A Pointed Pericope

If I have any gifts, inciting people to respond is definitely not one of them. I suppose yesterday’s exercise in trying to interest people in New Testament texts was a stretch, but not being one to learn from the past I will try it again. Today’s passage is again from The Gospel According to Luke (is anyone seeing a pattern develop?) which infers that something of the human spirit continues on after death. A very legitimate question is whether or not this inference is telling of the authors’ worldviews more than Jesus’, but it is the basic material with which we have to work. You be the judge. Is the tale of The Rich Man and Lazarus intended to bestow upon the reader anything more than the classical Jewish guilt trip?