The World Turned Upside Down

Transcript

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[0:01] Mark, our sermon text is from Luke 16, verses 19 through 31. Just a word of introduction, this is another parable, another parable on the way to Jerusalem. Jesus is going to Jerusalem. He's resolutely set His face there. So you might want to put this in the context that these are the last times He gets to say very much, so it might be important. It's pretty important. Everything He says is important, but there's some urgency at the tail end here. And again, it's a parable. Parables are wonderful. They function in kind of an interesting way. You don't develop an entire theology out of them, but they point at some things that we really want to pay attention to. They have their own internal logic. As we'll see, that doesn't always work in the outside world, but that's okay. So the parable exists to kind of bring home one or two main points, and it's also designed for people to think about it a day later and go, oh, I see a little bit more, and a week later to go, oh, okay. It's not... It's not... It's not like a math lesson that you could probably absorb in one day and go, okay, I get it. It's something that invites you into a longer sort of mental conversation with it, and that's a very great teaching tool, and Jesus uses them quite often.

[1:11] So let's go to this reading from Luke 16. It's the parable of... It's called the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, beginning with verse 19. Jesus said, there was a certain rich man who was splendidly clothed in purple and fine linen. And who lived each day in luxury. At his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, who was covered with sores. As Lazarus lay there longing for scraps from the rich man's table, the dogs would come and lick his open sores.

[1:45] Finally, the poor man died and was carried by the angels to sit beside Abraham at the heavenly banquet. The rich man also died and was buried. And he went to the place of the dead. There, in torment, he saw Abraham in the far distance with Lazarus at his side. The rich man shouted, Father Abraham, have some pity. Send Lazarus over here to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue.

[2:14] I am in anguish in these flames. But Abraham said to him, Son, remember that during your lifetime you had everything you wanted. And Lazarus had nothing. So now he is here being comforted and you are in anguish. And besides, there is a great chasm separating us. No one can cross over to you from here and no one can cross over to us from there.

[2:43] Then the rich man said, please, Father Abraham, at least send him to my father's home. For I have five brothers and I want him to warn them so they don't end up in this place of torment. But Abraham said, Moses and the prophets have warned them. Your brothers can read what they wrote.

[3:05] The rich man replied, No, Father Abraham, but if someone is sent to them from the dead, then they will repent of their sins and turn to God. But Abraham said, if they won't listen to Moses and the prophets, they won't be persuaded, even if someone rises from the dead. The rich man said, No, Father Abraham, but if someone is sent to them from the dead, then he will repent of their sins and turn to God. Right?

[3:34] Right? Right? Right? It means that he was brought there every day by somebody else. Okay? That means that there was a community of people around Lazarus that was helping Lazarus. But the rich man was not. So there's sort of a third character or a fourth character in this story. And that's the community around Lazarus. And they don't have a name, but they're implied. They're implied. They're there. They're helping Lazarus. They bring him to the gate in the morning so he can beg. They take him home at night. Right? And all the more so because he lives a while. Lazarus lives a while. Which meant he was being kept alive by the community. So even though at this man's gate he got nothing, other people must have been feeding him. Because he didn't die the next day. Right? He didn't die of starvation three days later or a week later or anything like that. So it's not just that the rich man does nothing. It's that the community that doesn't have as much as the rich man does something. So we kind of see this. We have a person in need. A person with great wealth. And in the middle is a community with moderate wealth, perhaps. And the people with less wealth are helping the one with nothing. And the person with great wealth is doing nothing.

[5:02] So it kind of sets up this sort of spectrum that is, I think, the people listening in the time of Jesus would have made that mental model in their head almost right away. You may have been wondering about what is called the place of the dead. The Greek word. The word underneath that is Hades. And this is a challenge when we're talking about there's sort of different words for the afterlife in the New Testament. The New Testament is written in Greek. They had to use this word sometimes to describe the place that people go after death. And in the Greek sense, Hades was where people went after they died. And they were kind of sort of disembodied spirits that floated around. And they weren't particularly happy. Or particularly sad. They just kind of existed. It wasn't necessarily there a place of punishment. But it wasn't a great place either, right?

