(1 Samuel 26:5-12; Luke 16:19-31)

In the last two parables we’ve read, we’ve seen the rich man of the village, the great landowner, in the story as a figure for God—merciful, generous, loving, someone who uses his wealth to give life to the community.  This morning, we have the polar op­posite.  The thumbnail sketch of this man in verse 19 is brilliant:  he’s ostentatious, self-indulgent, indifferent to people, and indifferent to God.

To start with, every day, he wears purple.  As you may know, purple dye was obscenely expensive, so only the wealthy could afford even one piece of purple clothing; and of course, even today, when we have a particularly expensive piece of clothing, we’re very careful to keep it clean—how much more then, when they didn’t have washing machines or detergents.  This guy is so rich, he has enough purple clothes to wear them every day of the week; he’s so rich, he has enough of them that he can afford to let them get dirty.  And just to put the point on it, that bit about fine linen?  That means, not only did he wear the most expensive clothes, he also wore the most expensive underwear.

Then too, he feasted every day, which means two things.  First, he didn’t even observe the Sabbath, let alone the Jewish fast days.  Second, he didn’t let his servants do so, either.  All he cared about was indulging his own appetites, with no regard for God and no concern for anyone else.  His servants existed to serve him, nothing more.  He should be ashamed by his flagrant selfishness, but he isn’t—he flaunts it.

Verses 20-21 give us an even more loaded picture.  “At his gate”—this guy’s so rich, he doesn’t just have a house, he has land in the village with a wall around it—“at his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus.”  First thing:  was laid.  By whom?  By the community.  Remember this:  the community is always present in Jesus’ stories—if not right onstage, then just offstage.  Almost everything happened in public in that culture, and they’re always a part of the events.  They laid Lazarus at the rich man’s gate because they loved him, but they didn’t have the resources to help him.  The rich man did—it was his responsibility.  But he didn’t care, so he did nothing.

Second, this is the only character in all of Jesus’ parables who’s given a name, so his name must be important.  “Lazarus” is the Greek form of the Aramaic name El‘azar, “the one whom God helps.”  He’s so sick he cannot stand, and so poor he has to beg; he can’t walk, so his family and friends carry him to the gate each morning and then back to wherever he sleeps at night.  This is the one whom God helps?

He lies there every day as the rich man’s guests come for the feast, listening to them eat and drink and talk, watching them all go by again as they leave.  He’s desperately hungry, but they give him nothing.  There’s food left over each day, and of course, no refrigerators, so the rich man could easily feed Lazarus with no effort at all; instead, he throws the food to the dogs.  Dogs were despised in Israel, barely a step above pigs; they didn’t have pet dogs, just half-wild guard dogs.  The rich man would rather feed them from his table than Lazarus.

The final irony is in the last line of verse 21.  We read that the dogs licked his sores and it sounds painful and disgusting, when it’s actually a blessing.  Centuries before Christ, the ancient world discovered that wounds licked by dogs healed more quickly.  For one thing, their rough tongues cleaned away the dead skin, dirt, and pus; not only did that promote healing, it also made the sores less likely to attract flies.  More than that, saliva contains natural antibiotics, so the dogs were actually disease fighters.  The rich man actively refuses to give the beggar anything, but the despised, violent, unclean guard dogs care for him, and do what they can to help.

In time, of course, both die.  Now Lazarus is at a feast, reclining at the table on Abraham’s right side, in the position of the honored guest, and the rich man is in torment.  As you might guess, he handles this situation very differently than Lazarus did.  For the purposes of the story, he can see into heaven, and he calls out, “My father Abraham!”  Family is everything in the Near East and Middle East; when you’re in need, you can go to the patriarch of the family and throw yourself on his mercy, and he’s honor-bound to help.  The rich man is making a racial appeal as a Jew to Abraham as his father, and on that basis, he demands services.

Note the sheer gall of the man.  He recognizes Lazarus, and he demands that Abraham send Lazarus over to ease his suffering.  He doesn’t even ask Lazarus!  In life, he thought he was important and the beggar at the gate was nobody, so he was indifferent to the beggar’s torment.  Now he’s in Hell and that beggar is Abraham’s honored guest, and he still thinks he’s the one who matters, not Lazarus.

