Jesus confronts the seductive power of money. This chapter contains some of His most challenging teachings on wealth, stewardship, and eternal consequences. Through the parable of the shrewd manager and the story of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus warns that how we use earthly resources reveals our true spiritual condition. He calls His disciples to radical faithfulness, showing that we cannot serve both God and money.
The parable opens with a lean introduction: Ἄνθρωπός τις ἦν πλούσιος ὃς εἶχεν οἰκονόμον ('there was a rich man who had a manager'). Luke offers no moral coloring of either party at the start; the rich man is simply rich, the manager simply employed. The accusation comes through the passive διεβλήθη ('was reported'), a verb whose root διαβάλλω connotes slanderous accusation — the same root as διάβολος ('devil, accuser'). Luke leaves it ambiguous whether the charge is true; the master treats it as actionable without trial. The participle διασκορπίζων ('squandering') deliberately echoes Luke 15:13, where the prodigal son διεσκόρπισεν his inheritance. The two parables are bound by this verb: in chapter 15 a son squanders, in chapter 16 a steward squanders, and in both Jesus probes how scattered resources can be turned toward life.
The interior monologue at vv. 3-4 is the parable's strategic hinge. The manager rules out two options through compact rhetorical balance — σκάπτειν οὐκ ἰσχύω, ἐπαιτεῖν αἰσχύνομαι ('to dig I have no strength, to beg I am ashamed') — paired infinitives weighing physical capacity against social standing. The aorist ἔγνων ('I have known/I have it!') marks the resolution: a flash of clarity. His plan is to reduce the debts owed to his master so that the debtors will receive him εἰς τοὺς οἴκους αὐτῶν ('into their houses'). Whether the discounts represent the manager's own commission, illicit interest forbidden by Torah, or pure embezzlement is debated; the parable does not resolve it. What matters is that the manager uses present authority — soon to be revoked — to secure future welcome.
The shock comes at v. 8: ἐπῄνεσεν ὁ κύριος τὸν οἰκονόμον τῆς ἀδικίας ('the master praised the unrighteous manager'). The genitive τῆς ἀδικίας is descriptive, not partitive — he is genuinely unrighteous, and Jesus calls him so. Yet the master commends him because φρονίμως ἐποίησεν ('he acted shrewdly'). The parable refuses moral neatness: ethical condemnation and tactical admiration coexist. Jesus' commentary makes the application explicit: οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου φρονιμώτεροι ὑπὲρ τοὺς υἱοὺς τοῦ φωτός ('the sons of this age are shrewder than the sons of light')—a sad observation, not a compliment to worldliness. The world's people see the coming reversal of their position and act decisively; the kingdom's people, who claim to believe in a far greater coming reversal, often do not.
Verse 9 turns the parable into command: ἑαυτοῖς ποιήσατε φίλους ἐκ τοῦ μαμωνᾶ τῆς ἀδικίας ('make for yourselves friends from the mammon of unrighteousness'). The aorist imperative is decisive. The phrase 'mammon of unrighteousness' diagnoses wealth as a creature of the present fallen age, contaminated by the injustice through which it almost always flows; yet that very mammon, faithfully expended, can purchase what wealth cannot purchase. The temporal clause ὅταν ἐκλίπῃ ('when it fails')—the subject is mammon itself—predicts the certain bankruptcy of every earthly account. The friends thus made will receive the disciple εἰς τὰς αἰωνίους σκηνάς ('into the eternal dwellings'). The eschatological reversal is exactly that of the manager's plan: present authority used to secure future welcome.
Verses 10-12 generalize through three conditional pairs structured around πιστός / ἄδικος (faithful / unrighteous) and a great-to-small / small-to-great logic. Faithfulness is not divisible: it is a quality of character that expresses itself uniformly across scales. The contrast between τὸ ἀληθινόν ('the true') and the unrighteous mammon, and between τὸ ὑμέτερον ('that which is your own') and τὸ ἀλλότριον ('that which is another's'), reframes all economic life. Earthly wealth, however acquired, is finally not the disciple's property; it is on loan from God for stewardship. True riches and true ownership belong to the age to come.
