NOTES for Mat 8:21-22
Jesus' words about the dead, who should be left to bury their dead, can seem too harsh. Yet He is speaking here about what constitutes the essence of the new life that entered the world with Him. The situation itself raises questions. It is not very clear whether the issue is an already dead father awaiting burial, or an elderly man whose son asks permission to live with him so that he will not be left alone in old age. In any case, one thing is clear: the issue is helping a person finish his life. To die calmly. To accompany him on his last journey.
In short, everything in one way or another connected with death. And Jesus brought the fullness of life into the world. A fullness the world does not know. What we habitually call life here turns out in reality to be delayed death. Gradual dying. The only question is how much we can delay the inevitable end in the fallen world. The Savior offers an alternative to all this. The fullness of life. It can be accepted, but then the semblance of life so familiar to us will have to be left behind.
To stop dying and begin living. This is strange, incomprehensible, unfamiliar. More than that: it seems impossible. Even today. Even for Christians. And today, in hospitals and hospices, Christians help other Christians finish dying. They see them off on their last journey. And they keep finding new ways to reconcile these departing Christians with inevitable death, which for those very Christians, in the normal case, simply should not exist.
And if it does exist, if today this problem stands for Christians finishing their earthly path as sharply as it did for Jews of pre-Christian times, and sometimes even more sharply, not even as for Jews but as for genuine pagans, then something is wrong with our Christianity. With life and death. With the path. With the Kingdom, not in general, but in our life. If both those leaving and those staying feel with their whole being that ahead for the departing there is not the path of the Kingdom, but death and death only, then in truth neither group has ever lived by the life of the Kingdom. And Jesus orients us precisely toward such life. This is not maximalism: only it deserves the name of life without qualifications. And only it is worth living.