The unrepentant arrogance of this rich man is infuriating, and Lazarus would have been justified to respond with a torrent of purely righteous rage; but he is silent.  Like David before the sleeping Saul, he has the chance to get his own back against one who caused him pain for no reason, but refuses to strike; like God in his patience with us, as the Lord holds back his judgment to give us opportunity to repent, Lazarus sets his anger aside.  In so doing, he refuses to allow the evil done to him to drive him to respond in kind; he chooses to act differently, and to create his own meaning from the situation.

In his place, Abraham responds—and his response is also gracious and kind, you will note, but unyielding:  this is justice.  Interestingly, as Kenneth Bailey points out, Abraham doesn’t say that Lazarus is now healed or well fed, but that now Lazarus is comforted.  His greatest pain wasn’t physical but emotional and spiritual, from the way he was treated by the rich man.  God gave the rich man good things; out of them he passed on only evil to the beggar at his gate.  Now things have been set right.

Abraham continues:  not only is this justice, but changing it is impossible.  What the rich man asks can’t be done, even by those who want to.  But why would Abraham add that last?  Who could possibly want to?  That’s such a jolt, it has to mean somebody does—and as Dr. Bailey notes, there’s only one other person on stage:  Lazarus.  It appears that not only is Lazarus not seething with rage at the rich man, he has compassion on him and is volunteering to go!

If anyone thought this exchange would make a dent in the rich man’s arrogance, they were wrong.  As far as he’s concerned, Lazarus exists to serve him, one way or another, and so he says, “Well, if he can’t wait on me, make him my messenger boy.  Send him to my brothers with a warning.”  Again, Lazarus is silent, and again Abraham refuses.  Moses gave the rich man and his brothers alike the law of God, so they know what God requires; the prophets showed them God’s anger at unrighteousness, and called them to repentance.  If they care to listen, they don’t need anything else, and if they won’t listen, nothing else will get through to them.

Does that shut this man up?  No—he actually has the nerve to contradict Abraham, even though his own actions prove Abraham right.  Why would Lazarus coming back from the dead with a warning make the rich man’s brothers repent?  He himself is in Hell, and he hasn’t repented!  Abraham tersely cuts him off:  if they aren’t willing to listen, they aren’t willing to listen.  If they can ignore Moses and the prophets, they’ll find a way to ignore someone who rises from the dead.  On that note, the story ends.

The problem with the rich man is that he had an instrumental view of the value of human life.  You may not know what I mean by that, so let me explain.  He valued other people solely for what they could do for him—for their usefulness.  He thought he mattered more than anyone else because he was richer than anyone else.  Those who didn’t have the money to do for themselves, and didn’t do anything for him, had no worth at all in his eyes.  We can see that in his treatment of Lazarus—both in life and in death.

This is a common spiritual disease in modern Western society—that is, the last 250 years or so.  In Buck v. Bell in 1927, the Supreme Court upheld the forcible sterilization of a young woman on the grounds that “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . .  Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”  Similar arguments were made in favor of legalized abortion—and continue to be made.  The British National Health Service rations care based on the economic value of the patient—they only approve expensive procedures if they figure you’re a good investment—and there are those in the White House who think America should do the same.  The worth of a life is calculated in dollar signs.

God does not approve.  The gospel does not let us look at other people that way.  You have never met a person whom Jesus Christ considered not worth dying for; if we treat anyone as any less, we’re selling him short.  The meaning of our lives is not—ever—in our possessions, our abilities, or anything the world can make of us, because none of those things are really ours at all; they belong to God, and we’re just stewards.  The only thing that’s truly ours to keep from this life is whatever we gain of the truth of God.  “Let not the wise boast in their wisdom, let not the strong boast in their strength, let not the rich boast in their riches, but if anyone wants to boast, let them boast in this:  that they understand and know me,” declares the Lord.  Let’s pray.

(Micah 7:18-20; Luke 16:1-8)

This parable has given the church fits for centuries.  Jesus seems to be holding up this servant as a role model precisely because of his dishonesty, and telling his disciples, “You go and be just as dishonest”—and that doesn’t fit with the rest of his teaching, or with his character.  Part of our problem is that we aren’t familiar with the culture in which Jesus was teaching; I’ve been leaning on the work of Dr. Kenneth Bailey quite a lot this year, and especially for the work he’s done on the parables of Jesus, but I’m indebted to him above all for making sense of this one.  Beyond our cross-cultural issues, however, part of our problem here is the chapter break.

