Yeah, everyone calls it the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man but when we look at what Jesus was telling His audience of mostly poor Jews, it was a funny and outrageous story about a very rich man who is so rotten that he ends up getting thrown into the canyon where all the trash of Jerusalem is burned.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
This week and next week we will be talking about one of Jesus’s most famous parables about love—Lazarus and the Rich Man. Remember, parables are teaching stories and one thing we can see from Jesus’s parables and the many other parables from Jewish rabbis is this—they often aren’t realistic at all. They aren’t supposed to be realistic. We can’t look at a parable and say, “Oh, well this story says this about what happens after we die so this must be exactly what happens.” But that wasn’t how this kind of story works. Have you ever read Aesop’s fables? They have animals doing things that animals wouldn’t actually do but the stories make the animals more like humans so we can understand the lessons they are trying to teach. Most of Lazarus and the Rich Man seems reasonable but after Lazarus and the rich man both die, things get kinda strange and very symbolic. If the parables made sense, they could be mistaken for real events but there are always things in them that would have sounded crazy to Jesus’s audiences of God-loving Jews. There was always a “that would never happen!” sort of catch when we know what life was like in the first century—how they lived and thought—their context.
Let’s read the parable focusing on the people first and about Lazarus—he’s not the Lazarus who was Jesus’s friend and the brother of Mary and Martha. This Lazarus is made up to tell this story:
“There was a rich man who would dress in purple and fine linen, the very best of clothing, eating lots of the very best of foods every single day. But a poor man named Lazarus, covered from head to toe with terrible open sores, was lying at the man’s gate—at the entry way to his courtyard. He could smell the man’s food and wished more than anything to be filled up with whatever crumbs happened to fall on the floor from the rich man’s table, but instead of getting something to eat, the dogs would come and lick his painful sores. One day, the poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham (yes, the Abraham we have been learning about in Genesis). The rich man also died and was buried. Although his dead body was given a nice grave on earth, he ended up suffering in Hades, the world of the dead. The rich man looked up and saw Abraham a long way off, with Lazarus beside him. ‘Father Abraham!’ the rich man called out, ‘Have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water so he can come to me and cool my tongue, because I am hurting in these fires where I am!’ “‘Son,’Abraham said, ‘I want you to remember when, during your life, you got so many good things, but Lazarus got only bad things. So now, Lazarus is being comforted with the good life, while you are suffering. And even if I wanted to help you, a huge, deep canyon is permanently between us and you, so that anyone who wanted to go from here to there cannot and you can’t come from where you are to us either.’ “‘Father,’ the rich man said to Abraham, ‘please, I beg you to send Lazarus to my father’s house—because I have five brothers—so he can warn them, so that they won’t end up here too.’ “But Abraham said, ‘Your brothers have the Bible, Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ “‘No, father Abraham,’ the rich man said. ‘If someone who they know comes back from the dead and warns them, they will repent and start to do what is right.’ “But Abraham told the rich man, ‘If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets in the Bible, they won’t care even if someone rises from the dead.’” (Luke 16:19-31)
That’s kind of a scary and horrible story, right? It’s easy to start thinking about hell and fire and demons, right? Well, that isn’t the point of the story at all and actually, once we know a bit about Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, it will make a lot more sense. You see, Jerusalem used to be made up of two small mountains and three valleys around and between them. In fact, from above, the city looked like it was surrounded by something that looks like the Hebrew letter Shin (sheen)—which sorta looks like the English letter W. The Kidron Valley was on the eastern side of the city between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives, the Tyropean Valley was in the middle (also called the Cheesemaker’s valley) and the Valley of Hinnom curved around from the south to the west of the city. I will put a picture in the transcript if you want to see it. Anyway, the Gei Hinnom was where the trash of the city was burned up and that fire just never really went out because there was always new garbage to burn. Whenever Jesus talks about people being punished, He always compares it to the trash being burned outside of the city. Sometimes it gets called Gei Hinnom and other times it is called Hades, which sometimes gets translated as hell. Oh no, Miss Tyler just said a dirty word. And a funny thing about the word hell that we use, it used to just mean the place where the dead people are. In Hebrew, that place was called Sheol and they thought people went there no matter if they were good or bad. The way we think about hell now is because a poet named Dante wrote a very popular poem called The Inferno that said hell had a ton of terrible layers and sometimes people think that what Dante said is actually in the Bible but it was just a made-up story based on the Bible. The Bible says other things, but right now Jesus is telling people that the rich man ended up in the trash heap instead of next to Abraham and not that he went to hell the way Dante wrote about it. I hope that makes sense. Really, Jesus’s audience mostly would have laughed to hear about the rich man in the garbage heap and unable to get out while Lazarus and Abraham are having a good time feasting in Jerusalem. So, this story isn’t about hell and if you understand that, then you can focus on the really cool stuff in this story. Remember, like many of His parables—teaching stories—Jesus is talking about what it takes to love your neighbor and what it looks like when you don’t and where you belong if you don’t. On the trash heap of history.
