Jesus & Lazarus

Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams

I was recently listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams ‘Variations on Dives and Lazarus’, which reminded me of Jesus’s parable about a rich man and a beggar called Lazarus, who ate the scraps from the rich man’s table. (More recently the rich man has come to be called ‘Dives’, Latin for someone who is rich.) Clearly Jesus regarded such inequalities as fundamentally unacceptable, as his parable shows.

The parable is related in the gospel of Luke, at chapter 16, verses 19 to 31. Both the rich man and Lazarus died, and Lazarus ‘was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom’, whereas the rich man was buried and went to hell, where he became uncomfortably hot.

So he called out asking Abraham to send Lazarus to dip his finger in water and cool his tongue. But Abraham replied that there was a vast chasm between the two places, and this journey was not feasible (let alone the return journey).

The rich man, who still felt for his five rich brothers alive on earth, called out again, asking Abraham to send Lazarus to warn them of what lay in store if they continued in their lavish and unfeeling lives. To this, the reply was that they already had Moses (with his laws about supporting the poor) and the prophets (with their demands for social justice), and if they would not listen to them, then they would not listen even if someone rose from the dead.

Left: A painting of Abraham

We can, I think, infer from this parable that Jesus believed in life after death, but not necessarily that he believed in a physical hell; hell plays the role of stage scenery, rather as in those jokes about ‘You’ll never get to heaven/In an old Ford car’, and ‘If you get there/Before I do,/Dig a little hole,/And pull me through!’

We can also tell that he was appalled at the inequality depicted in his story. Far from accepting that ‘The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate’ were part of the natural order, he believed that the law and the prophets condemned such unequal societies, and called for compassion, for mercy and for justice, and expected people to act accordingly, and not wait for a miracle to persuade them.

However, when I re-read the last bit, about the ineffectiveness of raising Lazarus from the dead, it suddenly struck me that this parable could be an instance of teaching getting changed into narrative. For in John’s (probably later) gospel, Jesus brings to life Lazarus, who had (according to the story there) died a few days earlier. Perhaps the parable was changed in transmission into this miracle.

Below: A Fig Tree in Season

This would not be the only occasion that a story told by Jesus changed into a narrative about Jesus. For example, in a parable told at Luke 13: 6-7, a land-owner asks for a barren fig-tree to be cut down. This parable seems to have been changed into a story about Jesus in which he pointlessly curses a fig-tree, which had no fruit because it was not the fruiting season (Mark 11: 13-14), but which rapidly withered (verse 21). This problem passage is explained if the parable just mentioned has turned into a narrative. There are other cases too. John’s story about Lazarus could easily be a case in point.

This month's blog post has been written by Robin Attfield, a dedicated member of Cardiff Unitarians and Cardiff Quakers, who also sits on our committee. Robin has a degree in Theology from Oxford University and led our February service. You can read about Robin's service in the latest Cardiff Unitarians newsletter. Download now from our 'News' section!

Robin is also the author of the book The Ethics of the Climate Crisis, which is due to be released in April. See the flyer below for full details.