<p>16:24 <i>And he cried and said: Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame</i>- The rich man appeals to his physical descent from Abraham (&quot;father Abraham&quot;), but this is of no value. As Lazarus had begged crumbs, so now the man begs for drops of water. His hard heartedness to Lazarus is exactly related to his punishment.</p><p>In the day of judgment, that man will cry out &quot;father... have mercy / pity on me&quot;, just as Lazarus used to cry out to him daily. The apparent terseness and indifference of Abraham's response in the parable is surely intended as a reflection of the attitude which the rich man had shown to Lazarus in his mortal life. A great gap had been <i>fixed</i> between the saved and the rejected; and the language begs the question, 'Fixed by whom?'. Clearly, by the rich man in the attitude he adopted in his daily life. For it would not be God who fixed a gap between the damned and the saved; through His Son He seeks to save and bridge such gaps. The lesson is that whenever we hear the voice of the desperate, we hear inverted echoes of our own desperation at the final judgment. And how we answer now is related to how we will be answered then. We make the answer now.</p><p>Note that the parable talks in terms of tongues, fingers etc.- bodies and not 'immortal souls' are in view. Note that only 11 of the 26 parables recorded in Luke are called &quot;parables&quot;. This is clearly a parable and not to be taken as a literal description of things. G. B. Caird, <i>The Gospel of St. Luke</i> (Penguin Books), p. 191 concludes that &quot;the story of the wicked rich man and the pious poor man, whose fortunes were reversed in the afterlife, seems to have come originally from Egypt, and was popular among Jewish teachers.&nbsp; ...It was not the intention of Jesus to propagate a strict doctrine of rewards and punishments...or to give a topographical guide to the afterworld.&quot;</p>