On Salvation: Luke's Story of Lazarus and the Rich Man

On Salvation: Luke’s Story of Lazarus and the Rich Man

I was recently discussing Luke’s story of Lazarus and the rich man with a small group of people at a local retirement facility. You’ll find that story at Luke 16:19-31. In it a rich man lives in luxury while a beggar named Lazarus suffers at the rich man’s gate longing to eat the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. Both of them die. Lazarus rests in the bosom of Abraham. The rich man suffers in the agonies of Hades. Abraham refused to relieve the rich man’s suffering saying that he received good things in his lifetime while Lazarus suffered. This story is one of the very few places in the Bible where people appear in an afterlife that involves reward and punishment. In it Lazarus is rewarded but not because he is said to have been righteous or moral or because he had the proper faith but only because he suffered during his life on earth. The only thing we know about the rich man’s behavior is that he lived in luxury and did nothing to help Lazarus, the suffering beggar lying at his gate. The moral of the story is relatively clear. God blesses the poor and calls us to do what we can to relieve their suffering. There are lots of nuances in this story that we could discuss, but what I’ve given you here is enough for what I want to say about it.

One of the people with whom I was discussing this story at the local retirement facility was someone I hadn’t met before. She identified herself as Free Methodist. All I know about the Free Methodists is that their theology is extremely conservative. I believe that they read the Bible as the literal word of God. In the course of our discussion this woman wondered if Lazarus were a Christian. Somehow I managed not to laugh at the question, although it is absurd for anyone with any sophisticated Christian theology at all. First of all Luke attributes the story to Jesus, and in Jesus’ time there was no such thing as a Christian. Jesus didn’t call people to be Christians, he called them to a new way of understanding and following God in a thoroughly Jewish context. The story says nothing at all about Lazarus’ faith. It doesn’t even say he is Jewish much less Christian. So reading anything into the story about his faith would be rank speculation. The question is absurd and hardly worthy of an answer.

Yet that question is grounded in a conservative Christian theology that has been and is wide-spread and immensely destructive in the world. I can think of only one reason why this good woman would wonder whether Lazarus were Christian. In the story Lazarus is saved. He goes to the bosom of Abraham, which we can take as an image of a blissful life in heaven after death. I am sure that this woman has been taught and has accepted the notion that only Christians are saved. Therefore, since in the story Lazarus is saved, he must be a Christian. In order to be true to what she believes Christianity to be this woman had to find a way to understand Lazarus as Christian. To her the question of Lazarus’ possible Christianity is not absurd at all. It fits perfectly with what she has been taught and apparently accepted about the Christian faith.

Yet the story of Lazarus and the rich man brings the theology behind the woman’s question into doubt. Yes, in the story Lazarus is saved and the rich man is condemned. Yet Lazarus isn’t saved and the rich man isn’t condemned because of any faith they may or may not have had. Lazarus is saved only because he suffered in his life on earth. The rich man is condemned only because he lived well during his life on earth and did nothing that we know of to help those who suffer. These characters’ faith, if they had any, has nothing to do with their respective fates in the story. Salvation doesn’t come to Lazarus because he believed the right things about Jesus Christ. It doesn’t come to him because, as the women I’m talking about put it, he took Jesus into his heart. Salvation comes to Lazarus only because he suffered in life. It seems that dynamic is something the good woman at my gathering could neither accept nor even comprehend.

The story of Lazarus and the rich man is only one passage in the New Testament that suggests that Jesus wasn’t at all about getting people to believe in him and thus be saved. Jesus was about how people live, not about what happens to them after they die. The story of Lazarus and the rich man uses imagery about fate after death not to make a point about fate after death but to make a point about how we are to live this life. The story makes a point similar to Matthew’s “insofar as you have done it to the least of these you have done it to me.” Done what? Not tried to make them Christian. After all, it wouldn’t make much sense for people to be called to make Jesus Christ Christian. Rather, Christ calls us to feed, clothe, and visit those in need. He calls us to acts of charity and lives committed to social and economic justice. That is what the story of Lazarus and the rich man teaches, not that you have to believe certain things to be saved.

This woman’s question about Lazarus being Christian is not only grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of what Jesus was about. Perhaps even more dangerously it is grounded in Christian exclusivism. It assumes that Christianity understood as accepting certain propositions about Jesus of Nazareth to be true (or “taking Jesus into your heart”) is the only way to salvation. There are passages in the New Testament that can be read to support that conclusion. Whether those passages actually mean that is an important question but one I won’t go into here. My point for now is that the largest and most vocal parts of the Christian tradition have for centuries proclaimed that Christian exclusivism is God’s own truth. For these people belief in Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation.

That conviction has had disastrous consequences both in predominantly Christian regions and around the world. At its worst it has led European nations to force conversions to Christianity at gun or spear point. Even in its least offensive form it has made Christians feel superior to people of other faiths or of no faith. It has led efforts such as those at the old Indian schools in our country to disrespect native languages, cultures, and faiths and to efforts to convert native people not just to Christianity but to Victorian cultural and sexual norms and prejudices. It has been a major factor in European and American anti-Judaism, a centuries-old hatred that culminated in the Holocaust. It has caused Christians to disregard and reject the contributions of non-Christians to world culture. All in all Christian exclusivism has been a very bad thing in world history.

Moreover, it just doesn’t make any theological sense. It posits that God has created only one way to be right with God, a way that happens to be our way. All other ways supposedly lead not to God but to perdition. Extreme Christian exclusivism even says that all the people who lived before Jesus Christ are damned because they didn’t believe in Jesus. It says that everyone who has lived in parts of the world where Christianity is hardly heard of and in which it is strongly countercultural are damned because they don’t believe in Jesus. Really? That’s how God has structured the world? No, that is not how God has structured the world. It can’t be how God has structured the world. Only a God who hates and is willing to condemn most of the people who ever lived would structure a world that way, yet even Christian exclusivists say that God is a God of love for all people. Their favorite Bible verse begins “For God so loved the world.” John 3:16a. It simply is not possible to reconcile Christian exclusivism with a God of love.

So let’s be done both with the notion that what God wants from us is certain cognitive assumptions about Jesus, and let us be done with Christian exclusivism. These things are killing Christianity in the world today because their falsity is becoming more and more obvious. Salvation isn’t about belief. It isn’t even primarily about life after death. Salvation for the follower of Jesus Christ is found in this life in conforming one’s life to the will and ways of God as revealed in and through Jesus. In Jesus’ parable Lazarus isn’t saved because he believed the right things. He is saved because God loved him despite or actually because of his suffering. To that truth let all the people say: Amen!