“You cannot serve God and money.” — Luke 16:13
Context and Key Themes
Luke 16 is a chapter about money, eternity, and the way the first shapes the second. Jesus tells two parables back to back, both concerning wealth and how it is handled. The first, the parable of the dishonest manager, is one of the most puzzling stories Jesus ever told — a tale that seems at first glance to commend cheating, until the deeper point comes into view. The second, the story of the rich man and Lazarus, is one of the most sobering. Between them, a short series of sayings about the Pharisees’ love of money and a hard teaching on divorce tie the whole chapter together with a single theme: what you do with what has been entrusted to you reveals whether you belong to God or to what you have. And the stakes, Jesus warns, are eternal.
The Dishonest Manager
There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions. So he called him and said to him: What is this I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management, for you can no longer be manager.
The manager, knowing his firing is inevitable, weighs his options. He says to himself: What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do, so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses.
What follows is the manager’s stroke of desperate cleverness. He summons his master’s debtors one by one. To the first: how much do you owe my master? A hundred measures of oil. Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty. To another: how much do you owe? A hundred measures of wheat. Take your bill, and write eighty. He is slashing the debts owed to his master, presumably without authorization, in order to put each of these debtors in his debt — so that when he loses his position, they will owe him favors.
And then the line that has troubled commentators for two thousand years: The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. Jesus adds the moral: The sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.
This is not a commendation of dishonesty. Jesus is not praising the fraud. He is praising the foresight. The manager, faced with an impending crisis, did not freeze or despair. He looked ahead, assessed the resources at his disposal, and used them to secure his future. His ethics were corrupt, but his urgency was sound. And Jesus is saying: the children of God often handle their affairs with less urgency and less foresight than the worldly do. The worldly see a coming reckoning and act. The religious see an eternal reckoning and drift.
Jesus draws the practical lesson: Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings. Unrighteous wealth does not mean stolen wealth. It means wealth of this fallen age — money, which in the wrong hands becomes a weapon and in any hands is temporary. Use it, Jesus says, while it is still yours to use. Invest it in the lives of people. Be generous. Give it to those who will welcome you into eternity when the wealth itself has dissolved. Money’s highest function is not accumulation. It is to be converted, through generosity, into friendships and provisions that will outlast the money itself.
And Jesus closes the section with sayings that pull the logic tight. One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own? Wealth is a proving ground. How you handle money in this life is an audition for what you will be trusted with in the next. Then the summary: No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
The Pharisees Sneer
The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things, and they ridiculed him. Luke tells us this almost in passing, but it is the key to the chapter’s hinge. These men who considered themselves the most religious in Israel had a fatal blind spot. They loved money. And the sermon on serving two masters was directly exposing them.
Jesus answers their sneer without flinching. You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God. Social respectability is not divine approval. A person can be celebrated by the world and detested by heaven. The Pharisees have been optimizing for the wrong judge.
He adds a puzzling statement about the Law and the Prophets lasting until John, and everyone forcing their way into the kingdom since then, and a word on divorce. These short sayings seem compressed and out of place, but their function is to remind the Pharisees that the word of God they claimed to champion was not being honored by them but displaced by their traditions. The Law they flex against others cuts against them too. Their permissive approach to divorce — using a technicality to break covenant — is one example of how they have mastered the art of keeping the letter while violating the heart.
The Rich Man and Lazarus
And then, without transition, Jesus tells a story that will burn into the memory of anyone who reads it seriously.
There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. Purple dye was extraordinarily expensive, worn by royalty and the wealthiest elite. Fine linen was costly underclothing. Feasting every day — not just on feast days — meant unending luxury. This man has it all. He is the picture of successful wealth in the ancient world.
And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. Lazarus is the mirror image. Unclean, starving, diseased, unable to fend off the dogs. He is not inside the gate. He is outside it — within sight of the feast, close enough to smell it, near enough that the rich man passes him every time he comes and goes. The rich man does not drive him away. He simply never sees him. Every day the feast continues inside, and every day Lazarus lies outside, and nothing ever changes.