That might sound odd to you, but if you’ve been around long enough to hear me go off on the headings they stick in our Bibles, maybe it doesn’t.  The thing is, the chapter and verse numbers aren’t original to the text, but were added quite some time later.  Imagine if this wasn’t Luke 16:1-8 but Luke 15:33-40—mentally, where would you connect it?  To the parable right before it.  You’d read that great story of the Father’s mercy, and you’d go right into this one and understand it as a continuation of the same theme.  The chapter break tells us “This is something new,” however, so instead of attaching it to the parable of the two lost sons, we naturally connect it to the poem on money that follows it, and we read this as a parable about money and how we ought to use it.  It isn’t.  Jesus uses money here to make a point about something else entirely.

He gives this story a common setting:  a great landowner hired an estate manager to take care of renting out the land.  Some of the tenants would farm the land or tend the trees themselves; others were rich enough to rent larger pieces and hire people to do the work.  Each one paid a fixed amount of their yield as rent—and note that:  a fixed amount, not a percentage.  They owed the same regardless of how good the year was.  The manager was paid a salary by the master, and also collected a fee from each renter as they signed their contract; that fee was not reflected in the contract, which stated only what the tenant owed to the master.

In some way, this manager was abusing his position and stealing from his master; the master was liked and respected in the community, so someone came and told him about it.  The master, of course, went through the roof, summoning his servant and demanding, “What’s this I hear about you?”  The servant doesn’t answer; the master has him dead to rights.  Since he doesn’t know how much the master knows, if he says anything, all he can do is make things worse.  His silence is its own confession, of course, so the master continues, “Turn in the books—you’re fired!”

Now, there are a couple key points to note.  First, the master is showing him great mercy here.  Under Jewish law, he could have had his servant hauled off that instant and thrown in jail until he could repay or work off his crime, but he didn’t; he left the steward at liberty.  Second, Jesus’ listeners would have expected the steward to loudly and firmly protest his innocence.  There were manytime-honored defenses he could have used, and many people to whom he could have tried to shift the blame, including the master himself.  That would have been the classic response.  Amazingly, however, he just turns and leaves the room, affirming by his silence his guilt and the justice of his punishment.

The situation is hopeless and he knows it, so he doesn’t waste his breath trying to get his job back.  Instead, he puts all his energy into trying to find himself a new one.  He considers manual labor, which would have been a tremendous comedown for an educated man in a white-collar job, but rejects that because he isn’t strong enough for the work.  He also looks at the possibility of begging for a living—it was considered a legitimate occupation, though extremely low-status—and rejects it on the grounds that he doesn’t want the shame that would come with it.  But having decided against both these options, what others does he have?  He’s been fired as a scoundrel, so who would hire him?

He’s clearly a gambling man; his master has already showed him great mercy, and he decides to stake everything on that mercy.  He’s been told to turn in the books, but no one else knows he’s been fired, and by leaving his master without a fight, he’s avoided having any sort of guard on him.  He has the freedom to act, and he uses it.  If his plan fails, he’ll be thrown in prison, but that might happen anyway.  If it works, he’ll be a hero in the community.  Sure, the whole story will come out, but someone will hire him anyway, out of gratitude for his actions and respect for his ability—they’ll just keep a very close eye on him, is all.

He has to act quickly, as he can’t delay long to turn in the books.  Before he does so, he calls in the tenants, one by one.  Because no one else knows yet that he’s been fired, the lower servants obey his orders, and the tenants answer his summons; they would only have come because they believed the steward had a message for them from their landlord.  He treats them rudely, for he’s in too much of a hurry for the usual courtesies:  at any minute, the master might discover his plan, and all would be lost.  The tenants would never cooperate with him if they knew he was cheating the master, for that would end their relationship with their landlord—not only financially, but socially as well.  That would cause them serious damage in the community, and could not be risked.

