MATTHEW 8:18-27
THE OTHER DAY I WAS at a park pushing my youngest daughter on the big-girl swing and listening to her laugh. Between the laughs she would say again and again, “Underdog, Daddy”—asking me to run under her as I'm pushing the swing so as to give her optimal height and velocity. As my daughter was flying through the air, enjoying herself thoroughly, I noticed a little girl, about three years old, who had climbed onto the swing next to us. She settled herself in place and then called back to her father, “Daddy, come push me.” Her father immediately got up from the park bench and started to walk toward her. I noticed that he was struggling just to walk to the swing. If I were to guess, I would say he was suffering from MS or MD (muscular dystrophy). Other than the obvious weakness of his legs, arms, and back, he looked very healthy. He hobbled over to the swing, placed his hand on her back, and gave the best push he could give. She went just a little bit forward and just a little bit back, hardly a push at all.
Have you ever felt helpless? I felt completely helpless as I watched him. On the one hand, I felt helpless since I couldn’t very well say, “Oh, move over, let me give her a real push,” although I wanted to for her sake. On the other hand, I felt helpless because I couldn’t heal him. I wanted to walk over, put my hand on his back, and say, “Disease, be gone,” and then see his body straighten up and his back and arms and legs gain strength and see, with one push, his daughter fly through the air, laughing and smiling on that swing.
I have prayed for healing for members of my congregation. All of us at some point in our lives will need such prayer. Nobody has the power to say, “Walk” and watch a paralyzed man get up and walk, or to say, “See” and see a child blind from birth open her eyes for the first time to see blue birds and brown trees and orange sunsets. Imagine if I was able to do that. Imagine—no matter what the illness or ailment—if, with but a word or a touch or even a glance, I could cure whomever and whenever. What would the response be? It would be the same as it was for Jesus. I would draw a crowd.
That’s how our passage begins. After giving the greatest sermon in the history of the world (the Sermon on the Mount), and after healing the untouchables with a touch—a leper, a servant, a woman—Jesus drew “a crowd" (v. 18).
But, so different than most celebrities today, Jesus is not interested in drawing a crowd. He is not interested in having people follow him; he is interested in having followers. He is interested in people like the leper, the centurion, and Peter’s mother-in-law—those who call him Lord and get up and serve him. In other words, he is interested in making disciples. Now, the passage before us is very much a passage on discipleship. What does and doesn’t a true disciple of Jesus look like ? However, the focus here is really on three negative examples. It reminds me of the teaching Jesus gives right before the Lord’s Prayer, where he teaches how not to pray: do not pray like the hypocrites, and do not pray like the Gentiles. Here he “teaches” how not to follow him.
Without Airs
The first example of how not to follow Jesus is the scribe who is described in verses 19, 20: “And a scribe came up [to Jesus] and said to him, ‘Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.’ And 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.’” I’ll make sense of Jesus’ apparently nonsensical reply in a minute. First, let's make sense of this scribe and his statement.
A scribe was a Bible scholar and teacher, an expert in the Scriptures. In Jesus’ day, to be a scribe was a respectable occupation, like a brain surgeon today. It took intellect and skill. As a result, such a man was highly esteemed by his society. This scribe in our story knows that and, as we shall see, relishes in that.
The first word out of this man’s mouth sounds fairly noble. He calls Jesus “Teacher.” And he is even willing to follow this teacher—Jesus. But in Matthew’s Gospel the five times Jesus is called “teacher” (8:19; 12:38; 19:16; 22:16, 36), it is always on the lips of someone who isn’t or won’t become a disciple. So there is already a hint, with this title “teacher,” however much of a concession it might be, that something is amiss with this man’s “faith.”
Yet, we might ask, what is amiss with what he actually says? What could be wrong with saying, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go”? Even today it’s hard to find people—let alone academics—who are willing to state publicly their willingness to follow Jesus. However, Jesus sees beneath the surface to this man’s pride and obliviousness, both of which our Lord brings to the surface. The title Jesus gives himself—“the Son of Man” (v. 20)—hits at the pride issue, and the talk about poverty—“nowhere to lay his head” — strikes at this man’s obliviousness to the cost of discipleship.
What this scribe says could be said with humility: “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” Or it could be said with a high sense of self and confusion about the nature of the kingdom, something like:
Teacher, as one Bible expert to another, I have noticed who is on your team thus far—fishermen, lepers, soldiers, and middle-aged women. Perhaps you could use someone with a head on his shoulders and with some religious respectability. Say... someone like me! This is your lucky day, for I will follow you wherever you go. I hope it’s into battle. It is far time those blasted Romans met their match. I’m with you 110 percent. Let’s do it. You and I can bring about this kingdom you've been talking about.