[6:00] In the New Testament, the New Testament thinking, and we don't really talk about this much, is that the place of the dead is different from hell. The place of the dead is sort of a temporary place where people go when they die waiting for final judgment. So it's sort of like a... It's not purgatory. Although maybe purgatory got its idea from this. It's sort of a container where people are kind of stored up until the final judgment. And then at the final judgment, they go one place or the other. So you think about the parable of the sheep and the goats. There's this final judgment. People come before. And there's a court case. It's very much the idea of sort of a courtroom metaphor going on there. And so even in the place of the dead. They're sorted into two categories. The righteous and the unrighteous. And the unrighteous are in torment until judgment. And so this initial sorting is kind of like a prejudgment, right?

[7:01] Everybody's waiting to receive their day in court. But you're kind of in sort of the good side of the courtroom or the bad side of the courtroom, if that makes sense. But everybody receives their day in court. Everybody gets a fair hearing before the judge. And then the final judgment is after that conversation. Takes place. And it's uncertain that any judgments are overturned. Like the initial sorting. You think about if you've watched Harry Potter. Like can you go from Gryffindor to, I don't even know the names of all the other ones. But Slytherin. Can you go from Gryffindor to Slytherin? Maybe. I don't know. But here it's like can you go from one side of the courtroom to the other side of the courtroom? You know, in the final judgment. One can hope. Hold on to that idea, though. Hold on to that idea because that's going to come back. But the judgment. The judgment on the rich man is that while people with less money than him helped Lazarus, he never did. So that's the judgment. And he was unmoved by Lazarus' plight. He just didn't really do anything about it. And the other telling thing is that Lazarus was left at his gate. Theoretically, this was the only way in and out of his own property. So that meant that if he went to town, he had to see Lazarus at least twice every day.

[8:15] And he was unmoved by this person who was both poor. And hungry. And was covered with sores. And he did nothing to help him. So it wasn't just he couldn't. If he was going to come to the courtroom and say, I never saw him. I never knew. That was going to be a lie. He saw him every day. Twice at least. Right? So there's no ignorance that can be sort of claimed as a defense in this sort of law court that is the afterlife.

[8:42] So there's then we see that in this place. There's a. There's a conversation between the rich man and Abraham. Right? And there's. But as Abraham says, there's this vast chasm between us. And then you may be saying to yourself, if there's a vast chasm between them, how do they talk to each other? They have walkie talkies and megaphone. So here's one part of of parables. It's kind of fun to think about is parables have their own internal logic that you don't have to think about. You don't have to pick apart. You know, it's called suspension of disbelief in literature. Something kind of unlikely or unusual or even illogical happens in a story. But it doesn't matter because it's in the service of making the story happen. All right. So in this particular case, you can communicate from the place of from one side of the place of the dead to the other. You can communicate from the torment of the flames all the way up to the banquet. You can talk back and forth. In reality, I don't think you can. You know, I don't. But we don't know. That's the other thing. We don't know a lot about the afterlife. We just have these little nuggets here and there all over all over the New Testament and even the Old Testament. So anyone who has a really like assertive view of what exactly it looks like after we die and when all this happens, the scripture doesn't back it up.

[10:04] They have some other source that they're going off of. So we wouldn't we wouldn't necessarily agree with them. We'd be more like all we can say is let's wait and see. Let's wait and see. So in that place where the rich man is. He's in torment. He wants Lazarus to come and be his servant, which is interesting. So evidently, we don't know how repentant he is, but he's still an elitist. You know, he still wants somebody to come and serve him. And it happens to be the person that he never helped once in his life. So this sort of this sort of hypocrisy about it all that I think everybody listening to this parable then would have gone. He you never helped him. Now you want his help, you know, and Abraham says, well.

[10:47] Even if. Even if we could help you, we wouldn't. It's actually the reverse. He's not going to help you. And even if you wanted to, he couldn't because he cannot. He cannot travel this. And Abraham says something that's really kind of. It's disturbing, kind of depending on how wealthy you are, is that when you guys were all alive, you had all sorts of good stuff and Lazarus had nothing. And now the tables are turned. The tables are turned over. Roles are returned. The tables are reversed. But this is forever. So you maybe should have thought this through. Now he's in. He's at the banquet sitting next to me. And you're in a place of anguish. We're going to get into that a little bit more, too. So.

