The fourteenth episode of the second season of the Retelling the Bible Podcast is posted today (November 28, 2018). You can listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast by following one of these links or by searching for the podcast on your favourite platform:

SHOW NOTES

This episode is based on Luke 16:19-31 in the New Testament of the Bible. (Click the references to read the original story). Any direct biblical quotations in the episode are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the episode.

The Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man

The parable of Jesus in which he talks about Lazarus and the rich man is rather unique in a number of ways. It is one of the only six parables that appear exclusively in the Gospel of Luke. This naturally makes us wonder how well this parable was known in the early church. Was it generally recognized as a parable of Jesus or was it only familiar to the church for which Luke was writing?

It is different in form from many other parables in that it tells a story with two characters who are identified by name. It is also the only parable of Jesus that offers any sort of description of the afterlife and yet, as noted in the episode, that description is somewhat problematic.

Rocka my Soul in the Bosom of Abraham

Traditionally the phrase “the bosom of Abraham” that appears in this parable has been interpreted as some sort of description of an afterlife state or even as a location within the afterlife. It is treated as a synonym for Heaven or for Paradise. The phrase itself does not originate from this parable and has been found in some early Jewish writings where it is universally associated with the afterlife and with the solace of the righteous who have died. But it seems pretty clear that the phrase, while used to speak of the afterlife, was always considered to be a metaphor that was based on the dining customs in wealthy homes.

At a feast, all of the guests would lie on couches to eat and the most honoured guest would share a couch with the host when he would lie with his head in his host’s bosom, that is, resting on his chest. (I speak using only the masculine pronoun here because dinner feasts were generally an exclusively male domain.)

To speak of the martyrs or the righteous dead lying in Abraham’s bosom, therefore, was merely to picture them receiving special honour and comfort in the afterlife. It was not a place in the afterlife so much as it was a description of their special status.

By setting the opening scene of his parable at a dinner party with the rich man lying on his couch and Lazarus lying at the gate, Jesus seems to be putting the emphasis on the dinner metaphor behind the phrase, the bosom of Abraham. Once you understand that, it seems clear that he is setting up a deliberate contrast between the dinner party at the beginning of the parable and the alternate dinner party at the end. It also becomes clear that the main point of the parable is the complete reversal of position between the two main characters.

Jesus, of course, often told parables of reversal. “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” (Mark 10:31) was one of his favourite sayings, if we can judge from the frequency of its appearance in the Gospels. And if that is the point of the parable then it is clearly not told in order to describe what the afterlife is like but rather to make us think deeply about this world and especially about the barriers that we create between the rich and the poor.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

“AhDah” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

“Plaint” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/