Perhaps my self-loving, power-monger reading above is wrong or exaggerated. I do, however, think there is something negative about the manner in which he addresses Jesus. For note who the subject of verse 19 is, and compare that to what the leper and the centurion say to Jesus? This man talks about what he will do; they talk about what Jesus can do. Moreover, I favor the less charitable reading due to Jesus’ response. In verse 20 Jesus basically says, “You don’t know who you are talking to, and you don't know what you’re talking about.” His actual words are these: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” The sense of Jesus’ subtle rebuke is something like this:
Listen, I’m the Son of Man, not merely some scribe like you. I’m not just a better Bible teacher. I’m the king Daniel wrote about, the one who will be given absolute dominion over Heaven and earth. Read Daniel 7:13, 14 when you get home. You don’t know who I am. And you certainly don’t know where I’m going. I’m going to Calvary. Are you willing to follow me there? Are you willing to deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow me? Homelessness is the least of your worries. You may or may not have a roof over your head if you follow me. There is more than a house to leave behind!
You see, Jesus had no faith in this man’s “faith” because he knew that at the heart of this scribe’s bold declaration was self-love, not self-denial, and a desire for power, not a willingness to be powerless—without a home, esteem, and possibly a life.
Jesus wants disciples. But here he teaches us that he will not accept just anyone! He will not even accept a scribe who comes with airs, who comes without humility and recognition that the road to the cross lies ahead.
So this “eager scribe” or “hasty scholar” or “Mr. Bighead,” as one commentator calls him, apparently (we aren’t told) retracts his bold declaration. It’s as if his big head has been deflated, and like a popped balloon I imagine him chaotically scurrying away.
Without Compromise
Ah. but the story isn’t over. Here comes another man. Shall we call him “the reluctant disciple” or “the hesitant son”? How about “Mr. Faintheart” or “Mr. Family-First”? Oh, I know. Let’s call him “Mr. Moneybags.” Exit Mr. Bighead; enter Mr. Moneybags. I’ll explain that name in a minute. For now just look at verses 21, 22:
Another of the disciples said to him, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.”
Now wait a minute. What happened to “Jesus meek and mild”? Where’s that nice blue-eyed, blond-haired, hanging-on-your-nursery-wall, wouldn’t- hurt-a-fly Jesus? Matthew must have skipped Sunday school as a child, for his Jesus gives a left hook, then a right, and down goes Mr. Bighead and down goes Mr. Moneybags. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. They’re knocked out!
What is going on here? If Mr. Bighead’s issues were pride and obliviousness to the cost of discipleship, what is Mr. Moneybag’s problem? Let me give you a hint. It has something to do with money. You might say, “Money? What are you talking about ? All he wants to do is bury his dear old dad. What could be wrong with that? And what does that have to do with money?”
Well, there is certainly nothing wrong with a proper Jewish burial. If anything the Bible goes out of its way to say, with the burials of Sarah (Genesis 23:8-20), Jacob (Genesis 50:5, 6), and even Jesus himself (John 19:38-42), that care and priority should be given to the deceased. However, the Jews of Jesus’ day took this obligation to exaggerated, perhaps even idolatrous heights (some viewed burial as the supreme duty, even above saying the Shema). Yet here Jesus is not attacking Jewish or Hellenistic burial rites or the common and necessary concern one should have for one’s parents, even and especially upon their death. He is not doing away with the fifth commandment. Just read his scolding of the Pharisees for not properly caring for their parents in 15:1-9 (cp. 1 Timothy 5:8). The key to understanding Jesus’ seemingly insensitive reply is grasping precisely what the man is asking.
If his father had just died, he wouldn’t have been following Jesus, at least not on that day, for “in Israel the dead were required to be buried on the same day they died.” So what’s going on? The most positive (but I don’t think accurate) reading of verse 21 is to say that this man is just asking permission “to remain at home during his father’s last [days or] years and follow Jesus only after that phrase of his life is over.” Yet if that is the case, what Jesus says in verse 22 is no less shocking and difficult for us to get our heads around. He is then cutting at the root of idolatry, saying something like, to borrow from Augustine, “Amandus est generator, sed pmeponendus est Creator ’ (“One should love the begetter but prefer the creator”). That is, put God first and family second.
