Is that your “Final Answer?”
This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 28, 2025.
Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Abraham said to him, "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."
How many of you have seen or read A Christmas Carol? The Ghost of Christmas Past and then present and future? This is essentially that in the Bible. You have people showing up from the dead in order to explain how things got the way they are and trying to convince this terrible Scrooge, Ebenezer Scrooge, that the way that he's living is uncharitable, terrible, and unjust and that he needs to be more generous in order to live forever with God.
It's a morality play and in the same way this parable, this teaching story that Jesus tells us today of the rich man and Lazarus is intended as a teaching story, a parable that is intended to show us the value of generosity and the consequences of not being generous.
The Rich Man and Lazarus
It starts off with a rich man who is very wealthy, maybe even like a prince or a king. He is dressed in purple and fine linen. Fine linen would have been very expensive to make. To make it dyed purple would have been astronomically expensive.
It's difficult for us moderns to conceive of how wealthy you would have to be in order to own clothing dyed purple because that dye was so rare and so extremely valuable. Not only is he dressed in the finest clothes humanity had on offer at that time, but also he feasted sumptuously every day.
He's a man who has access to the enormous wealth necessary to purchase the finest foods available and to have them prepared in the most expert of ways. This is a person who lives in one of those crazy mansions in Beverly Hills or overlooking the ocean in California like Barbra Streisand or something like that. The mansion is $30 million and that's pocket change for him. He's incredibly wealthy.
He lives in a gated compound, a fenced-in area there so that he can make sure that he holds on to all the things that he has to make sure that they're protected and safe and to only admit those whom he desires to have come into his courts.
And at his gate lays a man named Lazarus. It is not an accident here that the name Lazarus has been chosen by Jesus to name this man because those hearing this story would have immediately made a connection to a Lazarus that was famous in the early church.
And then Lazarus who was a close follower of Jesus who was willing to give of all that he had for the sake of the poor around him and who was loved by his community. Also incidentally, Lazarus, a man who died and who was brought back to life by Christ. But we'll get to that in a moment.
Death and the Afterlife
First we have the setup in this story where they both die and the man Lazarus is carried off by the angels to be with Abraham in a vision of maybe what heaven is like. And the rich man who we don't have a name for is carried off to Hades.
But not just Hades the domain of the dead. This idea of Hades is a place of eternal conscious torment. He is in agony, in flames.
Now we have an interesting dialogue, one which I suspect is not actually possible in the life to come. But it's intended for us to understand something here. It's a parable. So we're going to suspend our disbelief a little bit here.
This man, this rich man, is able to call out to Abraham whom somehow he can see across the great distance that separates the domain of those who are being punished and those who are receiving their eternal reward.
He calls out to Abraham and he asks that he might be given the opportunity to taste just a cool drop of water to cool his burning tongue. But what he asks is something that is both impossible and quite inappropriate.
Because he doesn't say, "Father Abraham, bring me some water." But he instead asks that Abraham would send Lazarus to do it. Even in death, this rich man is treating this poor man as merely a potential servant, less than an equal.
Even as he is tormented for his greed and his inhospitality and his unwillingness to share, he still demands that the man Lazarus who was malnourished, whose sores had become such a despicable sight, that dogs would come and lick them, which is gross enough, I suppose, for us today, but would have been even more detestable in the ancient Near East.
Dogs were unclean animals. And here, this rich man is demanding, requesting, but demanding that Abraham make Lazarus again his servant and send him to provide him with relief from his suffering.
Abraham scolds him and says, "No, child, you have received your good things in your life." And so now in your death, you are receiving what you are due. But Lazarus received evil things in this life. And now he is comforted.
And unfortunately, there's also a chasm between us because there is already been made a final judgment and one cannot cross from one side to the other.
The Final Answer
Have you ever seen the TV show, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Yeah? I don't know who hosts it now. But when you are locking in your answer, A, B, C, or D, and you have to make a decision, you can say, "Well, maybe it's A, maybe it's B, and that doesn't count."
But as soon as you say, "Final answer," then you are locked in. You can't change it at that point. And then the consequences come. Is it the correct answer or is it the wrong answer?
Here, I believe Jesus intends to remind us that there is a time where the final answer is locked in, where the person whom we have chosen to be in this life, either following God's prophets and promises, is part of who we are in our very soul, in our very identity, or whether we choose to go our own way and mistreat the people around us.
And so having given final answer, received his final reward, or rather his final punishment. But he's not done. He says, "I have five brothers. Please send Lazarus to my father's house and tell my brothers that there's consequences for their actions so that they will not also come into this place of torment."
Abraham rightly replies, "They have Moses and the prophets, and they should listen to them." Moses and the prophets, Moses the great lawgiver, tells us what is moral. He gives God's Ten Commandments to us, where we can evaluate our lives and see that we are falling short.
But one last request the rich man makes in an attempt to make things better. He says, "No, Father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent."
To which Abraham says, "No, if they won't listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."
Connection to the Real Lazarus
Now we see the connection to Lazarus. Not just that Lazarus was poor, nor that he was generous, but that he was the man whom Jesus in his delay intentionally allowed Lazarus to go through suffering and to die, delaying his arrival until after his death.
When Jesus arrives at that Lazarus's tomb, three days after he dies, he commands the stone to be rolled away, and he shouts in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out," and the body of dead Lazarus rises from the grave, commanded by the voice of Jesus the Christ.
The dead flesh of Lazarus hears the word of the Lord and stands and lives again. Yet we know that not everybody who saw Lazarus that day alive and well, the real Lazarus, not just the one in the story, believed that Jesus was the Messiah.
No, they saw a miracle, but they were not willing to trust it.
Our Response Today
For us today, it is easy for us to be caught up in those things which appeal to our desires, whether it is food or wealth or just the desires of our hearts. It seems appropriate that we would be having this message today on a day when many people will be focused on another activity instead of being here.
And yes, it would be enough if we could simply see that it would be Moses and the prophets that we should listen to and see that we are sinners in need of a Savior. We are dead men who are in need of the breath of life.
But for us, the final answer has not been entered. For you and me, there is still time to choose to follow Jesus Christ, to repent of our sin and to go after him. And then we can be counted with Lazarus.
Trusting in his promises, we can be sure that rather than getting what we deserve instead, we can receive the blessings that Jesus gives us. You see, because the problem with the parable here is that it creates a binary world in which the rich man is bad and Lazarus is good.
But if we actually do what Jesus says and we go and we look at what Moses and the prophets say, if we look at our own lives in light of the Ten Commandments and we evaluate ourselves on the basis of how good a person we have become, no one can conclude anything other than we are the rich man.
And when we are, we are called to repent, to serve, to love. And Jesus Christ promises you that as you turn and choose to follow him despite your sin, despite that affliction which keeps you from God, which produces for you that chasm which cannot be crossed on account of his mercy.
He will rescue you from the punishment you deserve and bring you into the bosom of Abraham, into the presence of God and all his saints, his angels and those who worship at the throne of God. He will bring you into his presence.
He will wash you with pure water. He will give you the things that you truly need. He will fill you not with the things of a sumptuous table, but he will fill your hearts with the gifts that he provides.
May you trust the promise of God in Jesus Christ so that you repent of your sin. For one has risen from the dead and he calls you to be reconciled to God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who by his cross put to death our sin and by his resurrection provides for us the promise of eternal life with him.
May you trust this Lord Jesus who reaches down from heaven to extend to you his hand that you may be lifted up into the heights. And in this life, may you serve others not counting the cost, having with you peace, which surpasses all understanding, which is yours in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