Okay, so this rich dude—he is dressed in linen and purple. I know this doesn’t sound fancy but linen clothing was expensive and harder to make and come by in Israel. Jesus and His followers probably all wore clothes made from sheep’s wool and goat hair which was much easier to make. And purple? That was the most expensive dye in the world. They got it from crushing the shells of murex sea snails. The color was called Tyrian Purple because they made it in the ocean city of Tyre north of Israel just off the coast. They were actually making it even before David was King and maybe even when Moses was alive. It would take a ton of those snail shells to make the dye and so only the wealthiest people could afford it and sometimes only kings were allowed to wear it. If this rich man was wearing purple all of the time, dang, he had a lot of money. And not only did he have a lot of money for purple-dyed clothes, he was also having big feasts everyday where he ate as much as he wanted of whatever he wanted. You might not realize it, but if he is doing this every single day it means that he isn’t giving his servants a day off for the Sabbath! He was making them cook and clean and serve him every single day of the week. Not having any days off is very tiring and difficult, and cooking like that wasn’t easy back then with no electricity or refrigerators or anything. Just think of what it took to kill, roast and serve animals and everything else that went along with it. His servants were working very hard every day all year long just so that he could eat way too much. God told us not to make people work on the Sabbath because if someone has to work every single day we are treating them like slaves and our God sets slaves free, so they weren’t allowed to treat anyone like that. But this guy is living it up—only, we don’t know what his name is because Jesus didn’t think it was important enough to give him one. And there’s a good reason for that.
So, there was a poor man, covered with terrible painful sores, who laid outside of this man’s gate every day. It sounds to me like he might have been homeless because what friends would leave him in a place where no one was helping him? Jews were expected to support the poor, it was part of God’s commandments to take care of the poor and the sick. In fact, it’s one of the most common commandments—even more important than not worshiping other gods. When people worship other gods, they aren’t being loyal to our God and they are giving credit for their blessings to imaginary gods instead of our God who is the only true God who created the heavens and the earth—which means the universe and everything in it. But when people say they love our God, and they are cruel to the people who are poor and weak with no one to help them, that’s making it look like God is like that but God isn’t ever on the side of people who hurt widows, orphans, the sick and injured, people who are being held captive, people from far away who came to live with them, and the poor. This man, called Lazarus, is certainly poor and certainly sick. Lying down in a place like that, he shouldn’t be hungry and someone should be taking care of him. But no one is. No one is giving him leftovers or water for washing his wounds. In fact, the only ones even doing anything for Lazarus are the guard dogs who are licking his sores. If you have ever had a dog, you know that they lick us when they are worried about us. People in the ancient world believed that dog saliva, their slobber, could help cure sick people. We know that isn’t true anymore but that’s what Jesus’s audience would have thought. So, He was telling them in terms they could understand that the dogs were following God’s commandments better than that rich man! I am not going to give you any details, but you do not want my dog Penny licking your face under any circumstances.
The man’s name, Lazarus, is Greek—we can tell because it ends with the letter “s”. Men’s names ended with an “s” sound and women’s names ended with an “a” sound. If you have ever wondered how we get the name Jesus, it has a lot to do with that. His real name would have been Yeshua, which means something like God saves. But when the teachings of Yeshua went out into the world where they spoke Greek, there would have been a big problem with Him having a name that ended with an “a” sound like a woman’s name. Also, they didn’t have a “y” sound either! So, they had to get creative and translated it to Iesouos (EE-YEA—SOO-OSE) so it would sound like a man’s name with sounds the Greeks knew. When it got translated later into Latin, the religious language of the Romans, they shortened it up to IESUS (EE-YEA-SOOS) and then later it became Jesus when the English got a hold of it. But Jesus goes by many names all around the world when they took Yeshua and used their own sounds to make a name like it. But we call Him Jesus on Context for Kids so that the people who listen in English know who we are talking about.