Jesus is not opposed to this kind of rebuke. We’ll hear it from him soon enough in 10:28-30, 34-39. Although there might be some of that here, I do not think the issue is idolatry—family and not God being this man’s first love. Note the word “first”: “Lord, let me first go and bury my father” (v. 21). Rather, I think it primarily has to do with money, or really the love of money, which is “a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:10) and most notably the root of unbelief. It can and often does choke trust (13:22).
I say it is the love of money because the phrase this man uses—“Let me... go and bury my father”—was a Near-Eastern figure of speech. We use figures of speech all the time, like “It’s raining cats and dogs” or “break a leg” or “I'll give you a piece of my mind.” We don’t take any of those literally. Summarizing the work of K. E. Bailey (Through Peasant Eyes, pp. 25-27], K. T. France explains the idiom to “bury one’s father” as follows:
If the father had just died, the son could hardly be out at the roadside with Jesus; his place was to be keeping vigil and preparing for the funeral. Rather. to “bury one’s father” is standard idiom for fulfilling one’s filial responsibilities for the remainder of the father’s lifetime, with no prospect of his imminent death. This then would be a request for indefinite postponement of discipleship, likely to be for years rather than days.
Thus, to contemporize the conversation, the man said to Jesus, “I’ll follow you soon. However, I first have an obligation as a son to help my father in the family business, and if I don’t, when he dies (whenever that is) I might not get the inheritance. So, Jesus, I can’t afford to follow you right now. But I will in time. Once dear old dad is dead and gone and once the money has come in, then I’m all yours. You see, Jesus, financial security is the issue. You understand, right?”
“Wrong,” Jesus says. “The first guy was too fast, but you’re too slow. I turned the first guy away. I don’t want anything to do with pride. It repels me. My kingdom will do just fine with fishermen and tax collectors [cp. 1 Corinthians 1:26]. I don’t need kings, intellectuals, or celebrities. I knew what was in the first guy’s heart, and I know what is in your heart too. But with you I see potential. So I’m inviting you to love God, not money. ‘Discipleship is always a present obligation.’ Right now you need to make a choice. Let me help you make the right choice. Here’s my free financial advice (JESUS CFO): ‘Leave the dead to bury their own dead’” (8:22).
Jesus doesn’t have a flattering view of the world. He doesn’t think that if only we educate everyone, things will all work out. He pictures the world as a bunch of dead men walking. He talks about what cannot literally happen: corpses burying corpses. What he means is that the spiritually dead will take care of business. They’ll make sure all worldly matters are taken care of, but we must put the kingdom of God and his righteousness first, knowing that all these things will be added. So if we choose this world we’ve chosen death; if we choose Jesus we’ve chosen life.
Now, again we don’t know what happened to Mr. Moneybags. But I imagine, like the rich young ruler we’ll meet in chapter 19, he walked away sad and that he walked away with his money in hand (or at least still in heart).
Without Fear
After these encounters with Mr. Bighead and Mr. Moneybags, in verses 23-27 Jesus’ disciples follow him into a boat to journey to the other side of the lake. Have you ever seen the play (or movie) Twelve Angry Men? Here I envision Twelve Anxious Men, or even better Twelve Chicken Chickens.
Look with me at verses 23-27. We won’t look at the whole story in this chapter. We’ll revisit it, along with verses 28-34, in the next chapter. For now I just want to point out their fear and Jesus’ strong rebuke of it.
And when he [Jesus] got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” And he said to them [I love this—he doesn't deal with the unsettled sea first; instead first he deals with their unsettled faith], “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”
There is a lot here, and in the next tract we will flesh it all out. For now we’ll focus on verse 26—their lack of faith. We’ll keep focusing on what we’ve been focusing on—in a sense, how not to follow Jesus. That is, how not to follow Jesus in three lessons: lesson one—without airs (in humility), lesson two without compromise (Jesus above family, occupation, and fortune), and finally lesson three—without fear.
When you think about this situation in verses 24, 25—the boat and the storm who of us wouldn’t be afraid? Have you ever been walking, driving, or sailing in really dangerous weather? In such situations it would be less than human not to be a bit chicken. It is important to say that Jesus is not addressing fear as such (fear in the ordinary or necessary sense), but rather their “excessive fear.” Fear that pushes faith in God out the back door. Fear that doesn’t recognize who’s in control. Fear that doesn’t acknowledge who’s onboard the boat.
