Matthew 8:18-22

Matthew 8:18-22

And after Jesus saw a crowd around Him, He commanded the crowd to go away into the other side.  And one scribe said to Him after approaching, “I will follow you wherever you should go.”  And Jesus said to Him, “The foxes have dens and the birds of heaven have nests.  But the Son of Man does not have anywhere to recline the head.”  And another of His disciples said to Him, “Permit me first to go away and to bury my father.”  And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.”

Thoughts for Today

First Thought:

These stories today confirm the teaching that we uncovered yesterday.  Often the Gospel stories work this way.  We hear Jesus teach on a topic and then the next story or parable gives us a clear demonstration of the principle.  Yesterday we learned that we are raised out of our sinfulness into a life of service to God.  We also learned that the work of God takes effort and willpower.  In other words, it does not come naturally to us.  All of the stories in this section of scripture illustrate that point.  In order to follow Jesus, we must be contrary to our own human nature and our own human desires.  We are raised by God into new life: a life of service into His desires and not a life that is a Christianized version of how I want to live.

Where do you wrestle with your own human nature?  Where do you still want to follow your own will but do it in a Christian manner rather than humbly submit to the will of God while abandoning your own will?

Second Thought:

A scribe comes up to Jesus and seems to profess a willingness to follow Jesus anywhere.  We cannot know the man’s heart, but we can assume Jesus did.  We can know Jesus’ reply to the man’s statement.  Jesus tells the scribe that if he wishes to follow Jesus then he will not ever feel at home in the world again.  We don’t know if the scribe continued to follow Jesus, and we should resist the temptation to assume that he didn’t.  So what is Jesus saying here?  Jesus is saying, “Count the cost of following me.”  Jesus is saying, “Prepare yourself for the journey ahead.”  Jesus is saying, “Make sure that you are willing to give up what the world has taught you to value so that you can endure what being a disciple of Jesus Christ actually looks like.”  Jesus is telling the scribe that the life of discipleship takes work and effort to endure it to the end.  We will constantly be pulled into the desires and cares of the world.  It will take work and effort to resist the lure of the world’s values and to continue to value what God values.

How good are you at resisting the world’s values?  How important are some of the things of the world to you – even things that we think we need such as shelter?  Do you ever pursue those things instead of pursuing God?

Third Thought:

The second man to come to Jesus in this passage is a sad man.  This passage is usually taken in two different ways.  The first possibility is that Jesus is saying, “Let the spiritually dead bury the physically dead.”  I don’t believe this is correct, because the Old Testament especially places a high value on giving people proper burials.  Even Jesus’ own followers came to the tomb to give Him a proper burial!  Nowhere in the Bible do we find any other teaching to imply that the burial of the dead was not the work of the spiritual people.  Instead, what I think is happening here is that the man is saying to Jesus, “I’ll follow you, but only after I don’t have any commitments here on this earth.”  He seems to be saying that he’ll follow Jesus once his dad has actually died and there is nobody else depending upon him.  I believe this is a more correct understanding.  The man isn’t asking for permission to go and bury his father now; the man is asking for permission to wait to follow until some point after his father is dead!  Again we see that following Jesus takes willpower and effort.  We will always have connections to this world.  We will always have ties that potentially restrict our ability to respond to Jesus.  The question we must ask ourselves is whether we are going to let those ties control our response to God or whether we will entrust God with those ties and follow Him instead.

What ties do you have to this world?  Compared to eternal life and obedience to God, how important are those ties?

Passage for Tomorrow: Matthew 8:23-27