Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, March 30, 2025
by Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: The chasm isolating the rich man in death is the same one he erected in life. Until his heart is changed, it will always be there.
At first blush, the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man seems to be terribly harsh. The rich man lived a sinful, self-indulgent life, this much is true. But he seems genuinely remorseful. And don’t we believe in a God of mercy? The Nicene Creed may have left it out, but the Apostles’ still has Jesus descending to the dead. Why would he go if not to liberate those who were repentant, even flagrant sinners like this man?
But is the rich man truly repentant of his sins? At first, he seems that way, but the more we delve into his interaction with Abraham, the more we see that he hasn’t learned anything. For starters, there is no remorse for his complicity in the life that Lazarus lived, no apology for leaving him at the gate rather than sharing the infinitesimal fraction of his bounty that would have allowed Lazarus to enjoy life and life abundant. He is entirely concerned about himself, first for the slaking of his thirst, then for the possibility of his removal from torment. When the door to his redemption seems shut, the rich man finally turns his attention to others. However, whom he looks to is telling. His petition “underscores the rich man’s blindness. He uses familial terms (father, brother), but they are confined to members of his house and, by extension, members of his class.”[1] Lazarus was not the only beggar of his world; there would have been many like him. The rich man, however, does not even begin to think of righting the wrong of how he lived. He thinks only of escaping his fate and, when that proves unlikely, helping those living like him to avoid it. Nowhere is there genuine repentance for his ways.
If we read this parable as a warning about punishment in the life to come, we fall into the same trap that the rich man has, namely, of thinking only of ourselves. His relegation to torment is a result of his stubborn refusal to take a good look in the mirror and truly see who he is and how far short of the mark he lived his life. It is important to drive home to our listeners that avoiding punishment is not the basis for a life of faith. As Jesus will tell us in the next chapter, “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.” Seeking after Jesus as a means of securing our own wellbeing is, to borrow Luther’s description of sin, to be wickedly curved inward. We do not proclaim a gospel of saving ourselves but the good news of a God who has saved us, setting us free from self-absorption to lose our lives in love of the last and least of these, the Lazaruses of our world.
[1] William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech, (Westminster John Knox, 1994), 124.