I think it is too much to claim, as a number of commentators do, that these disciples should have known that if Jesus died with them in this storm, the plans of God would die, which couldn’t happen. I think that is too much to claim because who would think about such things—make these commitments and logical connections—when waves are crashing over your head? It’s easy for us at a safe distance to say, “Oh they should have known better,” or “They should have known what the wind and waves knew.”
That seems too much to claim. But I don’t think it’s too much to claim, as Jesus claims in verse 26 with his sharp rebuke, that they should have known something of his divine authority, enough of it to trust him even in this situation. That seems to be what is behind his question, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Although I don’t think they should have seen the big picture, they should have seen who was sleeping onboard and why he was able to sleep through such a storm. But instead here they show “no faith” (Mark 4:40) in Jesus, other than faith in his ability to save them from drowning (the "little faith” of Matthew’s version). For they do eventually wake him and cry out to him, “Lord! Save! We are being destroyed!”—that’s the sense of it in the Greek. Jesus takes them where they are—weak faith and all. He doesn’t say to them, “You want me to do what? I’m not stopping this storm until I see some real faith. Wake me up again when your faith is stronger. What a bunch of wimps you are. Twelve Chicken Chickens.” Jesus doesn’t say that. He hears their prayer. He stops the seas. He stills the storm. This shows us that “even little faith is faith still” and that “Jesus helps us however we come to him”—so just come as you are. Jesus will save “even weak-in-faith disciples.”
But the point here is not to think that Jesus is flattered with weak faith. I think sometimes we think he is. But I ask you to find me a place in the Gospels where such is the case. Think of all his encounters with Peter. When Peter says something bold and brave (when he knows what he’s talking about), Jesus commends him. But when Peter cowers or compromises, Jesus never says (and I think we sometimes wish he did), “O Simon, you poor soul. Faith is hard, I know. That’s okay. Just try again.” Sure, Jesus understands weak faith, but he never commends it. Never!
That is the lesson here. Faith is to be without fear, or put positively, faith “is a form of bravery.” Do you ever think about faith like that? The Bible consistently does. In the New Testament faith is not simply “a passive acceptance of truths, a weak resignation that ‘just believes.’” Rather, faith is often depicted as “courageous confidence” that believes “Jesus is [always] equal to the occasion,” he is always up to the issue at hand.
Think about the leper and the centurion’s faith in 8:1-13. What absolute confidence in Jesus. As I said in the last chapter concerning the leper, his faith is the perfect blend of confidence and humility. “Lord, you can heal me; will you?” Or think about the heroes of faith who surround us as a great cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 11, a whole chapter on faith. What are the examples of faith in that chapter? “Through faith,” we are told, some “conquered kingdoms... stopped the mouths of lions, quenched... fire, escaped the edge of the sword...” (vv. 33, 34); others “suffered mocking and flogging... chains and imprisonment” (v. 36); “they were stoned... sawn in two... killed with the sword” (v. 37a), “destitute, afflicted, mistreated” (v. 37b); “some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life” (v. 35). Courageous confidence!
Or think about the heroic acts recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, stories of some of the men on that boat. Think of Peter and John boldly declaring the gospel in the temple and suffering persecution because of it. Think about Paul. What an example of fearless faith (or you can take the adjective “fearless” out because it’s redundant). What an example of faith! “To live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Right before that famous verse, he speaks of not being “at all ashamed” but having “full courage” (Philippians 1:20). Do you have faith? Do you have full courage?
Perpetual Perpetuas
In the first three centuries of the Ecclesia, if Christians were known for anything it was their courageous faith. The accounts of the early Christian martyrs tell the stories of many followers of Jesus who demonstrated this courageous faith even unto death. One such martyr was Perpetua.
Perpetua was twenty-two years old. She was married and the mother of an infant boy whom she nursed from her jail cell. She was in prison for being a Christian. All she had to do was recant her belief in Jesus, offer a simple sacrifice to Caesar, and call him, “Lord.” Her father begged her to do this, but she refused time and again. Finally, as she was led out into the Roman Colosseum to be killed by beast or gladiator, she was singing hymns to Jesus. Can you imagine that kind of courage? Twenty-two years old! Her last words, spoken to her brother, also a Christian, were, “Stand in the faith.”
Do you want to follow Jesus? Great. Go for it. But know that if you are to follow him, you must do it without airs (humbly come to him and serve him as Lord), without compromise (he is first; everyone and everything else is a far second), and without fear (courageously trust him).
(R. Kent Hughes. and Douglas Sean O'Donnell., 2013; edited Carl Hinton., 2020)