returned from death," Abraham says. "They've got their Bibles. They've got Moses. They've got the Old Testament Law. They've got prophets like Amos and Micah who ripped into the selfishly rich people of Israel long ago and whose prophetic upbraidings have been preserved as a warning to also future generations. If they won't listen to the living voices of Scripture, neither will they listen to a dead man like Lazarus who will say to them the exact same things."

In other words, those who find it easy to ignore Scripture will find it equally easy to ignore anyone who quotes Scripture to them. They have Moses. And if he's not enough for them, neither would Lazarus be. Or anybody. The rich man before he died, and now his surviving brothers, had every opportunity to know better all along. When it comes to just treatment of the poor, no one with a Bible can claim not to have known any better.

So does Luke 16 teach us that the rich are damned sheerly by virtue of being rich even as the poor are saved sheerly by virtue of being poor? No. The witness of Scripture, the ability for this rich man to have known better all along, reveals to us that undergirding this parable is the assumption that faith, and also faithfulness to God's Word, play key roles here. The rich man could have remained very wealthy but had he followed the lead of Moses and the Prophets, he would have done vastly different things with his wealth. And if he was saved thereby, it would have been his faith in the Word, and not generous deeds, that made the difference in terms of God's judgment on the state of his soul.

Still, in this chapter, and most certainly throughout the course of Luke's gospel, we see the theme of what Liberation Theology calls "the preferential option for the poor." The poor need to be saved by grace same as anyone else, true enough. But all through the Bible--through Moses, the Prophets, and now also the Gospel--God shows that there is one huge soft spot in his divine heart for the widowed, the orphaned, the disenfranchised of all kinds. God has a heart for the poor. God hates poverty and he wills its abolishment. We can talk politically all day long and until kingdom come about the underlying reasons for this or that form of poverty, about how some poor people contribute to their sad lot in life by making bad choices as well as about what is really the best way to help the poor. New Deal and Great Society advocates have one approach, some of the so-called Neo-Cons of today appear to have another approach. Republicans think one way, Democrats another.

We can talk and debate all the day long. But when the day is done, what no biblically literate Christian should dare to deny is that God's Word makes it clear that God hates poverty and he expects those of us who are not poor to do something. Whether or not we do, however, appears to depend in no small measure on how seriously we take the whole of Scripture. You see, at this juncture in Jesus' ministry the end is near. The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem will take place in Luke very soon as it is recorded in Luke 19. So when in this parable Jesus says, "they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead," there can be little doubt that we are to hear hints of Jesus' own rising from the dead and how that will be received by the world.

But for us, the only way we know about that resurrection of Jesus is through the Bible. If you believe what we celebrate not only on Easter Sunday morning but really every single week here at church--namely, if you believe it makes sense to pray to Jesus, sing to Jesus, and worship Jesus in that he is still alive as our resurrected Lord--then you embrace all that because you believe the witness of Scripture. You didn't see Jesus emerge from the tomb. You do not personally know anyone else who witnessed that, either. So if you believe the resurrection, it is not finally because your mother told you so or because it seems like such an obvious thing to believe. You believe it because of what you sang about long ago in the song "Jesus Loves Me": The Bible tells me so.

That's why last Sunday morning in my sermon I talked about the centrality of the Word in our tradition and the need to maintain the authority of Scripture if we are to avoid a kind of theological freefall. But the point for this evening and in connection to this parable is that if you are willing to believe the Bible's witness to the resurrection, then you must be willing to believe also that same Bible's witness to the fact that God hates poverty, he despises unjust treatment of those who are already poor for whatever the reason, and he expects his Bible-believing people to do something about it.

"They have Moses," Abraham tells the tormented rich man in hell. We have Moses, too. And we have Amos and Jeremiah and Micah and Hosea and Isaiah and all those other biblical writers who make clear that those who buy and sell the poor, those who treat the poor as a blight on society instead of as cherished brothers and sisters in need of help, are not just displeasing to God but are also ignoring the very Word God has provided for us. If we believe the resurrection accounts, which are so very, very difficult to believe in that these stories are completely unlike anything we have ever experienced, then why would we not believe the far easier-to-embrace parts of the Bible that tell us how much God wants us to do right by the needy in our midst?

One of the prophets whose words we have is Micah. At one point Micah asks an obvious question. "He has shown you, O man, what is right. And what does the Lord require of you? To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." As one commentator once noted, this is not rocket science. These are not complicated instructions. In a way, there is more complexity to be found in the instructions on how to assemble a child's tricycle than in much of what prophets like Micah tell us to do.

We have Moses. What's more, now we have Jesus. In this powerful parable our Lord asks us what we will do with the knowledge we have by faith as that knowledge comes to us from the Word of God. What kind of lives will we lead? What kind of government policies will we get excited about? What kind of congregation should we be in the midst of the community where we find ourselves? We have Moses. We have Jesus. Will we listen to what they say? Amen.