The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’inevitable hour,
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
It is true, of course, that death recognizes no class distinctions; it mocks them by its grim indiscrimination. Yet this story does not speak of death as equalizing people's fortunes. It portrays rather a great reversal of fortune. Society beyond the grave, according to Jesus, is no more egalitarian than this one is. It is riven, he says, by a barrier a thousand times more polarized and uncrossable than any social distinction this world has ever known. Notice how Abraham puts it in the story:
‘Besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us’ (Luke 16:26).
What was it about the rich man that merited such an appalling judgment—that his destiny was fixed in that awful place for eternity, with no way out? What was it that could possibly have deserved such a fate? What had he done wrong?
We need to be careful in analysing why the fates of the rich man and the poor man were so different. Some, I suspect, will be tempted to read into this story some kind of quasi-Marxist critique of economic disparity in society. Lazarus going to heaven, and the rich man to hell, is a spiritualization of the victory of the working classes over the exploitative bourgeoisie. Such an interpretation would be very appealing to many, but it is quite out of step with the Bible, and would be totally unjustified from this story itself.
There is not a hint in this story, for instance, that wealth per se is immoral. Jesus is not suggesting that heaven