[11:32] Then. He says, OK, there's this sense of resignation in the in the rich man's voice. Which is, I guess I'm stuck here. At least. My brothers. I want my brothers to avoid this. Which is actually the first nice thing he said. He's only caring about his own family. So there's still some problems there. But at least he wants somebody else to avoid this fate. And he says, have Lazarus go back. Tell them to avoid this at all costs. It's too late for me. Maybe they'll make some better choices. And Abraham says, your brothers have had the laws of Moses and the writings of the prophets all their lives.

[12:15] That's more than enough for them to figure out. You're this all out. It's more than enough for them to figure out that you're in the wrong. And. And then the rich man says, but what if somebody comes back from the dead? Wouldn't that really get people's attention? And you can kind of just think of Jesus sort of as he's telling the parable going. You would think so, wouldn't you? You know, you think so. You would think so. But Jesus is kind of speaking kind of through kind of from behind the veil, even in this parable. And he says.

[12:43] Even if somebody comes back from the dead. There's some people who still want to go back. They don't listen. And he's talking about himself. He's talking about himself. So it's kind of interesting. That's how this parable functions is it is this pointing for it is itself pointing forward to the cross is pointing forward to this idea of what people listen to under what conditions people will listen to somebody. And it talks about some really major themes in the New Testament, which is sort of this reversal of things. We call it the inverted kingdom. Sometimes, sometimes when Jesus says the first will be last and the last will be first. This is what that sometimes looks like. Okay.

[13:20] So some major takeaways from this sort of the put a sort of layer on top of it is as sort of asking ourselves, what could we take away from this parable? This isn't one of those parables where we have to guess who is what Abraham is Abraham, right? Lazarus is Lazarus. This rich man is the rich man. It's not like, oh, there was somebody who owned a vineyard and like, is that Jesus or God or some just some random person? No, it's pretty, pretty clear. But we can say, well, what is this saying to us? And as Victoria said, exactly right. One takeaway from this and some other parables is that at a certain point.

[14:01] In the future, yet for all of us who are alive at a certain point, it is actually too late. And that's a sobering thought. All right. It's too late. This man died before he could amend his ways. And it was too late. It was too late. And he had to kind of dig himself back out of that. So one parable, one parable with a similar message, if you remember, we've preached on it a few times, is the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. Five of them remembered to bring enough oil. Five of them didn't. When the bridegroom came and this is the coming of Jesus, they weren't ready. And they asked for somebody to share and it was not possible. And it was just too late. So sometimes it's just too late. And that's a sobering thought. Right?

[14:46] But I would always say that when it's sometimes, someday it may be too late, you can kind of throw your hands up and sort of defeat us and say, well, that's just too bad. Or it could motivate you to reach people who haven't received Jesus yet and say, let's talk to them before it's too late. Like there's some urgency. This creates urgency in us. Ideally, this would create urgency in us. Another takeaway from this.

[15:14] Parable is there's a warning about disbelief. Disbelief is a real issue for Jesus. Right? And there's a warning about taking the scriptures seriously. Right? Abraham says to this man, your brothers have Moses and the prophet. They need to read it. If they were to read all that stuff that they've been taught since childhood, if they were to listen to their rabbi, for example, they won't be in this situation that you are, which means that you didn't. You didn't listen. You didn't read. Right?

[15:42] The other thing I would take away. From this is that, as I said before, a parable like this does not function as an overall theology of how heaven works. Okay? So don't, don't, you know, take the parable. Oh, this is how heaven works. You know? No. This is a parable. Has its own internal logic. You can't talk from. I don't think you can talk from one side to the other. But for the sake of this parable, we can. So we don't use parables to make strong theological cases. We probably get more from entire letters like Romans and Galatians or from the entire text. We can't get more from the entire narrative of the Gospels. We put that all together. We build a theology out of that. But a parable can drive home one single point really well. And so they're good. And it's sometimes it kind of illuminates a little corner that we don't see too much. So parables have their place. But don't, don't build a whole theology about heaven. You know, for example, like the parable of the sheep and the goats. Don't, don't necessarily think that this describes how the final judgment is in all ways. It has its own purpose. It has its own thing.

[16:45] So and we don't take this then as a firm description of what it looks like when we die. We don't know. And we will find out. But to know more about the end, our own end, we need to look at a whole lot of other scriptures. We could do that someday. We could probably have a sermon on that.

