In parable of the Great Banquet in the Gospel of Luke, the king symbolizes God, those invited to the banquet symbolize the Jews, the servants are the prophets, and thoe invited after the Jews refuse are Gentiles. In Luke’s version, those who are invited immediately after the Jews refuse their invitation (and therefore the ones who are cared for) are the “poor and maimed and blind and lame” (14:21). Only when they have come in are the servants told to go invite everyone they meet. This contrasts the version in the Gospel of Matthew in which the kind immediately tells his servants to go invite everyone, not just the sick and poor. This means that Luke wanted to emphasize the fact that those in the Jesus movement should take care of the sick and poor more so than Matthew did. The negative figures in this story are the Jews. They refuse the invitation to go to the banquet and make excuses as to why they can’t go.

In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, Lazarus is poor and “covered in sores” (16:20). They both die, with Lazarus going to Heaven and the rich man descending into Hell. The one who is cared for here is Lazarus who is sick and poor, again emphasizing Luke’s idea that the poor and sick should be taken care of above all else. Luke writes that Lazarus “longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table” (16:21). If Lazarus was close enough to eat what fell from the man’s table, then he is close enough that the rich man would know he was there, and yet he did not help the poor man. Through this, Luke is arguing that not helping the poor is a sin warranting Hell. The rich man is further characterized as selfish when he asks Abraham to send Lazarus to “cool [his] tongue” (16:24), so Luke is arguing that those who go to Hell are people who are selfish like Lazarus.

The parable of the Unjust Judge in the Gospel of Luke is a story of a judge who grants justice to a woman only because she pesters him. Jesus then goes on to say that God will grant justice to his chosen ones without delay when they “cry out to him day and night” (18:7). In this parable, the king only cares for people for his own self interest, but God cares for everyone who cries out for him, therefor it is better, according to Luke, to care for others selflessly without personal gain.