The closing aphorism in v. 13 forecloses any compromise. Οὐδεὶς οἰκέτης δύναται δυσὶ κυρίοις δουλεύειν ('no household-slave is able to slave for two masters') — the choice of οἰκέτης rather than the more general δοῦλος sharpens the point: the household-slave belongs to one house, not two. The four verbs that follow form two antithetical pairs (μισήσει / ἀγαπήσει, ἀνθέξεται / καταφρονήσει) — hate/love, hold-fast/despise — leaving no neutral ground. Jesus then names the second master: μαμωνᾷ. The personification is theologically deliberate. Money is not portrayed as a tool that can be used well or poorly; it is portrayed as a rival deity demanding worship, and the disciple cannot serve both.
Worldly shrewdness reads the future and acts; spiritual carelessness assumes the present will last. Jesus does not commend the manager's fraud — He commends his clear-eyed recognition that the account he holds will be closed, and his willingness to deploy what little time remains for what comes next.
The narrative structure shifts abruptly from parable to confrontation. Verse 14 provides the audience response that triggers Jesus' rebuke: the Pharisees, characterized by the damning participle φιλάργυροι ὑπάρχοντες ('being lovers of money'), were listening and scoffing. The imperfect ἤκουον ('were listening') and ἐξεμυκτήριζον ('were scoffing') suggest ongoing actions—they heard everything Jesus said about money and responded with sustained mockery. Luke's editorial comment about their love of money is not incidental; it explains their reaction and sets up Jesus' devastating diagnosis in verse 15.
Jesus' response in verses 15-16 moves from exposure to proclamation. The emphatic ὑμεῖς ἐστε ('you are') identifies the Pharisees as 'those who justify yourselves'—the present participle δικαιοῦντες marking their habitual practice. The contrast is stark: ἐνώπιον τῶν ἀνθρώπων ('in the sight of men') versus ἐνώπιον τοῦ θεοῦ ('in the sight of God'). What humans exalt (τὸ ἐν ἀνθρώποις ὑψηλόν) is βδέλυγμα ('abomination') to God—cultic language that reverses the Pharisees' claim to purity. Verse 16 then announces the epochal shift: 'The Law and the Prophets were until John' (μέχρι Ἰωάννου). The present tense εὐαγγελίζεται ('is being preached') marks the ongoing proclamation of the kingdom, and πᾶς εἰς αὐτὴν βιάζεται captures the urgency of response—everyone is 'forcing his way into it.' This is not the end of the Law but the arrival of its fulfillment.
Verse 17 provides the crucial qualification: εὐκοπώτερον δέ ἐστιν ('but it is easier') introduces a comparative statement of impossibility. Heaven and earth passing away is easier than one κεραία ('stroke') of the Law failing. The infinitives παρελθεῖν ('to pass away') and πεσεῖν ('to fall') are contrasted—cosmic dissolution versus the failure of a single serif. Jesus is not contradicting verse 16 but clarifying it: the kingdom's arrival does not abrogate God's revealed will. The Law's authority remains, even as its era gives way to the kingdom's in-breaking.
Verse 18 appears abrupt, but its connection to the preceding argument is likely illustrative: the Pharisees' casuistry regarding divorce exemplifies their broader pattern of self-justification and evasion of God's true intent. The double use of πᾶς ('everyone') universalizes the principle—no exceptions are given here. Both ἀπολύων ('divorcing') and γαμῶν ('marrying') are present participles, and the main verb μοιχεύει ('commits adultery') is also present tense, suggesting ongoing states rather than single acts. The second clause adds that marrying a divorced woman also constitutes adultery. Jesus is reasserting the permanence of marriage against legal maneuvering that treated divorce as a simple dissolution of covenant. The Pharisees may have justified themselves in such matters, but God's standard has not changed.
Self-justification before human audiences is not merely inadequate—it is abominable to the God who knows hearts. The kingdom's arrival does not lower the bar of righteousness but exposes every attempt to manipulate divine law into human convenience.
