AT A KEY JUNCTURE in Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ public ministry, the Nazarene spins the short, foreboding cautionary tale of Lazarus and the rich man (16:19-31). It is set in the afterlife, where a rich man who is a model of entitlement and denial encounters Abraham, the primal progenitor of his people. They have a tense and terse exchange, albeit at a distance.
Abraham tries to explain to him two truths about the economic life and world the rich man has just left. First, his wealth was predicated upon a fatal sociological, moral, and theological condition the patriarch calls a chasma mega (“huge gulf”). It separated and insulated him from people who were impoverished and dehumanized by the system that created and sustained his privilege, people whose pain can only be grasped from their side of that social chasm. Second, to find the will and way to eradicate this cruel gulf, the rich man must reread his sacred scriptures.
This tale lies at the center of a series of seven decidedly unflattering portraits of rich men in Luke’s gospel. This series forms the backbone of the middle section of the longest gospel. It is framed before and after by two indictments: of a rich farmer’s selfishness (12:16-21) and of wealthy lawyers’ exploitation of poor widows (20:45-47; 21:1-4). This middle parable functions as Luke’s “narrative fulcrum” and articulates his keystone theme.
It also speaks plainly to our historical moment. We live in an era in which persistent economic disparity threatens social coherence, democratic prospects, and ecological viability. But Luke also assures us that the biblical vision of Sabbath economics represents ancient medicine that can animate the political imagination necessary to heal this otherwise terminal disease.
Jesus’ earlier beatitudes (6:20-26) and disciples’ prayer (11:1-4) proclaim good news to the poor. His realistic parable of the “Defecting Manager” (16:1-12), on the other hand, addresses those caught between the conflicting demands of Sabbath economics and plutocracy or rule by the wealthy (this includes most of us in North America). The “Defecting Manager” parable concludes with an ultimatum: “You cannot serve God and mammon” (16:13). Sabbath economics is rooted in God’s instructions to dismantle, on a regular basis, the fundamental patterns and structures of stratified wealth and power, so that there is enough for everyone.
It is then, to show us the consequences of failing to deconstruct systems of violent social and economic inequality, that Jesus offers the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, a surreal image of a dark mirror. Here, the brutality of disparity is purgatory: for the poor in their daily life; for the souls of the rich here and hereafter; and for all our prospects of peaceable equilibrium in society. Here too, the flames of Hades become a contemporary allegory for our warming planet under climate crisis.
Since mammon ultimately ravages both haves and have-nots (if in different ways), our parable challenges all of us infected with affluenza to view the world upside down — because the truth of social divides can only be seen from their other side.
A closer look
THE OPENING SCENE places a desperate outcast and a mansion owner in close proximity: Perhaps they meet daily at the gate. But the two are segregated by a distance designed to be uncrossable by the architects of a plutocratic system.
Like a political cartoonist, Luke employs here archetypal caricatures of wealth and poverty. The wealthy main character is a concise sketch of decadence. He “always clothed himself” with “purple and fine linen,” luxury imports equivalent to today’s high-end Italian power suits. (These fabrics are similarly mentioned together by John the Revelator as part of doomed cargo mourned by the profiteering merchants of a burning Babylon in Revelation 18:12).
That this man was “feasting sumptuously every day” would have been a slap in the face to Jesus’ original peasant audience, for whom such meals were limited to occasional, shared community festivals. This reiterates the solipsism of affluenza portrayed in Jesus’ parable about the rich farmer whose singular concern was how to store and privately consume his surplus (12:16-21). That earlier cautionary tale also cut short presumptive indulgence with sudden death (“This very night your life is being demanded of you”) as judgment — a veil Luke will now peer behind.
Tradition has called the rich man Dives (Latin for “rich”), but Luke’s gospel leaves him nameless, as a generic cipher for his economic class. The other character, in contrast, has nothing except a name. “Lazarus” derives from the Hebrew Eleazar (“God is my help”). Lazarus never utters a word in this story, but his positioning outside the rich man’s gate speaks volumes as a midrash on Amos’ oracle calling the rich to account (Amos 5:10-15). It is Lazarus who “convicts at the gate” (Amos 5:10) those who “trample on the poor” (verse 11). Dives, in turn, symbolizes those who live in “houses of hewn stone” (verse 11), who “turn aside the needy at the gate” (verse 12) having failed to “establish justice in the gate” (verse 15).
