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 the very essence of the new life that entered the world with Him. The situation itself raises questions. It is not very clear whether this concerns a father who has already died and is awaiting burial, or an elderly man whose son is asking permission to live with him so that he will not be left alone in his old age. But in any case one thing is clear: the issue is helping a person live to the end. To die peacefully. To accompany him on his final journey.
In short, it is about everything that, one way or another, is connected with death. But 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 deferred death. Gradual dying. The only question is how far we manage to postpone the end that is inevitable in a fallen world. The Savior offers an alternative to all this: the fullness of life. It can be accepted, but then we will have to leave behind that semblance of life to which we are so accustomed.
To stop dying and begin to live. This is strange, unclear, unfamiliar. More than that: it seems impossible. Even today. Even for Christians. And today in hospitals and hospices Christians help other Christians live out their days. They accompany them on their final journey. And they keep seeking new ways to reconcile these departing Christians with inevitable death, which, for these very Christians, in the normal order of things, simply should not exist.
And if it does exist, if today this problem stands before Christians finishing their earthly path as sharply as it did before Jews in pre-Christian times, and at times 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 who depart and those who remain feel with their whole being that what lies ahead for the departing is not the path of the Kingdom, but death and death alone, then in truth neither the one group nor the other has ever lived the life of the Kingdom. And Jesus directs us precisely toward such a life. This is not maximalism, because only that life deserves the name of life without qualification. And only it is worth living.