As it happens, however, the manager is not discovered, and his plan goes off without a hitch.  He asks each tenant, “How much do you owe my master?”—not because he doesn’t know, he has the contract right in front of him, but just to bring the full force of their debt home to them.  He reduces their debts by about the same monetary value in each case, about 500 denarii—some twenty months’ wages for an ordinary laborer—letting them believe he talked his boss into making the reduction.  No point in doing this if he doesn’t get the credit, after all.  He has them make the changes in their own handwriting, so it’s clear they’ve signed off on the deal, and away they go, rejoicing.

That done, he takes his newly-changed account books and turns them in to his master.  The master looks at them and knows immediately what his former employee has done.  He can be quite sure that as a result, the whole village is throwing a party in his honor.  His tenants think he’s the most noble and generous man who has ever lived, for he has given them an unprecedented and almost unfathomable gift.  Legally, he has every right to cancel the unauthorized reductions—but if he does that, their joy will turn to rage, and he will be cursed by the whole community for his stinginess.  It isn’t rational, but it’s human.  Otherwise, all he can do is keep his mouth shut, accept the praise of the community, allow the manager to do the same, and act like he meant it all to happen.

This was the servant’s calculation:  that faced with such a choice, his master would choose to keep quiet.  After all, he was a generous man (even if he hadn’t meant to be quite that generous), and generosity was one of the qualities expected of the rich and powerful.  He was also a merciful man, as he had already shown by not jailing his errant manager.  And so he reflects for a moment, turns to his former employee, and says quietly, “You’re a shrewd man.”  You’ll note that’s all he praises the manager for, certainly not for his morals; that’s the point of Jesus’ comment which follows.

The manager is an example for us not in his dishonesty but in the fact that he was wise enough to know where his salvation lay.  In a way, his actions are a compliment to the master—backhanded, to be sure, but no less sincere for all that; the manager knew his master to be generous and merciful, to the point that he was willing to stake his entire future on it.  He won.  Out of his generosity and mercy, the master chose to pay the full price for his former employee’s salvation.

The principle here is a standard one in rabbinical teaching, commonly referenced as “from the light to the heavy,” which roughly means, “how much more.”  In other words, if this crooked manager got out of his crisis by relying on his master’s mercy, how much more will God help you in yours if you will only trust his mercy?  And all humanity is in crisis.  God—the master—is a God of judgment, but also of mercy.  We are the steward who has misused what was put in our trust.  Excuses are worthless.  All we can do is stake everything on the unfailing mercy of God, trusting that he will pay the price for our salvation; and indeed, he has already done so.

For those who haven’t thrown themselves on the mercy of God, the application is obvious.  Those of us who have might think this is irrelevant to us, but it isn’t; this isn’t just a one-time thing, and then we go back to business as usual.  Watching us sometimes, you’d think we were saved by mercy and then spent the rest of our lives earning it, but that isn’t the gospel.  As we were saved, so we live—all of life, at every point and every moment, wholly dependent on the mercy and grace of God.

(Psalm 133; Luke 15:11-32)

I said during the previous series that there were two groups of people following Jesus—the disciples, who were focused on Jesus, and the crowds, who were focused on what they could get from Jesus.  There were two groups within the crowds, as well.  One was the religious folk.  There were several different factions—the Pharisees, the teachers of the law, the Sadducees, who were the priestly party, and so on—and they disagreed about a great many things, but not about Jesus:  they hated him.  There were exceptions to that, but not many.  They followed him to gather evidence against him.

On the other side, you had the “people of the land”—which was actually what the Pharisees called everyone who wasn’t as serious about keeping the Law as they were.  What they meant by it was “scum of the earth.”  This included the professional sinners, of course—the prostitutes, the tax collectors, and the like—but it also included all the ordinary folk.  You might think of them as your typical pew-sitters.  They did the required stuff, but otherwise, they weren’t all that focused on the things of God, so the serious religious types lumped them all together with the rest of the sinners.

As Jesus looked out, he saw both groups.  One was lost and knew it, or at least had been told so on many occasions; the other was equally lost, but thought itself the very model of godly living.  To both, he told a story about a man who had two sons.

