A time to be rich and a time to be poor: Eschatological reversal in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus

The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus can be effortlessly incorporated into interpretative programs of progressive social action. This fable of a bourgeois oppressor receiving his just desserts for neglecting the poor—coming straight from the mouth of Jesus Christ—provides dependable ammunition for socialistic causes. Had the rich man only listened to the Law and the prophets, embodied in Christ’s solidarity with the marginalized in their crusade against the land-owning elite, he may well have attained the heavenly bliss enjoyed by Lazarus. On the contrary, during his life he enjoyed excess at the expense of the destitute and was thus justly banished to a fiery netherworld.

For those who are not interested in class struggle, however, this parable proves obstinate to the best of evangelical hermeneutical wrangling. The tale treats the one doctrine prized above all others—justification by faith—quite like the rich man treats Lazarus, with reckless abandon. Nowhere does Jesus extol the poor man’s faith or reprimand the rich man’s disbelief. As in the parable of the Sheep and Goats, rather, faith in Christ plays no part in the allotment of eternal life and eternal torment. Instead, Father Abraham appeals only to the upside-down nature of the afterlife to justify this dichotomy of reward and punishment: “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony” (Luke 16:25). The rich man, so it would seem, condemned because of his riches; the poor man justified because of his poverty.

While the matter-of-fact depiction of Heaven, Hell, and the chasm in between, is agreeable to the evangelical mind, the parable as a whole remains puzzling within conservative theological frameworks. One cannot too quickly return to more pleasant Biblical territory: the lush pastures of Paul’s letters and the Gospel of John, for example. 

The progressive reading of the parable is, of course, rife for deconstruction as well. If the absence of justification by faith disturbs us, so should the absence of any moralizing posture—any sense that one might be justified by works. Indeed, the injustice intrinsic to the one man’s lavish consumption juxtaposed by the other man’s grotesque deprivation receives no explicit comment. Their proximity in life, rather, seems to merely provide for their familiarity in death—a necessary facet in the story’s logic such that the rich man can realize his new status relative to the beggar at his gate. This moral ambiguity has not been lost on all scholars. James Crossely and Robert Myles suggest the following:

It is notable that there are no moral reasons given for the respective fates of Lazarus and the rich man, not even a hint that the rich man had misused his wealth. Instead, the patriarch Abraham offers a straightforward explanation: ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.’ The implication, of course, was the idea that the scriptures, ‘correctly’ interpreted, viewed wealth disparity itself as inherently evil.”

Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict, 114-115.

To remedy this ethical difficulty many appeal to Abraham’s words later on concerning the scriptures: “[The rich] have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” While Abraham may seem to recall the scriptural obligation regarding care for the poor so as to explain the rich man’s hellish misery, this is not certain. What appears to be in view is not a specific command of the Law regarding inter-Israelite relations (e.g. Deuteronomy 24:19), nor regarding economic inequality as such (e.g. Micah 2:1-11), but rather the broader function of Israel’s scriptures to prophesy the revolutionary ascendancy of the Messiah. Abraham continues: “If [the rich] do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31). What both the prophets testify to and what the resurrection of the dead confirms is explored later on in the Gospel of Luke: “‘Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, [Christ] interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Luke 24:25-27, cf. John 5:39-40). Herein lies the primary purpose of scripture in earliest Christianity—to foretell the execution and resurrection of the Messiah prior to the establishment of the messianic kingdom. The great reversal predicted throughout the Old Testament and distilled definitively in the Magnificat and Benedictus (i.e. the day of the Lord’s wrath) required first the humiliation, death, and vindication of God’s Christ, Jesus the crucified Galilean. Not even the resurrection of the dead, a hallmark of the eschaton, could convince Israel’s aristocracy of the doom ahead, so claims Abraham.

Apocalyptic ethics of wealth

The upshot of this amoral and apocalyptic reading of the parable is twofold.

First, the rich man failed to secure Abraham’s hospitality in the afterlife, the age to come, because he clung to his possessions despite the advent of the Messiah—God’s agent of eschatological crisis. The rich man, like many of those wealthy Jews who rejected Jesus’ message of an impending kingdom of God, stored up treasures for a future that never came. The long-prophesied day of the Lord caught him unprepared; buying and selling, building and planting, as were those who were swept away in the days of Noah (cf. Luke 17:26-33). While Abraham himself was once a prosperous man with many slaves and many heads of cattle, he was, unlike the rich man of the parable and the rich men of Jesus’ generation, well-attuned to the timing of God. Rich but guiltless, Abraham foresaw the far-off messianic age with joy. Yet now the Messiah had come and announced the final verdict to Israel—”some are last who will [soon] be first, and some are first who will [soon] be last” (Luke 13:30). There was now no excuse for retaining money: “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions” (Luke 14:33).

