NOTES for Luk 9:60

Jesus' words about the dead burying their own dead may seem too harsh in the situation in which they were spoken. But if one thinks carefully, it is not hard to see that the situation too was essentially critical, although the person whom Jesus called to follow Him seemed not to ask anything of Him like that. On the contrary, the issue was a matter we usually call sacred: to bury his own father.

There is an interesting interpretation of this request: some commentators believe that the issue here is not that the father of the person mentioned in the story had already died, but that he was still alive yet already waiting for death, either because of illness or simply because of advanced age, and that this person was asking for a delay in order to let his father live out peacefully the years, likely few, that remained to him on earth. He was ready to follow Jesus; he was only asking for a delay. But Jesus did not give him this delay. Why? One could say that delays relax a person, often depriving him of the resolve he had at a certain moment, which then disappeared over time because the person never did what he had resolved to do. But this is only one side of the matter. The other lies in the fact that in spiritual life there is usually no "later" at all.

God is outside time, and one can meet Him only in the present, only here and now. But "here and now" as the point of a person's meeting with God is projected into a completely concrete moment of time and a completely concrete point in space. Jesus indicated precisely this point for the person mentioned in the story. At this point the utmost concentration is needed on God's presence, on the revelation of His will, and on the task set before the person in the context of all that has been mentioned. But the person about whom the evangelist tells does not have such concentration.

He is not in that eternal present where his meeting with God took place; he is in the temporal present, where the past gives way to the future and the present becomes not the point of meeting with God, but only the meeting place of what does not yet exist with what no longer exists. And the Savior's sharp words are needed to tear the person out of the temporal present and set him before God in the eternal present. Of course, this in itself is not yet a guarantee: the person is free. But the moment of the greatest possible clarity for a person always becomes for him the moment of truth. The truth with respect to which he must decide, for the Kingdom and for salvation.