[17:02] Then let's put this again into the larger context of Luke. Like I said, Jesus is on His way to Jerusalem. It's urgent. There's something in here that He really wants people to know. How would we tie this in to His journey to Jerusalem, which is His journey to the cross? And so one of those things is that through His death and resurrection, He's going to drastically reorder the world. And there's some reordering in this parable. And Jesus is basically warning people, when all this happens, when I go to the cross, I'm going to begin this process of reordering the world. Remember, He keeps saying the week, you know, the first will be last and the last will be first. And so in Jesus at the cross, weakness, weakness is going to overcome power, which is not what it looks like because He's crucified by force and He doesn't put up a resistance. So it looks like force destroys weakness. But if you look at the long view, weakness overcomes force and weakness overcomes power. Humility is going to overcome pride, right? So there's where He goes as a humble person.

[18:17] Right? Right? Right? Catholic Church, and the rich man is given a name, divus. But that's just the Latin word for rich, you know? So they're just, they're like, they wanted to give everybody a name in the parable so they could refer to him. But that was missing the point of the parable.

[18:56] Lazarus, who's poor and nothing, has a name. The rich man, who's rich and has everything, has no name in this parable. Of course, he has a, I was going to say he has a real name in real life, but there's no real life because this is a parable. But he has no name in the parable. So in the parable, the low people are named and the high people are without a name. And to have a name is to be known and to be valued and to love and to have a place in the world and to not have a name is to erase all those things. So already we see that Jesus is having this sort of preference for the person who's low. Not to mean that Jesus hates rich people. He doesn't. And I think that's a good distinction that we got from Clark reading in the New Testament. Money is not the root of all evil. Right? We always have to qualify that because the scripture does. The love of money. The love of money is the root of all evil. And not sharing it when you should. Not being generous with it when you should be. That isn't evil.

[19:55] So even in the telling of the parable, Jesus is inverting the kingdom because one person has a name and one doesn't. And Abraham really makes it explicit. Like it's almost like overly on the nose. Abraham says, when you were alive, you had riches. And Lazarus had nothing. But now he's in paradise and you're in torment and there's no crossing over from the one place to the other. So Jesus comes into the world and he's going to Jerusalem and at the cross is where this inversion is going to begin and it's going to continue to go on.

[20:29] There's this beautiful story from the beginning of Luke's gospel. Do you remember somebody named Simeon? He gets just a little bit of press. Not much. Just a few things. Just a few verses. This was a man, this is around the time, right after Jesus was born or a little bit after Jesus was born when he was a baby. There was this man named Simeon who had been waiting all his life for the Messiah to appear. Can you, and he was probably in advanced years. They don't say how old he is, but he's an older man.

[20:55] Waiting all his life and he was faithful. So God was like, when the Messiah comes, I'm going to tell Simeon. When the, I'm going to like, I'm going to satisfy this person's deepest desires so that when the Messiah comes. I'm going to let Simeon know. So Mary brings Jesus to the temple for a blessing and the Holy Spirit taps Simeon on the shoulder and says, the Messiah is here. He's here. He's finally here. You've been waiting all your life for this, right? This is such a beautiful story. And then this is the scary part. If you're Mary, Simeon grabs Jesus and holds him, you know, and Mary's like, Hey, what's going on? I think she was kind of maybe told by the Holy Spirit, like it's okay. Safe person. Safe person. Okay.

[21:39] He takes baby Jesus into his arms and starts to praise God. And he's praising God for all the wonderful things about Jesus. But then he tells a prophecy. This is really interesting. Right at the beginning of Jesus's life, this person, this stranger makes a prophecy about him. Luke 2.34 says this, then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother, this child is destined for the falling and rising. He said, this child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed and a sword will pierce your own soul too. He's speaking to Mary. Wow. It's really amazing, right? So this is a prophecy. Jesus is destined for Jerusalem where he will be opposed and the thoughts and motives of all sorts of people will be revealed. This prophecy of Simeon is about to come true. In Jerusalem, right? And Mary will grieve his death. This is the sword that will pierce her heart. She's one of the few that stayed to watch, which is amazing.

