A Story Jesus Did Not Have to Explain

There is a second passage worth sitting with here, not because it is a systematic geography lesson — it is not; it is a parable, and parables use their settings as vehicles for a point rather than as the point itself — but because of what it assumes its audience already understood, and what that assumption tells you.

"There was a rich man who dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. But at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus whose body was covered with sores, who longed to eat what fell from the rich man's table. In addition, the dogs came and licked his sores. Now the poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. And in Hades, as he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far off with Lazarus at his side."

— Luke 16:19–23 (NET)

Jesus tells this story without pausing to explain the setting. He does not introduce Abraham's side, or the great chasm that separates the two men, as a theological novelty His audience needs briefed on. He simply places His characters inside a picture His hearers already recognized, and tells the story that matters — a story, ultimately, about the Pharisees' hardness of heart toward the testimony of Moses and the prophets, not a systematic map of the afterlife. But the assumed background is worth noticing precisely because it is assumed. Both men are conscious. Both retain memory — the rich man remembers his brothers, remembers the life he lived, understands with painful clarity exactly what he has lost. There is communication, or at least the desperate attempt at it, across a chasm that cannot be crossed. Whatever the intermediate state between death and resurrection actually is, this parable assumes it is not a blank, dreamless interval. It is real experience, real continuity of the person who lived, and a real, differentiated outcome shaped by the relationship — or the absence of relationship — each man carried into it with the living God.