Jesus doesn’t want superficial niceness. He wants a truthful relationship with us.
To another, he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Sometimes Jesus isn’t nice. This can be upsetting to us even if we realize that “niceness” was not the point of Jesus’s mission. Still, we can wonder why Jesus seems to be unkind. The fact is that he is rather like a doctor who tells a patient the truth even when that truth is hard to hear. Jesus doesn’t want superficial niceness. He wants a truthful relationship with us. He wants us to follow him fully and freely.
As a boy growing up in Sunday School, I quickly learned that it wasn’t okay to be unhappy with anything Jesus did or said. He was, after all, my personal Savior. He was also God in human flesh. If Jesus said or did something, it had to be good. Once in a while, we could say “I don’t understand that,” but never “I don’t like that.”
Let me confess to you, therefore, that my first reaction to today’s passage is not positive. I can say without remorse that I’m perplexed by what Jesus says in this portion of Luke. And, if I’m really honest, I would admit that I don’t really like it. Jesus called a man to follow him but the man wanted to bury his dead father first. Jesus’s response, “Let the dead bury their own dead” seems unnecessarily unkind. Then, when another man offered to follow Jesus but wanted to say goodbye to his family, Jesus pretty much told him that he was not fit for the kingdom of God. What? Followers of Jesus can’t bury their dead parents or even say goodbye to their families? What’s up with this? Jesus is certainly not being very nice here.
I’ve been a Christian long enough to know that Jesus didn’t come to be nice. But I do know that Jesus was supremely loving and good. What he said to his potential disciples in Luke 9:59-62 at first glance doesn’t seem to be either of these. This suggests that I am missing something in my interpretation.
What am I missing? For one thing, I am missing much of the context for Jesus’s sayings. I don’t know anything about the man who wanted to bury his father, besides his sense of responsibility for his family, something valued deeply in his culture. Given Jesus’s response, I wonder if he knew there was more going on with this man than simply a reasonable need for burial. Perhaps Jesus saw deeper resistance in the man’s soul and was bringing it to the surface out of concern for his well-being. Similarly, Jesus might have known that the one who wanted to say farewell to his family had many other issues that would hinder his discipleship. The problem is that we don’t know and really can’t know what was going on beneath the surface here. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Jesus was using his words like a scalpel to remove deeper tumors than what we can see on the surface. Jesus often did that sort of thing, after all.
What I am also missing is something that challenges me in my own discipleship. Jesus quite clearly put allegiance to the kingdom of God above allegiance to family. This was even more shocking in his own day than it is in ours. Yet, as one raised to value family above just about everything else in life, I can miss Jesus’s priority of the kingdom not because I don’t recognize it, but because I don’t like it. Now, there is surely much in Scripture to underscore the importance of family. Don’t get me wrong. But some of us stretch the goodness of family love to such an extent that it can get in the way of our discipleship.
The fact is that Jesus isn’t necessarily “nice” in his dealings with us. He calls us to hard things and says hard things to us. In this way, he reminds me of my doctor, who is deeply committed to my health. Sometimes this commitment has led him to say things to me that have been hard to hear, things related to ways I am not taking good care of myself. In those moments, my doctor isn’t being nice. But he is doing what is best for me even though it’s hard for me to receive it. Jesus can be rather like this, don’t you think?
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