King & Kingdom Come: The Rich Man and Lazarus

Welcome to an audio teaching from Windsor Park Baptist Church in Auckland, New Zealand.

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Kiori everybody, great to be with you again.

Well, it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago, and my family gave me a garment watch.

I haven't had a watch for many years, and this isn't just a watch that tells the time.

Although I'm not sure I appreciate a device judging me before I've even had my first coffee.

We live in a world where we have more information at our fingertips than any generation in history.

Yet one of the greatest challenges of our age is not knowing more, it's noticing people more.

We can become so focused on screens or notifications and information that we miss the actual person often standing right in front of us.

And that's exactly the warning that Jesus gives us in Luke chapter 16.

Luke 16 · chapter mention

Well, last week we looked at one of Jesus' strangest parables in verses 1 to 15 of chapter 16.

A manager who gets caught out realizes that the future has arrived faster than he expected, and acts decisively and shrewdly.

The word Luke uses is phronymos, meaning wise or sharp or switched on.

The manager saw where things were heading and he adjusted his whole life around it.

Jesus then turned to his disciples and asked them, If people are this sharp about money and self-preservation, why are my own followers sometimes so complacent about eternity?

Then came verse 13 that is so confronting that most of us would rather forget it.

You cannot serve both God and money.

And Luke tells us, who was in the room, the Pharisees, and they weren't just listening, they were sneering.

Because Jesus wasn't talking about their bank balance, he was talking about their worship.

The issue was never what they possessed, the issue was what possessed them.

And now here's what we often miss.

Our Bibles put a heading and a gap between last week's parable and today's.

But Jesus didn't.

There's no break, no new setting, no new audience, no, and then Jesus told another parable.

It's one continuous story.

Jesus is still talking to the same room about the same subject, and he tells one more story to drive home his point.

Last week we saw a man who understood the future and acted wisely.

This week we see a man who never saw the future coming at all and paid the price for it.

One man saw reality clearly, one didn't.

Through both stories, Jesus is asking us the same question.

What future are we actually living for?

In Luke chapter 16, verse 19, we read, There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen, and lived in luxury every day.

Luke 16:19

Now for Jesus' first listeners, this man has made it.

Purple dye was eye wateringly expensive.

Fine linen said old money.

Luxury every day?

This is not a man having the occasional good week.

Translate him in today's terms, then he's got the waterfront property, the Range Rover in the driveway, the La Mizocco coffee machine in the kitchen that he doesn't know how to use properly.

And he's just released a book called The Secret of My Success.

If this guy turned up at Windsor, we'd be asking him to speak at the men's breakfast.

Then Jesus introduces someone else in verse 20.

At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table.

Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

That's not a pretty picture, but it's classic Luke.

The Gospel writer who never tires of putting the exalted and the overlooked side by side.

Throughout the Gospel, we've seen Mary singing that God pulls down the proud and lifts up the humble.

We've seen shepherds of all people get the birth announcement.

Tax collectors get invited in, sinners get embraced, outsiders become insiders, and now two men either side of one gate.

One has everything, one has nothing.

One lives inside the gate, one lies outside the gate.

One feasts, one longs for scraps.

One is known by everyone, one appears forgotten.

Or so it seems.

Because there's a detail here that's so easy to miss, and yet it's so important, I don't think I can overstate it enough.

The rich man has no name, the beggar does.

Lazarus is the only person who's given a personal name in any parable Jesus tells across all three synoptic gospels.

Think about that.

We can think of the Good Samaritan, the rich fool, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the great banquet, categories and titles, every one of them.

But the only one person Jesus ever names in a parable is a beggar nobody else in that society bothered to name at all.

Lazarus.

A name that means God is my helper.

The man society had forgotten carried a name that declared something society could not see.

God had not forgotten him.

It's so significant.

What does it mean that the rich man had everything except a name and Lazarus had nothing except a name?

Pretty much every society we know of runs the other way.

The powerful get remembered, the poor get forgotten.

Jesus flips it.

The man who spent his whole life curating status becomes anonymous, and the beggar at his gate gets remembered for 2,000 plus years.

I mean, why doesn't anyone in our country name their son Lazarus?

It's so significant.

And this is Luke doing what Luke does.

Names matter because people matter.

The rich man saw a problem at his gate, God saw Lazarus.

The rich man saw a category, God saw a person.

The rich man saw someone disposable, God knew his name.

And maybe that's the first thing this parable wants to teach us.

The kingdom changes how we see people.

I mean, picture the scene in the story that's repeated daily.

The gate opens and Lazarus is there, and the rich man steps around him.

Every morning, a small, practiced choice not to see.

That's the real tragedy of this story.

Not Lazarus' poverty, but that the rich man became the kind of person who simply stopped noticing.