In Luke, Lazarus is equally archetypal of those at the bottom of the social pyramid: made poor by debt (displaced from his land and kinship network), disease (he has “sores”), and discrimination (considered “unclean”). He “longs for” the cast-off pieces of bread used as napkins by the rich at table — yet cannot even compete with street dogs for these (16:21). As my late teacher William Herzog put it, “He is so beaten down that he does not even have the status of beggar.”
Having established this all-too-recognizable scenario of extreme social disparity in bold strokes, Luke’s plot commences starkly. Both characters die (16:22) — mortality being the only thing they have in common. Dives is buried, implying all the pomp of a funeral for his class. Lazarus receives no interment, his body likely disposed in a refuse heap. This is where Luke’s deconstruction of this punishing world commences, reflecting what liberation theology calls “God’s preferential option for the poor.”
Lazarus’ corpse is carried by angels to the “bosom of Abraham” (a beautiful vision preserved in the venerable African American spiritual “Rocka My Soul”). Dives, on the other hand, is cast into Hades (Greek) or Sheol (Hebrew). In antiquity, this connoted a kind of holding place where just and unjust gathered in separate groups, awaiting judgment. The parable states matter-of-factly these contrasting “destinations” and reiterates them in verse 23. The opening spatial opposition is intensified cosmically: The gate that separated the two in life has become a gulf in death. Lazarus’ longing for crumbs from the table is echoed in Dives’ plea for water (verse 24).
If this were merely a Trading Places plot device, it would connote a crude form of divine retribution-in-kind. However, it’s more helpful to read it as a split screen vision characteristic of ancient apocalyptic resistance literature. Apocalypsis in Greek means “unmasking.” The rhetoric in apocalyptic literature peers through the dominant stories of empire: the self-aggrandizing fictions of sovereignty, militaristic triumphalism, seductive delusions of entitlement, and severe orthodoxies of law and order.
Apocalyptic oracles seek to poke through what The Matrix’s Morpheus calls “the world that has been pulled over [our] eyes.” These oracles re-vision reality from the standpoint of redemption: First, by stripping away layers of denial and propaganda that keep us distracted, preventing us from apprehending empire as it really is from the perspective of the poor and excluded. Second, by transfusing our dulled and dumbed-down imaginations with dreams of a social order as it can and should be from the perspective of divine love and justice. Apocalyptic “double vision” recognizes the world enslaved — and insists on its liberation. Luke’s parable is trying to jolt us into having just such “eyes that see.”
A catechism of justice
THE SECOND PART of the parable begins with the rich man’s loud cries across the gulf. Dives, refusing to engage the catechism of his new position, persists in tragi-comical attempts to negotiate with Abraham (who never stops trying to awaken him).
Luke talks about Abraham more than the other evangelists. Who really belongs to the Abrahamic family, Luke asks (3:8)? A poor woman crippled by debt is welcomed back into that family, against objections from synagogue authorities (13:16). Jesus warns that elites who presume their entitlement will not sit with Abraham at the eschatological banquet (13:28). And in Luke’s final rich-man story, a tax collector is embraced as a “son of Abraham” after he redistributes his wealth (19:9). But only in this parable does Abraham “appear” directly, portrayed as a cosmic schoolteacher.
The caricature of Dives now hits high notes of sarcasm concerning class presumption. He asks Abraham to dispatch Lazarus on a servant’s errand not once, but twice (16:24, 27). The Ancestor, in turn, addresses the plutocrat as a petulant “child,” directing his attention back to the unjust world over which the rich man once presided, and defining good and evil in clear material terms (16:25). With the shoe now on the other foot, Dives experiences the groaning pain of deprivation, while Lazarus is “comforted.”
The chasma mega (used only here in the New Testament), says Abraham, is a mirror (16:26). Having benefited from the social architecture of extreme disparity in his world, the rich man must now learn the truth of its impassability from its other side. There is restorative justice logic here: If inequality is criminal, then perpetrators must comprehend “victim impacts” to make authentic repair through restitution — as Luke will dramatize in the story of Zacchaeus (19:9).