The parable's opening (vv. 19-21) operates entirely through visible contrast. The rich man ἐνεδιδύσκετο ('was clothing himself' — imperfect of habitual action) in πορφύραν καὶ βύσσον ('purple and fine linen'): outer garment of imperial purple, inner of Egyptian linen, the literal uniform of priests and kings. The participle εὐφραινόμενος ('making merry') with καθ' ἡμέραν λαμπρῶς ('every day brilliantly') sketches an ongoing festival, not occasional indulgence. He is unnamed — Jesus refuses him the dignity of a name in the parable, the only character left anonymous. By contrast Lazarus (Λάζαρος, Hebrew אלעזר 'God has helped') is named — the only named figure in any of Jesus' parables. The verb ἐβέβλητο ('had been thrown/dumped' — pluperfect passive) is brutal: he was not laid carefully but discarded at the gate. εἱλκωμένος ('having been ulcerated') and ἐπέλειχον ('were licking') of the dogs render him not merely poor but ritually defiled — the gentile pariah at the gate of every privileged Israel.
The death-narrative (v. 22) is told with elegant minimalism. Lazarus dies and is ἀπενεχθῆναι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀγγέλων ('carried away by angels') to τὸν κόλπον Ἀβραάμ ('the bosom of Abraham'). No funeral, no burial — angels take him directly. The rich man dies and ἐτάφη ('was buried') — a noticeable, no doubt expensive burial — but no angels. Then the curtain pulls back and we see what cannot be seen: he is in ᾅδης, in βασάνοις. The reversal is total. The man who never lifted his eyes in this life now ἐπάρας τοὺς ὀφθαλμούς ('having lifted his eyes') sees clearly — sees Abraham, sees Lazarus, knows him by name. Hell, in this telling, is not the absence of sight but the unbearable presence of it.
The first request (v. 24) reveals that even in torment the rich man's social grammar has not adjusted. He addresses Abraham as πάτερ, claiming covenant kinship; he asks that Lazarus be πέμψον ('sent') — a verb of dispatch, the same one used for sending a slave on an errand. Lazarus, having been a beggar in life, is now treated as a servant in death. The detail he requests (the tip of a finger dipped in water for the tongue) is exactly what Lazarus longed for from his table: not the meal, but the crumbs. The mirror is precise. Abraham's reply addresses him as τέκνον ('child') — affectionate, but pointedly not υἱὸς Ἀβραάμ ('son of Abraham'). He is a child of the patriarch by descent, not by faith. The verb μνήσθητι ('remember') is imperative aorist — remember the structure of the story. The two received their portions (ἀπέλαβες, 'you received in full') in this life: this is not arbitrary punishment but the working out of choices already made.
Verse 26 names the chasm. μεταξὺ ἡμῶν καὶ ὑμῶν χάσμα μέγα ἐστήρικται — perfect passive of στηρίζω, meaning 'has been firmly fixed and stands so' (the same perfect tense Jesus uses of His own resolution to set His face toward Jerusalem in 9:51). The chasm is divine action, not natural geography. The two infinitives (διαβῆναι, διαπερῶσιν) emphasize the impossibility of crossing in either direction. Hell is sealed not because mercy is absent but because the door of repentance, freely refused in life, has now closed. The gate that Lazarus once lay outside — the gate the rich man stepped over every day without seeing — has become an unbridgeable ravine, and the rich man is on the wrong side of it.
The second request (vv. 27-28) is the parable's most psychologically acute moment. Stripped of any hope for himself, the rich man's first thought is for his five brothers — and at last he speaks not as creditor but as warner. He asks that Lazarus be sent to his father's house to διαμαρτύρηται ('testify solemnly,' the formal verb for legal warning) so they will not come εἰς τὸν τόπον τοῦτον τῆς βασάνου ('to this place of torment'). It is too late to repent of his treatment of Lazarus, but perhaps not too late to spare those still on the right side of the chasm. The request is humane. It is also, fatally, an indictment: it concedes that he himself had not been adequately warned by Moses and the Prophets, and asks for an exception — a special revelation, a postmortem witness, a sign-and-wonder strong enough to overpower the inertia of his brothers' settled lives.
