Brothers and sisters,
Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and
our risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Jesus tells a parable of a rich man and a poor man.
And it should come as no surprise that the sympathetic character in this
parable is the poor man. Were this story told today it might be received as an
attempt to invoke some sort of class warfare for there is an undeniable element
of “the haves” and the “have-nots”.
This parable comes right after Jesus has been
teaching that we need to loosen our grip on money; that we cannot serve God and
money. So a story involving a rich man and a poor man seems appropriate. And as
Jesus is prone to do with earthly notions, He takes our concept of the haves
and have-nots and flips it upside down.
In one of
the verses immediately prior to today’s Gospel lesson Jesus says “The Law and the Prophets were
until John; since then the good news of the kingdom of God is preached, and everyone
forces his way into it.” God has given the law and the prophets (the Old
Testament) for the purpose of pointing forward to Christ Jesus and also
exposing the reality of your sinful nature in order to show you your need for a
Savior. And those who ignore this warning are the have-nots because they do not
realize their own need for a Savior, they don’t admit their own powerlessness
to sin, death and the devil. And so what
they don’t have is the justification before God and salvation that comes only through
faith in what Christ Jesus accomplished for sinners in His life, death and
resurrection. But those who heed the warning and who hear and trust the Gospel
are the haves. They have justification. They have salvation. They have eternal
life in God’s Kingdom.
And so as the story moves forward, Jesus shows that as different as the
two men were from each other, there was at least one thing that they, along
with all of us have in common. They both died. This is why some call death the
great equalizer.
The first of the two to die is the poor man Lazarus. And when Lazarus
dies it says that the angels carry him to Abraham’s side. All we know about the
rich man’s death is that he ended up in Hades. We also know that Jesus does not
appear to know the rich-man’s name as He just refers to him as a rich-man; this
perhaps is an indication that Jesus declared to him, depart from me I never
knew you, and with that forgot even his name. Jesus simply says that the rich man died, he
was buried and that he is in torment. It was a reversal of fortune. On earth
the rich man lived in comfort and opulence but in death he was in torment.
Lazarus lived in squalor and despair on earth but after this life he went to a
place where he was happy and comfortable.
In Hades, the rich man pleads with Abraham to send Lazarus to relieve
the torment that he was experiencing, if even for just a moment. But Abraham
refuses and tells him about the big chasm between them. But the rich man keeps
going and asks Abraham to send Lazarus to his father’s house so that he would
warn his five brothers. But Abraham tells the rich man that his brothers have
the law and the prophets; let them hear them;
if they are not convinced by the law and the prophets, they will not be
convinced by someone rising from the dead.
And that is the heart of this story. That is what the haves have and what the
have-nots are missing; faith in God’s Word, trust in God’s promises revealed in
scripture, an abiding in the eternal hope of the Gospel. But it’s not that the
Word and promises of Christ are not available to the have-nots. They are. But
the have-nots remain in bondage to sin and the devil who seek to convince us
that we do not need a Savior. They seduce us into making our own idols of
self-sufficiency, and the world just feeds into this by telling us we should never
be content.
The promises of God were just as available to the nameless rich man as
they were to Lazarus. But the rich man was like many people in our modern
culture who strive to be totally self-sufficient. They thrive on not needing
anybody’s help. They long to be independently wealthy. Like the rich-man,
wealth and power ultimately is their god. The rich-man loved his money and hated God.
Perhaps he simply did not spend a whole lot of time thinking about God. Why
trust in God when you already have everything you need to make you happy?
A recent study showed that happiness does increase as income-level
increases. The more money a person makes, the happier they are. It would seem,
to a certain degree, money can buy happiness. However this stops at 75 K. Once
the income reaches 75K the level of people’s happiness no longer goes up as
incomes increase. If you make 75K or more you are about as happy as you can be
here on earth. And I am sure if we could ask the rich man and Lazarus about
their own happiness when they were here on earth we would find that the rich
man was pretty happy in his lavish robes and sumptuous feasts while
Lazarus-believer though he was-was probably pretty unhappy during his life. So
money can improve our quality of life.
But like everything of this world, money has limits. When you hear the
doctor say that it’s cancer, when you get the call from the police that one of
your loved ones was killed by a drunk driver, when your facing your own
mortality, if money is your god, all it can offer is despair.
Of course we all want to be secure, we all seek contentment. And sin,
the devil and the world will tell you to seek this contentment through
self-reliance and in things of the world. Bookstores are filled with how-to
books, books on possibility thinking, and new-age books that teach that we can
create our own reality, and even so-called Christian books that teach
false-doctrines about becoming wealthy by simply naming and claiming what we
desire.
But in
the lesson from 1st Timothy, Paul speaks of a different sort of
contentment. He speaks of contentment that comes not from self-reliance and
ambition but from dependence upon Christ, when he says But godliness with contentment is
great gain. The quest for self-sufficiency will never result
in true and lasting contentment since Christ alone supplies what is necessary
for our eternal welfare. In fact in Philippians 4 Paul makes it clear that his
contentment is found in the complete opposite of self-sufficiency for he says
that he has learned to be content in whatever situation, that he can abound in
any and every circumstance and that he has learned the secret of facing plenty
and hunger and abundance and need. And Paul confesses the source of that
contentment when he writes I can do all
things through him who strengthens me.
Though it was too late for him, the rich man wanted his five brothers to
be spared the same torment he was enduring so he asked Abraham to send Lazarus
to warn them-thinking that surely they would believe if they saw Lazarus risen
from the dead. But Abraham tells him that if they did not believe the law and
prophets then they would not believe even if someone rose from the dead. The rich man’s 5 brothers appear to be afflicted
with the same deluded sense of self-sufficiency that their brother was. As long
as they clung to their own self-sufficiency then they would never find the true
contentment that comes only from trusting in the promises of Christ Jesus-the
One through Whom Paul confessed he could do all things.
The proclaimed Word of Christ creates faith by declaring sinners
righteous before God because of Christ Jesus’ giving of Himself on the cross.
Salvation is bestowed through the promise of the resurrection in Christ Jesus.
The holy and precious blood of Christ was shed that you would find true and
eternal contentment. Even faith itself is a gift, as Martin Luther declares in
the small catechism: “I believe that I
cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or
come to Him..” Jesus promises that all scripture testifies of Him; thus in
the Word of God the Holy Spirit creates, renews and regenerates faith.
Contentment cannot be found through your self-sufficiency.
And when you seek contentment through your own efforts, it is not just a
fruitless effort, but it is rebellion against God. It is idolatry. The law and
the prophets expose this reality to you by revealing your powerlessness to sin
and point you to Christ. It wakes you up to the reality that you are like
Lazarus; beggars completely dependent upon the mercy of another. But in your
case the other is Christ Jesus who meets you in your poverty, sin and death. He
becomes poor so that through His poverty you might become rich.
He took on your weak and sinful humanity and He lifts you up from the
curb and brings you to His house. In baptism He cleanses the bruises of your
sin and washes your wounds, in the Lord’s Supper you receive the forgiveness of
sins and are further transformed from beggars outside of the Kingdom to friends
of the King who have a place at the eternal banquet in the Kingdom and you
receive not just the crumbs but the abundance of salvation. You have more than
the law and the prophets, you have the Gospel of Christ Jesus. You have the
Word, you have the sacraments, you have the forgiveness of sins. You have
Christ. You are as rich as Lazarus. Praise be to God.
Amen
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