[22:45] But this is the other thing. Jesus is destined for the rising and falling of many in Israel. For rising, think of Lazarus and the other vulnerable people in the community that takes care of their needs. And for the falling, think of the rich man without a name dropping from riches to torment. Do you see it? So this is Jesus. Jesus saying, I'm about to do all these things that were prophesied about me. I'm on my way to the cross. And this is sort of a vision of what the world will start to look like after I go to the cross. So the prophecy comes true, of course. It comes true on the cross. It comes true during the time between Jesus' death and his resurrection. And this is a little more involved, but I think this is worth it today because this is something that comes up every now and then. We have a very cryptic comment in 1 Peter 3.18. 1 Peter 3.18. It says, About Jesus being able to actually do what the rich man's brothers couldn't do or what Lazarus couldn't do, which is to go to the place of the dead and preach the gospel not yet judged. Okay? And this is very interesting. 1 Peter 3.18. This comes up every now and then because people scratch their head at it. And again, it's just one verse, two verses. So you can't develop an entire theology about it.

[23:59] But this is what it says in 1 Peter 3.18. It says, For Christ also suffered for sins once for all. The righteous for the unrighteous in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit. In which, that spirit, he also, listen to this part. In which he also went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.

[24:27] You see where this is going? Whom in former times did not obey. I'm going to read that part again. In which he, the spirit. In which he also went. In which he also went. And made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.

[24:39] And so this idea that this courtroom, before the final sorting into Gryffindor and Slytherin and all the rest. This courtroom where there's sides and the judgments don't change. There's this sense in 1 Peter 3.18 that in between when Jesus died on the cross and when he was raised again. In that brief amount of time, maybe just 36 hours or so. In the spirit, he went down to the place of dead. And proclaimed his gospel to people who were waiting there who had been disobedient. Why would he do that unless he thought some of them could be brought from one side of the courtroom to the other? So what Abraham can't do, what Lazarus can't do, maybe Jesus can do. Now like I said, this is one verse. It's actually kind of related to this. Very interesting. I'm not going to say with 100% certainty that this is how it's going to happen. But I hold out that this is. This is God's mercy at work. It's not up to us. I'm not the judge. I'm not going to say it. But it does seem that if we read this, Jesus made his way to this place to continue in the hope that even those who had already died weren't completely lost. And that could give us some hope.

[25:52] Do you know this little tiny verse that we don't really know much about made its way into the Apostles' Creed? Which is kind of a mystery. You know that part of the Apostles' Creed? Right? It's interesting.

[26:05] But I think people who wrote the Creed were like, this is important. This could be important. It was important to them. And now it's important to us because we say the Creed very often. All right. So how can we wrap this up? I'll just say a few things.

[26:21] One, at some point it will be too late. Unless it's not. You know, hedge my bets. But at some point it's too late. So you want to get in front of that. That should create urgency in us to bring the gospel to people. To people who haven't heard it yet. Okay?

[26:36] The second thing is that Jesus is still turning the world upside down. And he wants to do it through us. So this kind of sounds fun or scary. Is that this rising and falling of many that Jesus is all about. The first being last and the last being first. He wants to keep doing in the world. I'm not saying we need to bring people down from their perches. We need to preach the gospel. The gospel can fill people with humility. The gospel can reorient people. The gospel can reorient people's lives. Away from pride and wealth and arrogance and disdain for other people. To being people who are genuinely moved by the spirit. To be generous and to love other people. And to care about other people's well-being. So Jesus wants to turn the world upside down. I keep saying this. He wants to do it through us. We are the ones who need to lift up the low. And somebody else can bring down the high. The Holy Spirit can bring down the high. But we need to bring it. We need to lift up the low. There's all sorts of ways to do that. I'm not going to talk about that. The first thing before we do that.

[27:37] Before we invert the world. We have to be inverted. We have to be inverted. We have to give up pride. We have to embrace humility. We have to decide that we're not that great. I mean, you're all wonderful. You know, you're like all from Lake Wobegon and etc. But really you're all rotten sinners. You have to start there. We embrace this humility. That without God we can really do nothing. We have to empty ourselves just like Jesus. Of all the attachments in this world that slow us down. And in the end we have to admit that we're sinners. And that we deserve. We deserve the place of torment. Right there next to the rich man. But only when we surrender it all are we lifted up. Jesus lifts us. Jesus himself then lifts us from that low place of humility. And admitting that we're sinners. And we're brought up to his side. Ready to do in this life. Ready to do his work. And in the next life to sit next to him at the banquet. Well, let's pray.

[28:40] Father, thank you again for your word. This great parable that opens up so many doors into Jesus and what he's thinking and what he's doing. And is yet doing in this world. Father, make us your willing partners and servants in this work. To turn the world upside down for you.