Yet Dives, unrepentant, doubles down, exuding male entitlement (16:27–28). Presuming that his brothers deserve “special warning,” he proposes that Lazarus be sent to the household of Dives’ father to “bear solemn witness” concerning the wages of such economic disparity (verse 28). Dives is not wrong that testimony “from the other side” of social gulfs is essential to change hearts and minds. Yet he ignored Lazarus at his own doorstep for years, and now he has the gall to summon the poor man to leave his “consolation” and cross the chasma mega to enlighten Dives’ plutocratic relatives! This rich man still has not reckoned with marginalizing poverty, desiring only to “save” his own kin who still live in luxury. Today this is referred to as revictimization: We the privileged are well-practiced at displacing responsibility, ever expecting oppressed people to bear the emotional labor of speaking truth.
The third and final exchange is the parable’s punch line. Abraham waves off Dives’ attempts to make victims responsible for change and points the House of Dives instead to the testimony of scripture (verse 29). It’s all there, Abraham says, in the Sabbath economics vision of Moses and the prophets.
Dives’ last gambit moves from special pleading to full-blown quarrel. “No!” he insists, his wealthy kin will only change their behavior “if someone is sent to them from the dead” (verse 30). Abraham’s rejoinder is stunning: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (verse 31). In Luke’s narrative, this last phrase refers not to Hades, but to Jesus’ resurrection. This is how the gospel story ends (or rather, continues). Yet at its midpoint, Jesus insists it is only the scriptural catechism of justice, not the newness of resurrection, that can “persuade” us to repent.
This is a shocking assertion — especially for those who regard Jesus’ resurrection as a dogmatic requirement, or worse, a “get out of jail free” card. Yet Abraham’s clincher anticipates Luke’s epilogue: On the road to Emmaus, an unrecognized Jesus exhorts disillusioned disciples to turn to “Moses and the prophets” to understand the crisis of history (24:27, 44). Luke’s Risen Christ doesn’t offer a “happily ever after” ending but empowers us to transform disparity by apprenticing to our traditions of prophetic faith.
Scripture afflicts the comfortable
WE WEALTHY NORTH American Christians tend to resist this biblical witness from both testaments, despite our professions of scripture’s “authority.” Instead, we ape Dives’ desire for special dispensation or divine intervention to resolve our personal and political problems. But these exchanges between Dives (self-referential and defiant to the end) and Abraham (equally stubbornly insistent on biblical literacy) undermine every theology of privilege and immunity by which we exonerate ourselves from responsibility to realize economic justice.
This parable represents the hermeneutic key to Luke’s whole gospel. It holds up an eschatological mirror to our own economic realities, challenging us to either live against or die within the inhumane gulfs that divide our social landscape. It points us back to the Sabbath economics vision of scripture, as the Risen Christ himself does.
This “small catechism” in Luke is a rude awakening for our daydreams of the hereafter, arguing that the contradictions of our here will persist in our after. It exhorts us to reread the Bible, our history, and our own social geography so that we can embrace a discipleship that dismantles the chasma mega.
As such, this catechism has haunted our churches, appearing persistently in the iconography and art of Christendom. And it remains disturbingly relevant. In 2009, historians Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen analyzed economic disparity in the Roman Empire at its population peak around 150 C.E. (a few generations after Luke was written). They estimated that the top 1.5 percent of that empire’s 70 million inhabitants controlled around 20 percent of the wealth. In 2016, a study by the U.S. Federal Reserve reported that the top 1 percent in the U.S. controlled nearly 40 percent of our empire’s wealth. Since then, the disparity has intensified. I commend the exemplary work of United for a Fair Economy and the Poor People’s Campaign for how they map and organize around these realities.
If the chasma mega today is twice as wide as when Jesus told the story of Lazarus and the rich man, then this ghostly tale continues to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” Where, who, and how are Dives and Lazarus today? Why and how do we aspire to the affluenza of the former while scapegoating or making invisible the misery of the latter? How long will our churches live peaceably with socioeconomic disparity?
Our parable is a “text of terror” for American Christians — but also an invitation to relearn the economy of grace and the habits of Sabbath economics practiced by our ancestors in the faith.
This article is adapted from Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress Press, January 2025; used with permission).
Ched Myers, author of Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke's Jesus and Sabbath Economics, is an activist and theologian who co-directs Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries in Oak View, Calif. He has written and taught widely about radical discipleship at the intersection of seminary, sanctuary, streets, and soil.
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