Luke 16:19-31

Introduction

Our text falls within a larger section (Luke 16) in which Jesus deals head-on with questions of money, specifically the need to choose God over mammon (the worship of money), in other words, the kingdom of God over the kingdom of this world. Jesus does this by telling a series of parables, including ours today. 

The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus involves a role reversal, where a homeless beggar named Lazarus, humiliated and disabled in this life, switches places with the rich man whose (outer) gate he begs at. As with many of Jesus’ parables, the story involves an ordinary, common setting, in this case that of a rich man and a beggar. The one significant difference between this story and the rest of Jesus’ parables is that this…