tec said: Luke 16: 26-27 'And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.'
Paul explains this better than I ever could, when speaking to the Gentiles. Romans 11:25 "I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in." Again, a reference to the reversal of the rich man and Lazarus' roles. And what is that chasm? What is that stumbling block? Jesus as the Messiah.
Sorry tec, your analysis of the Rich man and Lazarus simply doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Much of what you've written is very similar to how the Society tries to explain away this extremely troublesome (to their pre-conceived ideas) passage.
If you read the entire chapter of Luke 16, Jesus is clearly speaking of how money and riches can overtake a person's life. Verse 13, a scripture that Witnesses take at absolute face value says: " No servant can serve two masters. 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 both God and Money."
That the 'Rich Man and Lazarus' is a parable, is not in dispute. Jesus frequently drove home a point by use of parables. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, he always used things that were real so that people could understand what he was trying to say: mustard seeds, a hidden lamp, slaves and masters, vineyards, a prodigal son, mountains, sowing seeds in a field, fishing. No matter how you try to interpret it, there is no reasonable answer as to why Jesus would base this one parable on a (supposedly) false doctrine. He never did this on any other illustration, so why would he do it on this one?
Rather than simply take what he said at face value, you seem to go to the ends of the earth in trying to explain away the fact that Jesus himself apparently believed in an afterlife. There is nothing in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus that suggests that it's talking about a " change in the status of who can claim Abraham as their father." What you are completely ignoring is the fact that Jesus specifically states that when a person dies, there's something afterwards. Besides, when it says: '...between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us' it certainly could not be talking about Christ being the "chasm", as you claim, because history tells us that those who might not initially accept Jesus as the Messiah could certainly change their minds and "cross over" if they became believers down the road. So your theory doesn't hold up whatsoever.
The jist of the parable seems quite obvious: The Rich Man was well, rich. Jesus wasn't condemning him for that. What he was condemning him for was the lousy way he treated those who were diseased, poor, outcasts and had no hope. He didn't give them a second thought as he was too busy indulging himself in an orgy of material comforts. Who was it that Jesus spent alot of time with? The diseased, poor, outcasts and those who had no hope. And this is exactly what he told his followers to do. What did he condemn the Pharisees for? For the exact same thing that the Rich Man was condemned: treating the less fortunate like shit under their sandals. The idea of this parable is that if we care only about ourselves and never lift a finger to help the less fortunate in this life, don't expect any reward in the next life. That's really all there is to it.
Whether this actually happens or not is another story.
