Luke 16:27-31

The second Conversation.

The rich man acquiesces so far as his own person is concerned. But he intercedes for his brethren still in life. And again it is Lazarus who must busy himself on their behalf!

What is the thought contained in this conclusion? Starting from the standpoint that the idea of the parable is the condemnation of wealth, De Wette, the Tübingen School, and Weizsäcker himself find this last part entirely out of keeping with the rest of the description. For it is their impenitence face to face with the law and the prophets which exposes the five brethren to danger, and not their being rich men. They allege, therefore, that Luke at his own hand has added this conclusion, with the view of transforming a doctrine which was originally Ebionite and Judeo-Christian into one anti-Judaic or Pauline. The rich man who, in the original meaning of the similitude, simply represented riches, becomes in this conclusion the type of Jewish unbelief in respect of the resurrection of Jesus. Weizsäcker goes the length of regarding Lazarus as the representative of the Gentiles despised by the Jews. This last idea is incompatible with the Jewish name Lazarus, as well as with the place awarded to him in Abraham's bosom, the gathering place of pious Jews. As to the rich man, from the beginning he represents not the rich in general, but the rich man hardened by well-being, the Pharisee, whose heart, puffed up with pride, is closed to sympathy with the suffering. This appears from the expressions: Father Abraham, my son, Luke 16:24-25, which are as it were the motto of Israelitish formalism (Matthew 3:7-9; John 8:39). This conclusion is thus nothing else than the practical application of the parable, which, instead of being presented to his hearers in the form of an abstract lesson, is given as the continuation of the scene itself. It is exactly the same in the parable of the prodigal son, in which the elder son exhibits the Pharisees with their murmurings, and the divine answer. The first portrait, Luke 16:19-21, depicted the sin of the rich man; the second, Luke 16:22-26, his punishment. In this appendix Jesus unveils to His hearers the cause of this misery, the absence of μετάνοια, repentance, and for those who wished to profit by the warning, the means of preventing the lot which threatens them at the moment of their death: taking to heart Moses and the prophets very differently from what they have ever done. There must pass within them what took place in the prodigal son, the figure of the publicans (Luke 15:17: he came to himself), and in the steward, the type of the new believers (Luke 16:3: he said within himself): that act of solemn self-examination in which the heart is broken at the thought of its sins, and which impresses an entirely new direction on the life, and on the employment of earthly goods in particular. To reject this conclusion is therefore to break the arrow-point shot by the hand of Jesus at the consciences of His hearers.

Ver. 27. The five brethren cannot represent the rich of this world in general, and as little the Jews who remained unbelieving in respect of Jesus Christ. They are Jews living in a privileged, brilliant condition, like that of the rich man the Pharisees, whom this man represented; this relation is the idea expressed by the image of the kinship which connects them. Some have imagined that those five brethren are the five sons of the high priest Annas. Would Jesus have condescended to such personalities? The forms of address: father, Luke 16:27, father Abraham, Luke 16:30, continue to define the meaning of this principal personage very clearly. Διαμαρτύρεσθαι, Luke 16:28, does not signify only: to declare, but to testify in such a way that the truth pierces through the wrappings of a hardened conscience (διά). In putting this request into the rich man's mouth, Jesus undoubtedly alludes to that thirst for miracles, for extraordinary and palpable manifestations, which He never failed to meet among His adversaries, and which He refused to satisfy. Such demands charge with insufficiency the means of repentance which God had all along placed in Israel. Some commentators, unable to allow any good feeling in one damned, have attributed this prayer of the rich man to a selfish aim. According to them, he dreaded the time when his own sufferings would be aggravated by seeing those of his brethren. But would not even this fear still suppose in him a remnant of love? And why represent him as destitute of all human feeling? He is not yet, we have seen, damned in the absolute sense of the word. If we must seek a selfish alloy in this prayer, it can only be the desire to excuse himself, by giving it to be understood, that if he had been sufficiently warned he would not have been where he is.

Abraham teaches all his sons by his reply, Luke 16:29, with what earnestness they should henceforth listen to the reading of that law and those prophets, the latter of which they had, up till now, heard or even studied in vain (John 5:38-39). The subject has nothing to do with unbelief regarding Jesus; the situation of this saying is purely Jewish.

The rich man insists. His answer, Nay, father Abraham, Luke 16:30, depicts the Rabbinical spirit of disputation and pharisaic effrontery. Repentance would produce, he fully acknowledges, a life wholly different from his own (such as it has been described, Luke 16:19); but the law without miracles would not suffice to produce this state of mind.

Jesus unveils, Luke 16:31, the complete illusion belonging to this idea of conversion by means of great miraculous interpositions. He whom the law and the prophets bring not to the conviction of his sins, will be as little led to it by the sight even of one raised from the dead. After the first emotion of astonishment and terror, criticism will awake saying, Hallucination! and carnal security, shaken for a moment, will reassert itself. Jesus not having showed Himself, and not having preached to the Jews after His resurrection, this saying cannot be an invention of Luke borrowed from that event.

Such is the terrible answer of Jesus to the derision of His adversaries, the proud and covetous Pharisees, Luke 16:14. He shows them their portrait, the likeness of their present life, and their lot after death. Now they know what they are in the eyes of God (19-21), and what awaits them (23-35); they know also the real cause of their near perdition, and the only means which can yet avert it (27-31).

From this study it follows: 1. That all the indications of the preface (Luke 16:14-18) are entirely justified; in particular, that the Φαρισαῖοι (the Pharisees), Luke 16:14, is the real key of the parable. 2. That there reigns throughout this description a perfect unity of idea, and that the context furnishes no well-founded reason for distinguishing between an original parable and a later re-handling. 3. That the piece as a whole, and all its details, are in direct correspondence with the historical situation in which Jesus was teaching, and find their natural explanation without any need of having recourse to the later circumstances of apostolic times. 4. That this passage furnishes no proof of an Ebionite document anterior to our Gospel, and forming one of the essential materials employed by the author. Hilgenfeld says (Die Evangel. p. 102): “ Nowhere does our Gospel allow us to distinguish so clearly the original writing of which it is the anti-Jewish and Pauline handling.” Nowhere so clearly! This passage proving nothing, it follows that the others prove less than nothing.

This character, not anti-Jewish, but certainly anti-pharisaic, belongs equally to the whole series of pieces which we have just surveyed (comp. Luke 11:37 to Luke 12:12); then (after an interruption), Luke 13:10-31; Luke 14:1; Luke 15:2; Luke 16:14. The parable of the unfaithful steward is also connected with this series by the law of contrast. Here, then, is the time of the most intense struggle between Jesus and pharisaism in Galilee, like the contemporaneous period, John 7-10, in Judaea.