After completing his prophetic course, Jesus next fulfilled the scriptures for all to see by dying and rising from the dead. Even still, those Jews “dressed in purple and feasting sumptuously” did not believe that the day of judgement was near. Therefore God would soon “fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53). 

Perhaps the clearest expression of this apocalyptic orientation toward wealth appears in the Lukan counterpart to the Beatitudes. Jesus declares: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep” (Luke 6:24-25). A prophetic word had come upon Israel that necessitated decisive and immediate action—action taken not because money, food, and happiness are wicked in and of themselves but because “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:25). In other words, it was time for the rich to prove their devotion to God, to be justified by faith, as it were, by abandoning their property just before David’s booth was restored to Jerusalem.

Second, taking Abraham’s explication of the afterlife on its face also entails that Lazarus became the beneficiary of the Patriarchal banquet (cf. Luke 13:38-29), the “great and mighty nation” promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, simply by being an impoverished Jew. No noteworthy faith or exemplary work justified his warm welcome into the bosom of Abraham. Rather, Lazarus received “evil things” in his life (i.e. in the present age) and so received consolation in death (i.e. in the age to come). The rich man, on the other hand, received no such communion with his glorious ancestor, only chilling dismissal. Being therefore neither worthy nor unworthy in any conventional sense, justified neither by good works nor by faith in the atoning blood of Christ, the rich man and Lazarus entered radically different states upon death, the one into sorrow and shame (i.e. Gehenna, outer darkness), the other into pleasure and honor (i.e. God’s kingdom): “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame… For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner” (Luke 14:21-24).

Reversals in eschatological-history

When the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus is incorporated into Jesus’ larger apocalyptic program like so it functions in the same way as does the parable of the Rich Fool—death in each fable symbolizing one’s transition into the next age or eternal life (αἰώνιος ζωή). Jesus warned his countrymen that this transition—what he called the kingdom of God—was close at hand, and, moreover, that its arrival would result in a sweeping re-alignment of status and property. The revolution would be catastrophic for those with riches but kind to those with nothing.

Interpreted through the lens of history past, we might locate this reversal first in Israel’s war with Rome—a period of devastation for Jerusalem generally and for the Jewish elite specifically. The holy city, its cultic apparatus, and any meaningful possession of the land were at that time stripped away from the Jewish people. The children of Jacob would henceforth persist as a diaspora community, a people not of the temple-state but of the Book of Moses. Although Judaism had formerly been a privileged cult of the Roman Empire, the disastrous rebellion against the heathen occupation would permanently break Israel’s ability to police heresies like Christianity in Syria-Palestina and elsewhere. Yet beyond this dissolution Christians would procure major centers of influence in the eastern part of the Empire: Damascus, Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Caesarea Maritima. Some pagans would even come to acknowledge that the God of heaven had punished the Jews on behalf of his innocent servant, Jesus.

What else can we say, when the wise are forcibly dragged off by tyrants, their wisdom is captured by insults, and their minds are oppressed and without defense? What advantage did the Athenians gain from murdering Socrates? Famine and plague came upon them as a punishment for their crime. What advantage did the men of Samos gain from burning Pythagoras? In a moment their land was covered with sand. What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king? It was just after that their kingdom was abolished. God justly avenged these three wise men: the Athenians died of hunger; the Samians were overwhelmed by the sea and the Jews, desolate and driven from their own kingdom, live in complete dispersion. But Socrates is not dead, because of Plato; neither is Pythagoras, because of the statue of Juno; nor is the wise king, because of the new law he laid down.

Mara bar Serapion, 2nd century Stoic philosopher

The eschatological reversal conveyed in the parable might also be identified with the eventual overthrow of Mediterranean paganism by the increasingly Neo-Platonic religio of the divine Christ. The “new law” of Christ would ultimately bankrupt the ancestral pantheon and enrich the Greek churches strewn about the Empire, the emergent “Israel of God” (cf. Galatians 6:16).¹ By means of such complex historical processes God would raise up Lazarus from the dead and into the arms of Abraham, redeeming “the scum of the world, the refuse of all things” from the landfill (1 Corinthians 4:13), and cast out the rich men of the previous epoch into fire and gloom.

---

1. See Paul D.’s excellent post at Is That in the Bible? regarding the intriguing connections between the parabolic Lazarus, Abraham’s Syrian slave, Eliezer, and Luke’s supersessionist attitude toward the Jewish people.