Abraham's refusal (vv. 29-31) sets the final ground of the parable. Ἔχουσι Μωϋσέα καὶ τοὺς προφήτας· ἀκουσάτωσαν αὐτῶν ('They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them'). The aorist imperative ἀκουσάτωσαν means more than 'let them listen' — it means 'let them obey.' The Torah and prophetic literature have already said everything needful about Lazarus at the gate; the legal codes of Deuteronomy 15 and the prophets' indictments of Israel for ignoring the poor (Amos 4, Isaiah 58) constitute warning enough. The rich man's protest οὐχί, πάτερ Ἀβραάμ ('no, father Abraham') and his counter-proposal — that a resurrection appearance would do what Scripture cannot — is decisively refused. εἰ Μωϋσέως καὶ τῶν προφητῶν οὐκ ἀκούουσιν, οὐδὲ ἐάν τις ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀναστῇ πεισθήσονται ('if they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead'). The future passive πεισθήσονται is theologically loaded. Luke writes after the resurrection of Jesus, and writes for readers who know there has been another Lazarus (John 11), and another rising more decisive still. Yet the religious leaders who scoffed at this parable will, on Easter morning, refuse to be persuaded. The parable's last word is the parable's verdict on its first hearers.
The chasm in Luke 16 is dug not at death but every day at the gate. Each crumb withheld widens it; each morsel given begins to bridge it. The rich man's tragedy is not that hell exists but that he lived as if Lazarus did not, and discovered, too late, that the two facts were one fact.
Deut 15:7-11 commands Israel: 'You shall not harden your heart, nor close your hand from your poor brother.' The Hebrew אֶבְיוֹן ('ʾevyon, destitute one') is precisely the LXX's πτωχός — the very word Luke chooses for Lazarus. The closing line of the Deuteronomy passage (15:11) is what Jesus quotes at the anointing in Bethany ('the poor you will always have with you,' Mark 14:7), but the verse continues: 'therefore I command you, you shall freely open your hand to your brother, to your needy and poor in your land.' The rich man's offense is not wealth itself but the closed hand at the open gate.
Isaiah 58:6-10 sharpens the same theme into liturgical critique: the fast Yahweh chooses is to share bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into one's house, to clothe the naked. Then — and only then — 'your light will rise in darkness.' Amos 6:1-7 announces woe to those who 'lie on beds of ivory and stretch out on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock... but they have not grieved over the ruin of Joseph.' The rich man's daily feasting λαμπρῶς is a direct portrait of Amos 6. Jesus' parable is not a new ethic; it is a story-shaped reading of the Torah and Prophets that the rich man, by his life, had already refused to hear — which is exactly Abraham's verdict in v. 31.
'No slave can serve two masters' for οὐδεὶς οἰκέτης δύναται δυσὶ κυρίοις δουλεύειν (v. 13) — LSB is consistent with its policy of rendering δοῦλος/δουλεύω as 'slave/serve as a slave,' though here the underlying noun is the more specific οἰκέτης ('household-slave'). The translation captures the binary force: a household-slave belongs to one house, not two.
'Wealth of unrighteousness' / 'unrighteous wealth' for μαμωνᾶς τῆς ἀδικίας (vv. 9, 11) — LSB resists the older 'mammon' transliteration in favor of 'wealth,' losing the Aramaic loan-word color but gaining clarity. The genitive τῆς ἀδικίας is rendered descriptively; the wealth itself is implicated in the unrighteousness of the present age.
'Joyously living in splendor every day' for εὐφραινόμενος καθ' ἡμέραν λαμπρῶς (v. 19) — LSB unpacks the participle and the adverb together, capturing both the daily rhythm and the brilliance of the rich man's life. The same verb εὐφραίνομαι appeared in 15:23-32 (the prodigal's father celebrating); the parable of the prodigal celebrates a feast over a found son, this parable indicts a feast that ignored a dying brother.
'Carried away by the angels to Abraham's bosom' for ἀπενεχθῆναι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀγγέλων εἰς τὸν κόλπον Ἀβραάμ (v. 22) — LSB preserves the literal 'bosom' rather than smoothing to 'side.' The retention matters: the same word is used in John 1:18 of the eternal Son εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρός ('in the bosom of the Father'). Lazarus's destination is intimacy of the same shape.
'Neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead' for οὐδὲ ἐάν τις ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀναστῇ πεισθήσονται (v. 31) — LSB renders the future passive πεισθήσονται as 'will they be persuaded,' preserving the verb's force as a movement of the heart, not merely the mind. Luke's reader, knowing what Easter would not unlock for many, hears Jesus' own anticipation in the line.