NOTES for Mat 8:18-22

The evangelist sets apart a group of sayings of Jesus Christ: His brief replies addressed to various people and meant to change their ideas about life at the root. Here are two remarkable examples: the words that "the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head," and about "the dead burying their dead." In the first case, a new disciple, burning with a passionate desire to follow the Teacher through fire and water, suddenly learns that on this path he will have to envy "foxes and birds of the air," and that the fate of the Teacher and His disciples will not at all correspond to his ideas about the life of a renowned and wise person. In the second case, the disciple learns that the distinction between the dead and the living recedes into the background compared with the transformation awaiting Jesus' disciples, so that against their background all the rest turn out to be "dead." But most striking of all is that these two sayings follow one after the other in the Gospel, revealing the contrasts of the Heavenly Kingdom: the despised and humiliated Teacher turns out in reality to be the center of life.