And if we're honest, comfort can do exactly the same thing to us.

Here's what's so what's sobering about this story.

The rich man is never accused of some dramatic crime.

He isn't violent, he isn't cruel, he isn't, at least not explicitly, oppressive.

His failure is quieter than that, and arguably more dangerous.

He simply lives as though Lazarus doesn't register.

He gets comfortable with someone else's suffering right at his own front door, and his heart slowly, almost politely, grows cold until he no longer sees Lazarus as a person.

Now let's be clear.

Scripture never says that wealth or comfort or security are themselves the problem.

Abraham was wealthy, Job was wealthy, plenty of faithful people in the Bible has significant resources.

The danger isn't possessions, the danger is what possessions can quietly do to our field of vision.

Our world gets smaller, our concerns get smaller, our compassion gets smaller.

And we don't notice it happening because nobody's field of vision narrows all at once.

It narrows one comfortable, reasonable decision at a time.

I sit on a few governance boards that include some Baptist assets in the aged care and the retirement sector, which mostly means I read reports, I ask hopefully intelligent questions, and occasionally sign things wondering if I've understood them correctly.

But one phrase comes up constantly in the governance space, and it stuck with me ever since I started thinking about this passage.

A duty of care.

And governance, a duty of care means that I don't get to say afterwards, oh, I didn't see the risk, when the risk was right in front of me, in the reports and the data, at the gate.

Ignorance isn't a defense when the information was available and it was my job to see it.

A board that quietly stops asking hard questions and stops noticing the little things that can become big things ultimately will face some kind of failure that they only recognize afterwards when the consequences have already arrived.

In the story, Jesus would say that the rich man had a duty of care to the man at his gate, not because a regulator said so, but because he was made in the image of God, the same as Lazarus was.

And he failed in that duty of care, not with a single dramatic decision, but with thousands of small ones, repeated daily until it became normal, which incidentally is a very unglamorous way to end up in a parable in the Bible.

Nobody sets out to become the villain of a Bible story.

You just keep stepping around the same gate long enough, and there he is.

Luke has already warned us about this.

Back in Luke chapter 12, Jesus tells the parable of the fool and lands this line: Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.

Luke 12 · chapter mention

Because possessions have a way of possessing us.

Comfort has a way of dulling us.

Success has a way of quietly distracting us.

And so spiritual growth often looks less like mountaintop experiences and more like God reopening our eyes to the people already around us.

Not just the crisis on the other side of the world, though that matters.

The person at our actual gate, our neighbor, our workermate, the struggling family member, the lonely one, the teenager who needs one adult to believe in them, the older person whose whole world has shrunk to four walls and a TV.

The person carrying grief quietly enough that nobody's asked.

The kingdom of God trains us to see what comfort has trained us to overlook.

Then comes the turn in verses 22 through 26.

Both men die, and everything, everything flips.

The rich man loses what he thought would last forever.

Lazarus receives what he never had in this life.

The future arrives and reality, which was hidden the whole time, becomes visible.

Sound familiar?

It's the same theme Jesus has been building all along.

The kingdom of God isn't defined by present appearances.

It reveals things as God actually sees them.

And we land back on the exact principle from last week.

Future realities are meant to shape our present decisions.

The shrewd manager understood that.

The rich man in this story didn't.

The shrewd manager knew his circumstances wouldn't last.

The rich man lived like his wood.

The shrewd manager adjusted his life because of what was coming.

The rich man never did.

One acted with urgency, one drifted.

One prepared, one presumed.

One was phronemos, one was blind.

Let's remind ourselves that the rich man isn't condemned for simply being wealthy.

Remember who's still in the room?

The money-loving Pharisees, still listening, still sneering.

Just like last week, the issue was never wealth, the issue was allegiance.

The issue was what wealth had done to his heart.

His life reveals that God never actually sat at the centre of it.

His compassion had withered, his stewardship had failed, his concern for anyone beyond himself had shrunk to nothing.

His resources served his comforts instead of God's purposes.

The warning from the previous passage has now played out in full colour.

You cannot serve two masters.

Eventually, one master shows its face.

The rich man's money had stopped being a resource and had become his ruler.

And the truly frightening part is that he never seemed to notice the handover.

In the final section, verses 27 through 31, it contains one of the most important lines in the whole parable.

The rich man, even in torment, who was still trying to manage the situation from a distance, asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to warn his five brothers.

He reasons that surely if someone returned from the dead, they'd repent and believe.

Abraham's answer is blunt.

Let them listen to them.

The rich man pushes back.

Surely a miracle would do it.

Surely a sign would finally wake them up.

And Abraham gives them a line that should stop us in our tracks.

If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced, even if someone rises from the dead.

That line gets more remarkable the longer you sit with it.

