Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Rich Man and Lazarus
Luke 16:19-31
19 “Now there was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, living in luxury every day. · WEB
A beggar at a gate and the man who stepped over him — and a request for a warning that is refused twice.
"Now there was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, living in luxury every day" Luke 16:19.
The last of the chapter's parables is told to the same audience as the rest — men described three paragraphs earlier as lovers of money who scoffed Luke 16:14 — and it is the fifth parable in a run addressed to them. Everything about how it is read follows from that.
The two men are drawn in a sentence each. Purple and fine linen were the most expensive cloth available, and every day rules out the excuse of an occasional indulgence. A certain beggar, named Lazarus, was taken to his gate, full of sores Luke 16:20 — carried there by somebody, since he cannot walk, and left at the one door in the district where there was food to spare.
The beggar is given a name. No other figure in any parable is, and the name means God has helped. The rich man has none, which reverses the way such stories are usually remembered.
The indictment is never stated. He does not have Lazarus driven off, and no cruelty is described. He simply steps past a starving man at his own gate every day, for years, and this is the whole of the charge.
"The beggar died, and he was carried away by the angels to Abraham's bosom. The rich man also died and was buried" Luke 16:22.
What follows is the scene the parable is famous for, and it needs to be read for what it is doing.
The imagery is the popular picture of the next world as that generation told it — a bosom of Abraham, a fixed gulf, torment and comfort within speaking distance. That picture is not drawn from the older Scriptures; the phrase Abraham's bosom appears nowhere in them. It is the furniture of a familiar story, and a teacher who wanted to press a point about wealth on men who told that story would naturally use their own scenery.
And the scenery cannot be pressed as description. The rich man has eyes, a tongue and a finger, and both bodies are accounted for — one was buried in the same verse. A drop of water on a fingertip is offered as relief in flame. These are the details of a picture, not of a place, and Scripture elsewhere states plainly that the dead know nothing and that the resurrection is future Ecclesiastes 9:5–6 Psalms 146:4 John 5:28–29. Honest readers have long differed over how much weight this scene will bear, and what settles the question best is what the parable says it is about.
Because it does say. The conversation runs past the torment to a request, and the request is the payload.
"I ask you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father's house — for I have five brothers — that he may testify to them" Luke 16:27–28. The first sympathetic impulse the man has ever shown is for his own family, which is in character.
"They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them" Luke 16:29.
That is the answer, and it is the point of the whole parable. The brothers do not need a messenger from the dead; they have the Scriptures, which are full of instruction about the poor at the gate — the law's edges of the field, the prophets' fury at those who lie on ivory beds and are not grieved Amos 6:4–6.
"No, father Abraham, but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent" Luke 16:30. He argues, which is the last thing he does. He believes a spectacular sign would work where the text has not.
"If they don't listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if one rises from the dead" Luke 16:31.
The refusal is the parable's closing verdict and it is the same thing this book has said since Nazareth and since the demand for a sign Luke 11:29. Evidence does not produce repentance in people who have declined what they already have. A man who steps over Lazarus daily with the prophets on his shelf will not be moved by a ghost.
And there is a further edge, aimed at the men listening. Within a few chapters another man named Lazarus is raised from the dead, and it hardens the opposition rather than ending it John 12:9–11. The sentence proved true before the ink was dry.
held with reason What this mark means