Read Luke 16:19-31 with your family.

If Luke 15 was the chapter about the lost things, then Luke 16 is about how rich people don’t understand Jesus’ teachings.

The story today is what we call ‘apocryphal’, meaning it is just a story, not a prediction, and it is meant to both fill us with hope and warn us about what could happen if we don’t follow the path Jesus is pointing towards. The hope comes with the promise that things will get better. The warning is to remember that the first five books of the Bible (called the Books of Moses by some) and the prophetical books in the Bible all tell of how we are to live: How we are to use money, treat ourselves and each other, welcome strangers, and work for peace. Jesus did not come to start a new religion, he came to get all the Hebrews and Gentiles to look again at the Hebrew Scriptures and recognize that everything they needed to do and be was in those stories.

People didn’t listen.

That’s why we have the ironic line at the end of this passage that says “even someone coming back from the dead wouldn’t make a difference”. Jesus was not talking about Lazarus in that line, he was talking about himself.

Everything we need to know about living the live God wants us to live can be found in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), and again in the Christian scriptures (New Testament), we just have to read it, recognize it, and do it.