Because in John chapter 11, a man is literally raised from the dead, and plenty of people still refuse to believe.

John 11 · chapter mention

Some religious leaders even start plotting to kill both Jesus and the man he raised.

That man's name?

Lazarus.

Whether Luke and John intended the echo or not, it's a striking one, two different Lazaruses.

The problem for the rich man's five brothers was never a lack of evidence.

It was the human heart.

They already had everything they needed.

They already knew God's commands, God's concern for the poor, God's heart for justice, what faithfulness looked like in practice.

The problem was never information, the problem was obedience.

Which is a slightly deflating thing to hear if, like me, you've ever hoped that the solution to your spiritual dryness was one more conference, one more podcast, or one more really good worship set.

Sometimes it might just be doing the thing you already know you're supposed to do.

Because I believe that real growth usually starts with responding faithfully to what God has already said.

The question isn't what else do we need to know?

The question is, what am I doing with what I already know?

Luke's original readers would have caught something we can easily miss.

Jesus says people may not believe even if someone rises from the dead.

And then that's exactly what happens.

Jesus himself rises.

Some believe, many don't.

But the resurrection doesn't just hand us information, it demands a response.

It asks which kingdom we actually belong to, which future are we investing in?

Which master are we really serving?

And unlike the rich man, we have something he never had.

We stand on this side of the cross, the side of the empty tomb.

We know Christ entered death and walked out the other side.

We know God's kingdom is coming.

We know eternity is real.

We know people matter forever.

The only question is whether that reality is actually shaping how we live today.

Most of us don't wake up thinking, you know what, today I'm going to reject the kingdom of God.

We just get busy.

Busy paying the mortgage, busy with the calendar, busy with sports, busy trying to find a park at Albany Mall on a Saturday.

Busy living life.

And somewhere in all that busyness, we quietly stop noticing the people God keeps placing directly in front of us.

Maybe that's the most unsettling part of this whole story.

The rich man wasn't condemned because Jesus tells us he hated Lazarus.

The tragedy is subtle.

You simply never truly saw him.

Day after day at the same gate until the blindness just became normal, the way any habit does.

So here's the question this story leaves sitting with us.

Who's at our gate?

Who have we stopped seeing?

What person has God placed in our path that we've simply grown accustomed to walking past?

Because the kingdom of God changes how we see people.

Every person carries the image of God.

Every person has a name.

Every person matters.

Every person is someone that Christ died for.

Most of us don't have a beggar lying at our front gate.

But we might have a teenager at our gate, a spouse, a neighbor, a colleague carrying more than we've noticed.

Someone three rows behind us, someone whose world is quietly falling apart.

Someone who comes into our life half hoping that someone will notice them.

So here's one thing to think about.

This week, don't just notice someone.

Move towards someone.

Start a conversation, ask a question, make a phone call, sit a little longer, listen a little more carefully, ask what their name is.

Start there.

That's how the rich man's story could have gone differently, and it's how ours still can.

The good news of this gospel is that Jesus is nothing like the rich man.

Jesus sees us, he knows our name, he comes to us in our need, and having been seen by him, we're now invited to see others the same way.

So may the Holy Spirit open our eyes this week to the Lazaruses at our gate, to the people we've overlooked, to the opportunity God keeps placing in front of us.

And may we live wisely, Fronimos, in light of the kingdom that is already breaking into the present through Jesus Christ our Lord.

May the Holy Spirit help us see clearly, love deeply, and live faithfully in the kingdom of God that can never be shaken.

Let's pray.

Father, we are grateful, I think, for your word.

We do acknowledge it's deeply challenging.

And these two parables that we've looked at over two weeks are deeply challenging to the way that we live.

It confronts the kingdoms that we live within.

It confronts all the messaging of our world.

And it confronts us to think around how obedient we are to where you call us, those of us that call ourselves Christians or followers of Jesus, what you call us to respond to.

Father, I pray that we would continue to deepen our faith in you simply by following you.

And in these passages, you tell us to have our eyes opened, to re-evaluate our priorities, to think about who we are living for, and to put our effort and our focus into things that are eternal.

So give us wisdom about what that means for each one of us.

And out of this story today, help us to recognize who might be the Lazarus in our life.

Who might we have just walked around?

What habits have we formed that mean that our comfort prevents us from seeing the lives of people that you put in front of us, whether that be at work or whether that be at home, whether that be as we play sport, whether that be as we go about just our ordinary lives.

And help us to have the courage to respond in obedience, to put aside all of the busyness that we often occupy ourselves with, and to hear what your spirit might be saying and leading us into for the sake of your kingdom.

Thank you that you know each one of us so intimately.

Amen.

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Head to our website, windsapark.org.nz, and you'll find various ways to contact us.

God bless.