But anyway, Lazarus isn’t a Hebrew name—it’s Greek. Lazarus would have probably been called Eliezer by his own family, although a lot of Jews actually were given Greek names back then just because it was a language that most folks spoke. Do you remember Eliezer of Damascus? The servant who Abraham was going to give everything he had to when he died because Abraham had no kids? That’s the same name and it means “God is my helper.” We talked about that word “ezer” last time and how it wasn’t good for the man in the Garden to be alone without a helper. We talked about how that word almost always describes how God helps us when we need it. People can be “ezer” or “help” to one another but God is the biggest ezer (helper) we have in the Bible. And so, when Jesus calls this poor man Lazarus, we would expect God to be helping him somehow, and because God usually helps us by sending us people as helpers, it would seem as though Lazarus is in the perfect place to get help but the rich man absolutely refused even though he had more than he needed. In fact, we could say that even worse than not helping Lazarus, the rich man was torturing him by showing off right in front of him, with his purple and linen clothes and the smell of his food wafting out into the courtyard and to the gate where Lazarus was lying down hungry and hurting, This rich man was given everything he needed to be an ezer from God to Lazarus but he just didn’t do anything at all.
Anyway, they both died. Which, you know, happens to everyone sooner or later. Jesus says that the angels, God’s special messengers, personally take Lazarus right to Abraham! Whoa! Talk about VIP treatment! Although Jesus said that Lazarus was taken by the angels, it says that the rich man was buried. He would have been buried in a cave where his body would have been perfumed and wrapped in cloth and his body would have rotted away until he was nothing but bones and then his bones would be put in a stone box called an ossuary and placed in another cave along with his family members. The dead ones, I mean. But we don’t see anything about Lazarus being buried—I don’t think he had anyone to take care of him like that. But, like his name says, God helped him by sending angels to personally carry him to be with Abraham, which is what every single Jew wanted—or at least the ones who believed that there is another life after we die. The Sadducees didn’t think so. So, they would have hated this story a lot. They believed you had to get the good stuff in this life and that nothing would happen to you after you died.
Although Lazarus went to hang out with Abraham, the rich man ended up in—you guessed it, Hades! And he is suffering. In fact, we know that he is burning hot because he wants some water to cool his tongue. Why is he burning? Because Jesus is saying he is on the trash heap of Jerusalem where the fire never goes out while Lazarus is living it up with Abraham in Jerusalem, the holy city. Wow, how can anything be more different, right? The rich guy had it as good as you can have it without indoor plumbing and air conditioning, and now he is having the worst life possible. Lazarus had it so bad that no one would have wanted to trade places with him, and now he is partying with Abraham himself. But wait, it gets even crazier, because the rich man calls out to Abraham from the burning trash pit, ‘Father Abraham! Have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water so he can come to me and cool my tongue, because I am hurting in these fires where I am!’
Dude said what?? “Send Lazarus, like a slave who I am not even talking to directly, to take his finger and dip it in water and come down here into the fiery trash pit to cool off my tongue for me.” So, he still sees himself as better than Lazarus, who should somehow be expected to come down into the fire to serve the rich man like some sort of slave. He isn’t even saying please to Lazarus or begging him for help. And maybe the worst thing of all is that he actually knows Lazarus’s name. How does he know his name? Did he know Lazarus personally? Did someone tell him his name? What gives? One thing we know for sure—the rich man knew Lazarus was outside his gate suffering and still did nothing about it. The rich man can’t claim to have known nothing. He can’t say, “Oh, nobody told me he was out there, I definitely would have helped him if only my servants would have mentioned him to me.” Nope, he knew enough about Lazarus to know what his name was. That’s super messed up. But we still don’t know what the rich man’s name was. So, what is Abraham going to say back to the rich man?
