“Death-resurrection stands forth as clearly in this parable as it does in any of the others…Lazarus starts out as a loser, plays out his allotted hand, and then, in one stunning throw, wins the game with the last trump of an accepted death. [The Rich Man] starts out as a winner, but because he never accepts death he loses, hands down.
Jesus is anticipating the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican here. In that story, too, both main characters are dead: the difference between them is simply that while the publican accepts his death and is justified, the Pharisee rejects this and is condemned.
It is not, of course, that we are to run out and actively seek a miserable life like Lazarus’s…Life in this vale of tears will provide an ungenteel sufficiency of such things. The truth, rather, is that the crosses that will inexorably come-and the death that will inevitably result from them-are, if accepted, all we need. For Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to reward the rewardable, improve the improvable, or correct the correctible; he came simply to be the resurrection and the life of those who will take their stand on a death he can use instead of on a life he cannot.”
-The Rev. Robert Farrar Capon, on the parable “Lazarus and Dives” from The Parables of Grace
Robert Farrar Capon. The Parables of Grace (Kindle Locations 2204-2218). Kindle Edition.
Koenig, Peter. Lazarus at the Gate, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.
https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58503
[retrieved February 13, 2023].