The story begins as the younger son says, “Dad, divide the property and give me what’s coming to me.”  That translates as, “I wish you were dead so that I could take my inheritance.  I would rather have the money than you—give me what’s mine and let me go.”  At this point, two things would be expected, in that culture.  The father would be within his rights to beat his son within an inch of his life and cast him out of the house for such an insult; the elder brother has the responsibility to try to patch things up and reconcile his father and his younger brother.  Neither happens.  The older son waits in silence for judgment to fall on his brother; the younger son is determined to go, no matter what, and the older one wants him gone.  The father, grieved and hurt by both of them, withholds judgment and offers grace.

The scandal this caused in the village only got worse for the way the younger brother used the gift his father gave him.  His inheritance wasn’t money or jewels but a portion of the family land, and he didn’t want to stay there, he wanted out; so he sold it off as quickly as he could, just to be on his way.  Since that land supported the whole family, he left all of them quite a bit poorer.  In response, the elders of the town went down to the property and performed the qetsatsah, formally casting him out of the commu­nity.  If he were able to come back with enough money to re-purchase the land and restore it to his family, he could resume his place; otherwise, he was banished—forever.

The younger son must have known that was coming.  Cut off from his name, his family, his community, and even his nation, he headed off to a far land.  The money in his pocket gave him a feeling of security, and so he lived expensively––a penthouse suite, eating at the finest restaurants, dating rich women.  Somehow, though, his business ventures never quite turned out.  He ran through his money, and his associates abandoned him.  He managed to scrape by, until drought brought economic collapse; when the famine hit in earnest, he was out of a job and out on the street.

In desperation, he went to one of the leading men of the city, someone he had wined and dined in the good times, begging for work.  In an effort to get rid of him, this man offered him a job tending the pigs—surely no Jew would accept such a job.  It was an insult, but to his surprise, the young Jew took it, and went out to live with the pigs.

Sitting there in the mud, his stomach aching with hunger, the younger son wised up and faced the facts: he’d made a complete mess of things, and if he stayed there, he would starve.  “The craftsmen who work for my father feed themselves and have money left over, and here I am dying of hunger!  What’s the sense in that?” he asked himself.  “I know what I have to do.  I’ll go back to my father and say, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and you, and right now I’m not worthy to be called your son.  Let me be trained as a craftsman—I’ll be able to support myself and save up money, and eventually I’ll be able to buy back the land I sold.’  It will take some doing, but I bet I can talk him into it.”

At this point, Jesus’ hearers were listening raptly—especially the religious leaders.  Feeding pigs!  The ultimate degradation for a Jew.  This man betrayed his father, and he wound up an exile feeding pigs!  What a perfect picture of the consequences of sin!  Even they had never described it so well.  To earn back his father’s favor, he would have to return to his hometown in utter humiliation and take terrible abuse from the village.  Then, perhaps the father would lock the door on his son and make him grovel for a while; perhaps he would never open the door at all.  It would serve the son right.

But the door wasn’t locked.  The father was on his front porch, sitting on the hill in the middle of town, watching the road.  If his son ever came back, he must be protected from the hostility of the town; if he had to fight past all the people who hated him for what he had done, he might never make it home.  When the father saw his son in the distance, he took off running, leaving his neighbors in shock.  Adults never ran; that was for children, and the more important a man was, the slower he walked.  Running meant lifting your robes and exposing your legs, which was humiliating.  To see this rich man running with all his might—they would as soon have expected him to flap his arms and fly.

The younger son was dumbstruck.  For long, weary days he had been rehearsing the arguments he would make to win over his father, dreading the humiliation and abuse he would face on the long walk through the town—but his father took it all himself, suffering it for him, and it broke him.  His entire plan was gone, for he was being welcomed back as a son.  He said, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you, and am not worthy to be called your son,” and he meant it.

Having welcomed his son in full view of his neighbors (most of whom had followed him down the street), the father now set about making perfectly clear to them that this was still his son.  He ordered one of his servants to bring his best robe and cover his son’s rags with it, told another to go get a ring for his son’s finger, and sent a third to bring sandals—servants went barefoot, the family wore shoes.  A fourth was ordered off to kill the fattened calf—which could feed 200 people—and start up the grill.  Then the father announced in a ringing voice, “My son was dead and now he is alive––he was lost and we have found him––and we will celebrate.”

