What Does Luke 16:25 Mean?

(25) **But Abraham said, Son, . . .**—There is surely something suggestive that the Patriarch is represented as not disowning the relationship. If we find a meaning in the “friend” of the parables of the Labourers in the Vineyard (see Note on Matthew 20:13) and the Wedding Garment (see Note on Matthew 22:12), we ought not to ignore the thought that seems to be implied here. Here, too, was one who, even in Hades, was recognised as being, now more truly than he had been in his life, a “child” or “son of Abraham.” (Comp. Luke 19:9.) The word used is the same, in its tone of pity and tenderness, as that which the father used to the elder son in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:31), which our Lord addressed to the man sick of the palsy (Matthew 9:2), or to His own disciples (John 13:33). **Remember.**—The word has a terrible force in its bearing upon the question of the future life. Memory intensified, reproducing the past visions, pleasures, and base joys, the *mala mentis gaudia* of the self-indulgent, and subject to the action of a conscience no longer narcotised into slumber—this makes the sharpest pang of the deserved anguish. In Christian eschatology the river of death is no water of Lethe, bringing with it the forgetfulness of past evil. **Thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things.**—The verb, like “they *have* their reward,” in Matthew 6:2, implies that this was all he was to have. There is an emphasis, too, in the presence of the pronoun in the one clause, and its absence in the other. The rich man had made the pleasures of sense “*his* good things.” They were all that he cared for—all, therefore, that he was to have. He had identified himself with them. The “evil things” of Lazarus, on the other hand, had not been chosen by him; they were external *to* him, a discipline and a probation through which, turning them to their right use, he passed to his true good. **Now he is comforted.**—Some of the better MSS. give, “now he is comforted *here.”*