Foxes, birds, dead people and burials?

Matthew 8: 18-22

18 Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. ¹⁹A scribe then approached and said, ‘Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.’ ²⁰And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ ²¹Another of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ ²²But Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’

It can be easy to get carried along with the crowd. We see it when we attend large public events and we begin to join in activities that we would normally not do. Mass participation without any real personal commitment is a phenomenon that can be manipulated and abused and has been seen both inside and outside the church. Jesus was very cautious about accepting vulnerable people and their expressed desires in these situations. In our passage Jesus is moving on and two people have a word with Him about coming along.  Desperate people do desperate things to have their frustrated and personally unmet needs satisfied. There is a cost to discipleship namely, an ongoing and relentless transforming of life’s practices. Costly changes to life and its priorities come with discipleship. It should not be entered lightly or as part of the enthusiasm of being part of a crowd. In our passage today Jesus is teaching us that if we take the words and practices of Jesus seriously and put them into practice, bit by bit and day by day we might find ourselves ‘homeless’ but meeting our social responsibilities in radically new ways. The scribe in our passage belonged to a social group with a strong identity and high social status. They were ‘at home’ in the rigorous disciplines of practicing the personal disciplines to keep themselves pure for their exacting work as scribes. They experienced certainty and predictability if they just kept to the rules. Jesus calls the scribe to give up all the false, unsatisfactory certainty of ‘scribal-ism’ and embrace the ‘homelessness’ of following Jesus and His teachings. This may include actual physical homelessness!   The other person in the story is trying to have the best of both worlds. Contrary to some explanations of this passage, Jesus is not teaching that His disciples have no responsibility for their families. That would be inconsistent with the overall teaching of Jesus. Jesus is calling us to meet our family and indeed other social needs in a radically new and life transforming way. He uses a local saying ‘let the dead bury their own dead’ to present the reader with a socially unacceptable and indeed impossible suggestion in an attempt to teach that the excuse of ‘family / social commitment’ for not following the teachings of Jesus is ridiculous. The Romans, Pharisees, Sadducees and Zealots were all dictating how family and social needs should be met and they all resulted in the ‘death’ of the individual, the family and the communities they form. Jesus is offering a radical alternative (read the Sermon on the Mount) which will lead to a new life for family relationships and rich diversity of family forms and expressions. Jesus is not teaching abandonment of responsibility but the meeting of our responsibilities in new life giving ways; life for the individual, the family and the community.  Jesus is offering a path of transformation through participation in His Kingdom values, attitudes, beliefs and practices. The offer is a good one and is still being made today.  Are we ready to give up the old certainties and ways of meeting our needs our own way? Don’t get caught up in the fashion of the fickle crowd; the teaching of Jesus offers us a realistic and radical alternative way of life that values individual diversity and social responsibility. Will we participate and have our lives, families and communities transformed in the process?