This turn staggered Jesus’ audience.  This father had violated every right he held as patriarch, had thrown away his reputation and humiliated himself before the whole town—and for what?  To protect a son who had insulted and humiliated him from the proper consequences of his own actions; to restore to his place in the family a son who had betrayed him, making it possible for the son to betray him again.  What sort of love was that?  It went much too far.  How could he do that?

Someone was sent to bring the elder son, but missed him somehow, so the elder son started back from the field with no idea what was happening.  As he drew close to the town, he could hear the music—first the drums, then the sound of many voices, and soon the various instruments.  As he walked through the streets, it quickly became clear that whatever the reason for the party, it was in the great hall of his own home.  When he reached the courtyard, he asked one of the boys dancing there what was going on.  The boy looked up at him and said, “Your brother is back and your father made up with him, so your father killed the fatted calf and threw a party.  They’re waiting for you inside.”

This hit the elder brother like a ton of bricks.  That shiftless, good-for-nothing brat was back, and his sentimental father had let himself be used again and had let him back in the family.  Now there was a party going on, and he was supposed to go in and pretend the brat hadn’t done anything.  He wouldn’t do it.  He turned his back and stalked off.

This was the second major shock of the day for the village, for this was an act of absolute disrespect to his father.  It was fully as bad as the insult the younger son had originally offered the father—in fact, it was worse, because it was in public.  Within moments, someone had hurried in to tell the father what was happening.  The townspeople would have expected the father to have his son dragged off to be beaten, for that would be the proper response—but who knew with this man anymore?

Instead, the father rose and went out to the courtyard to ask his son to come in.  Once again, he did what a servant should do; once again he put his suffering on public display.  His son snapped back, “All these years I’ve slaved for you, and you never gave me so much as a goat to have a party with my friends—but when this, this, this son of yours came back after wasting your money on prostitutes, you killed the pride of the herd for him!  It isn’t fair!”  He insulted his father a second time by addressing him with no title, as he would a servant; the townspeople’s eyes widened, but he didn’t care.  This reconciliation was insufferable, and he would do everything he could to shatter it.

The religious leaders in Jesus’ audience leaned forward as the elder brother spoke, bringing their own reactions into the story; they shared his firm conviction that this was not how things should be, and wondered how the father could possibly answer him.

Within the story, the villagers had their own questions.  The elder son had publicly insulted and shamed his father, and yet he had the nerve to claim never to have broken his father’s commandments.  He had refused to acknowledge his brother and tried to destroy the peace which the father had made between the younger son and the community.  Surely now the father would defend his honor and punish the elder son?  Instead, the father looked sadly at his son and said, “Beloved son, I’ve provided for you all your life, given you everything, and all that I have is yours; you haven’t been my servant, you’ve been serving yourself.  You don’t need to worry that I’ll give what’s yours to your brother—your rights and privileges are intact.  But your brother was dead and has come alive, was lost and we found him; it is necessary to celebrate.  Come in, be reconciled to him.”

With that outstretched hand, the father humiliating himself to reach out to his first son as he had done with his younger son, the parable ends.  Having drawn the religious leaders into the story through the elder son, Jesus left them with the father’s appeal.  The elder son’s decision was yet unmade, for it was theirs to make.  Would they accept his call to reconcile with the younger son—the “sinners,” the “people of the land”—or would they instead hold to their bitterness and reject God?  They did not have any other choice, Jesus was telling them, for he had already reached out to the lost to bring them home.

And for us?  Some of us identify with the younger brother, having gone far away from God into all sorts of wrong lifestyles.  Others see ourselves in the elder brother, because we always stayed close to the house—but maybe on the inside we wandered a long way from God, seeing him as a stern taskmaster and a slave-driver.  All of us need to know that no matter how far from God we go, the Father’s heart goes farther.  His love for his children will not let go no matter what we do.  We need to remember that this is for us, that God will not leave us in our wanderings; we need also to remember that this is for everyone else too, even those we hate and despise.  No matter what they might have done, God wants to bring them home and celebrate.  He longs for the day when he will be able to say, “Look, my children were dead and have come alive, were lost and I found them!”  Heaven rejoices at such words.