Christian2 wrote:Thank you.
OK, I understand Jesus comes first. That point was brought out when He said,
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters- yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple."
Jesus used hyperbole in the verse above, which is a very Jewish thing to do.
But if I understand you correctly, the story cannot be authentic, meaning there was no man who said, "let me bury my father first."
Because,
Jesus is a Jew and Jews honor their parents and part of honoring their parents would be to bury them properly. After all, Jews buried their dead right away. Spending a day or two taking care of the burial of his father and then following Jesus would be about the same as doing it right then.
This is a hard saying.
I've been talking with some Jews and this is one subject that was brought up to prove that Jesus was not fit to be the Messiah because He broke the law of honoring father and mother.
Jesus also let His disciples gather food on the Sabbath, which was also a "violation" of the Law. Jesus' response? He is Lord of the Sabbath. If He is Lord of the Sabbath, is He not also Lord over the Law? Still further, to whom are we first responsible: God or our parents? Yes, we should honor our parents (i.e., give them a proper burial), but if to honor our parents requires us to dishonor God (i.e., tell Him that His commands take a backseat), then our priorities are mixed up. The Law is not to be understood as an arbitrary set of rules that God laid down because He happened to like the way they sounded and therefore must be blindly followed. The Law is a detailed exposition of "Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself."
In other words, is it possible to break the letter of the Law and still keep the Law by following its spirit? Put in reverse, is it possible to break the spirit of the Law by keeping its letter? Clearly, the answer to both of these is 'yes.' Therefore, I think the story can, and should, be taken as perfectly authentic. If Jesus was making a broader theological point, it had nothing to do with the spiritual deadness of anyone; it had to do with the true intent of the Law (another common theme in Jesus' ministry).
FFC wrote:Jac, who is playing in the hyperbole anyway? Is that the Georgia state Panthers?
I wish I had a witty joke to respond. You have outfunnied me, sir!
Cross.eyed wrote:This sounds reasonable Jac, but why did He say; Let the dead bury their own dead?
What I don't understand is how dead people can bury either physically or spiritually dead people.
I think that's the point. The dead can't bury their dead. Taken to its utter extremes, it would mean that the dead man would rot! And Jesus' point. "Fine. Compared to the necessity of following Me, a rotting corpse is meaningless."
The command here is very similar to Jesus' command on the Rich Young Ruler: what is most important, following God or following your own desires? Certainly, desiring to give your parents an honorable burial is a commendable and even righteous desire. But if a righeous desire gets in the way of following Christ, is it still righteous? And, as Christian2 has well pointed out, this forces the man to choose between his understanding of the Law (which, given his situation, was likely very legalistic) or following Jesus. He should have chosen the latter.
Christian2 wrote:Paraphrasing...
The father is not dead yet, otherwise the son would be home sitting shiv'ah. The son wants to go home and live with his father in comfort until his father dies and it could take years. He perhaps is interested in collecting his inheritance before he becomes a disciple at his leisure.
"Let the dead bury their dead" means those concerned with the benefits of this world -- like inheritances and living in comfort -- will remain with each other and when the time comes the spiritually dead will eventually bury the physically dead.
The son does not have his priorities straight.
Does this make sense?
As I said in my first post: "I really don't think Jesus was making some deeper spiritual point about unbelievers burying their own,
nor do I think the man was putting off following Jesus until his father died." Now, my thoughts, of course, come nowhere close to settling the matter (indeed, I may be only offering more confusion to a passage than can legitmately be taken several ways!), but my main problem with this interpretation is simply that it isn't found in the text itself. It requires constructing an entirely theoretical context in which we are to understand the text.
Now, hermeneutically, I don't like that. I don't like
creating a context that we then
use to interpret the text. More clearly, we aren't just finding out what the historical situation is. We are actually supplying a background situation, and then, in light of that situation, we are suggesting a meaning. The implication is that, without said background, the passage is unintelligible. While it may be true that the immediate hearers may have been aware of such a situation, is it all obvious that Matthew's readers would have been aware of it? And if not, then does it not follow that, if Matthew wanted to be sure that his readers understood Jesus' point, then he would have recorded that fact? As it stands, this interpretation asks me to believe that the passage cannot be understood in its own context by its own readers.
Is it a
possible interpretation? Of course. Grammatically, there is nothing wrong with it (although there is nothing in the grammar to commend it, either). I just see no reason to invent a situation when none is needed. Matthew presents us with a Jesus who is King over all, who requires first allegience. In that very Matthean view, the passage fits perfectly.
