Editorial-

"Let the dead bury their dead" (Br. Duncan Heaster)

The Lord’s comment, “Let the dead bury their dead” (Mt. 8:22), reveals how He had a way of so radically challenging the positions held by normal people of the world, to a depth quite unheard of and He did it in so few words. And even more wondrous, the Lord appeared to have come out with this so pithy and semantically dense statement almost ‘off the cuff’, when presented with a man declining to follow Him immediately because he had to bury his father. So let’s see in what ways the Lord’s comment was so radical.

Respect for parents, as expressed in burying them, “was at the heart of Jewish piety… under Hasidic-Pharisaic influence the last offices for the dead had gained primacy among all good works… the duty to participate in a funeral procession could even override study of the Torah”(1). And of course the Lord knew this, He knew just how fanatic the Jews were getting about burying parents - and it’s exactly that issue which He chooses to pick on in His relentless demand for our ‘all’ in following Him. Quite apart from the particular obsessive situation in first-century Israel relating to burying parents, there was a widely held view amongst both Greeks and Jews that burial of a father could only properly be done by the son, and if this wasn’t done, then the man was effectively not properly buried, which even Biblically is used as a curse. And ‘just’ for delaying doing the Lord’s service for a day, the Lord demanded all this of a person. He’s no less demanding today, even if His radical call is articulated over different issues. It may mean

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