The detail that Luke slips in almost incidentally is this: the parable names the poor man. Lazarus. This is the only parable in the gospels where a character is given a name. Meanwhile, the rich man is never named — he is simply the rich man. In the world of the parable, Lazarus is a nobody and the rich man is somebody. In the book of heaven, it is exactly reversed. The rich man’s name has been left off the page, and the poor man’s has been written in.
The poor man dies and is carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also dies and is buried. And in Hades, being in torment, he lifts up his eyes and sees Abraham far off, and Lazarus at his side. He calls out: Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.
Notice that even in torment, the rich man still cannot see Lazarus as a person. He calls out to Abraham as if Lazarus were still a servant — a resource to be dispatched for his comfort. The habits of a life spent treating the poor as invisible follow him past the grave.
Abraham answers: Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.
The verdict is not about the rich man’s wealth as such. It is about what his wealth did to him — and what his neglect of Lazarus revealed. The man had every resource to show mercy and used none of it. The chasm in the afterlife is not arbitrary. It is the frozen form of the distance the rich man maintained in this life. He kept Lazarus outside the gate. Now the gate cannot be opened.
The rich man has one more plea. Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house — for I have five brothers — so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment. He is beginning, perhaps, to think of someone other than himself. But even now, he is asking Lazarus to do him a favor.
Abraham answers: They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them. The rich man protests: No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent. And Abraham’s final word: If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.
It is a shattering line. The people who will not listen to the Word of God they already have in their hands will not be persuaded by supernatural spectacle either. The evidence is not the problem. The heart is. If you will not hear Moses and the prophets, a resurrection will not save you — and Luke’s first-century readers, who knew that Jesus himself had risen from the dead and been refused by many of the same religious elite, would have heard the devastating implication. They did not listen to Moses. They did not listen to the prophets. And when Jesus rose from the dead, most of them did not listen to that either. Abraham was right.
Reflection
Luke 16 is a hard chapter. It is uncomfortable in ways modern Christianity has spent a lot of energy trying to soften. Jesus is not neutral about wealth. He does not teach that material prosperity is a sign of divine favor. He teaches that money is a dangerous master, that comfort in this age is often a warning rather than a blessing, and that how you handle resources now is an audition for how you will be trusted in eternity.
The dishonest manager, read rightly, is a parable about urgency. The manager saw a coming reckoning and acted immediately and decisively. Most believers believe in a coming reckoning too — and act as if they had all the time in the world. The parable is a pointed comparison. If the children of this world can show that much foresight about their small worldly fortunes, how much more should the children of light show foresight about their eternal ones? Give now. Invest in people now. Translate temporary wealth into eternal friendship now. When the money fails — and every dollar will eventually fail — you will be received into eternal dwellings, because the good you did with the money will still be there.
The rich man and Lazarus is the other side of the same coin. Here is a man who had the resources, had the proximity, had decades of daily walking past the suffering at his gate — and did nothing. He was not actively cruel. He did not kick Lazarus. He did not forbid the beggar to sit there. He simply never noticed him, never intervened, never let Lazarus’s need pierce his comfort. And for that he lost eternity. The parable is a warning that the sin of indifference is not a small sin. It is the sin that shapes an eternal chasm, because it is the sin of a heart that has grown incapable of mercy. You can go to hell by doing nothing. You do not have to commit a spectacular evil. You only have to keep walking past Lazarus.
And Abraham’s last word is the most sobering of all. The rich man thought a dramatic sign would change his brothers. Abraham said no. If they will not hear Moses and the prophets, no spectacle will save them. The Word of God is sufficient. What it requires is a heart willing to receive it. Every generation has people demanding new signs, new proofs, new supernatural evidence. God has already given what is needed. Scripture. The law. The prophets. The testimony of the apostles. The risen Christ. If these do not produce faith, nothing will, because the barrier was never lack of information. The barrier was always the heart.
Read Luke 16 slowly, and ask yourself the two questions it puts to every reader. First: am I handling what has been entrusted to me with the kind of foresight the dishonest manager had about much smaller stakes? Second: is there a Lazarus at my gate I have learned not to see? The chapter is less about the wealthy in the abstract than about the hardness that wealth slowly produces when it is not held loosely. The good news is that while you are still on this side of the grave, the chasm has not yet been fixed. The gate is still open. Lazarus is still there. You can still go out.