“‘Son,’Abraham said, ‘remember when, during your life, you got so many good things, but Lazarus got only bad things. So now, Lazarus is being comforted with the good life, while you are suffering. And even if I wanted to help you, a huge, deep canyon is permanently between us and you, so that anyone who wanted to go from here to there cannot and you can’t come from where you are to us either.’ “ Wow. Abraham isn’t calling him by his name either—maybe Abraham doesn’t know it. Instead, he calls the rich man “son,” which is what he would probably call any Jew. But even though he doesn’t call the rich man by name, his reputation is well known. Abraham knows about his life and Lazarus’s life and what he knows isn’t pretty. In fact, it’s horrible. Abraham is telling the rich man that they are both where they belong because of how they lived their lives. And remember how I said that this was about Jerusalem and the fiery garbage pit? This is why. Abraham and Lazarus are on one side of the chasm and no one can get across it to the rich man. It was the same way in ancient Israel.
But then the rich man decided to double down, which is what you call it when someone decides to not only do something wrong but does it even worse the second time. The rich man again ignores Lazarus and asks Abraham to send Lazarus out like an errand boy to the rich man’s brothers to warn them. He still doesn’t get it! He doesn’t understand that Lazarus is now at the top of the heap and he is at the bottom. He wants Lazarus to go back and warn his five brothers, who I am guessing are living in exactly the same way and must also know Lazarus and know that he died—otherwise, why would they care about what some random dude tells them? The rich man is worried about his brothers, which is the first kindness he has shown to anyone during this entire story, but he isn’t sorry. Abraham knows this and tells the rich man that it wouldn’t do any good at all to tell them because if the Bible isn’t enough then it won’t even matter if someone comes back from the dead. So, what would they be reading in the Bible that should teach them the importance of being kind and generous with people who are suffering, like Lazarus was?
“You had better not take advantage of someone from another country who is living in your land or treat him badly, because that’s what your family was in Egypt. “You’d better not treat any widow or fatherless child badly. If you treat them badly, they will definitely cry to me, and I will certainly hear their cry. I will be so angry, and I will send people after you to kill you; then your wives will be widows and your children won’t have a daddy. If you lend money to my people, to a poor person, you had better not act like a bank and take more money from him than you are owed. “If you loan a poor person money and take his cloak until he pays you back, you need to give it back every night before it gets dark.If he is so poor that his cloak is all he has to give you, then it is obviously all he has to cover himself with at night; it’s his warm clothing. What will he sleep in if you keep it all night? And if he cries out to me about you keeping his cloak, I will listen because I am kind and care for people who can’t take care of themselves without help.” (Ex 22:21-27)
There are lots and lots of those kinds of verses—God got angrier at people for being mean to poor and sick people than He did with people who worshipped other gods! God isn’t on the side of the people who are like this rich man in the trash heap outside of Jerusalem, He’s on the side of the people who have nothing and who are suffering. In fact, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was talking to His Jewish brothers and sisters who were mostly poor and He was telling them that it wasn’t enough to keep the Sabbath and to go to Jerusalem and keep the festivals and to not eat pork—if they wanted to be His followers then they had to be kind, merciful, generous, forgiving, peaceful, and to do good for their neighbors who needed help. That’s all called good fruit, and He said that bad trees can’t produce anything good and good trees can’t produce anything bad. Rotten, thorny fruit comes from bad trees who aren’t doing what is right for the people who are suffering and crying. When God hears what they are saying about us, He knows whether or not our trees are good or bad, and He even said that He will say that He doesn’t even know people who have nothing except for bad fruit. He said that you can even work miracles but if you aren’t doing what is right, He will say “Get away from me, you broke the most important laws of all!”
Is that why the rich man in Jesus’s parable about Lazarus has no name and even Abraham doesn’t know it either? He didn’t love his neighbor, so he was a rotten tree with rotten fruit even though he looked really fancy on the outside. He knew what Lazarus needed but he didn’t care. Next week, we will talk about God’s love for Lazarus and how this story teaches us about honor reversals—how the people on top can become the people on the bottom and the people on the bottom can become the people on the top as proof of God’s love.
I love you, I am praying for you. Have you ever met someone who seems to do everything right except for the most important stuff? Maybe they always drive the speed limit and obey all the laws but are just mean and nasty? God wants us to be all good and helps us change into people who can be better and better all the time. After all, no one cares about what we are doing on the Sabbath if we are nasty the rest of the week.