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Bible Passages Explained - by Rob Irish: Matthew 8:21-23

Last week, we looked at Jesus’ encounter with a scribe in Matthew 8:19-20. Right after that, Matthew records another encounter. This time, the person is identified as another of the disciples says “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.” This seems like a reasonable request to us, “let me go to the funeral, and I’ll catch up with you this afternoon.” It was even more significant in the Palestinian context. The obligation to bury one’s parents was a tremendously strong imperative. So when Matthew writes of this encounter, his first century readers would be absolutely scandalized by Jesus’ response: “Follow Me, and allow the dead to bury their own dead.”

WHAT?!! This won’t do! How can you leave off the undeniable responsibility of burying one’s parent? Jesus is preaching anarchy! He’s a lunatic! That would be the normal response of a person from first century Palestine. After all, they didn’t have funeral homes and undertakers and so on, so dealing with the dead was a family responsibility. In fact, touching the dead would make one ceremonially unclean, so that a person who did the dealing with the dead body would have to then go through a time-consuming process of regaining ritual purity. When Jesus calls for the person to ignore that responsibility, he is calling him to a radical break from all that seems reasonable and normal.

What’s interesting about this encounter, and the one we looked at last week is that in both, Jesus is trying to shrink his following. Unlike so many churches today, he’s not trying to make the program grow. He’s getting rid of potential followers with his hard-to-swallow teaching.

Significantly, the story continues with “And when He got into the boat, His disciples followed him.” We don’t get told which disciples. Did the scribe and “another disciple” get in the boat or did they return home to bury their dead? If God called you to do something completely radical and outside of “normal response” would you get in the boat?

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Bible Passages Explained - by Rob Irish: Matthew 8:21-23

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