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From: Matthew 8:18-22

Demands for Following Christ

[18] Now when Jesus saw great crowds around Him, He gave orders to go over
to the other side. [19] And a scribe came up and said to Him, “Teacher, I will
follow You wherever You go.” [20] And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes,
and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”
[21] Another of the disciples said to Him, “Lord let me first go and bury my father.”
[22] But Jesus said to him, “Follow Me, and leave the dead to bury their own
dead.”

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Commentary:

18-22. From the very outset of His messianic preaching, Jesus rarely stays in
the same place; He is always on the move. He “has nowhere to lay His head”
(Matthew 8:20). Anyone who desires to be with him has to “follow Him”. This
phrase “following Jesus” has a very precise meaning: it means being His disciple
(cf. Matthew 19:28). Sometimes the crowds “follow Him”; but Jesus’ true dis-
ciples are those who “follow Him” in a permanent way, that is, who keep on fol-
lowing Him: being a “disciple of Jesus” and “following Him” amount to the same
thing. After our Lord’s ascension, “following Him” means being a Christian (cf.
Acts 8:26). By the simple and sublime fact of Baptism, every Christian is called,
by a divine vocation, to be a full disciple of our Lord, with all that that involves.

The evangelist here gives two specific cases of following Jesus. In the case of
the scribe our Lord explains what faith requires of a person who realizes that he
has been called; in the second case—that of the man who has already said “yes”
to Jesus—He reminds him of what His commandment entails. The soldier who
does not leave his position on the battlefront to bury his father, but instead
leaves that to those in the rearguard, is doing his duty. If service to one’s coun-
try makes demands like that on a person, all the more reason for it to happen
in the service of Jesus Christ and His Church.

Following Christ, then, means we should make ourselves totally available to Him;
whatever sacrifice He asks of us we should make: the call to follow Christ means
staying up with Him, not falling behind; we either follow Him or lose Him. In the
Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) Jesus explained what following Him involves
—a teaching which we find summarized in even the most basic catechism of
Christian doctrine: a Christian is a man who believes in Jesus Christ —a faith he
receives at Baptism—and is duty bound to serve Him. Through prayer and friend-
ship with the Lord every Christian should try to discover the demands which this
service involves as far as he personally is concerned.

20. “The Son of Man”: this is one of the expressions used in the Old Testament
to refer to the Messiah. It appeared first in Daniel 7:14 and was used in Jewish
writings in the time of Jesus. Until our Lord began to preach it had not been
understood in all its depth. The title “the Son of man” did not fit in very well with
Jewish hopes of an earthly Messiah; this was why it was Jesus’ favorite way of
indicating that He was the Messiah—thereby avoiding any tendency to encourage
Jewish nationalism. In the prophecy of Daniel just mentioned this messianic title
has a transcendental meaning; by using it Jesus was able discreetly to proclaim
that He was the Messiah and yet avoid people interpreting His role in a political
sense. After the Resurrection the Apostles at last realized that “Son of Man”
meant nothing less than “Son of God”.

22. “Leave the dead to bury their own dead”: although this sounds very harsh, it
is a style of speaking which Jesus did sometimes use: here the “dead” clearly
refers to those whose interest is limited to perishable things and who have no
aspirations towards the things that last forever.

“If Jesus forbade him,” St. John Chrysostom comments, “it was not to have us
neglect the honor due to our parents, but to make us realize that nothing is more
important than the things of Heaven and that we ought to cleave to these and not
to put them off even for a little while, though our engagements be ever so indispen-
sable and pressing” (”Hom. on St. Matthew”, 27).

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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.

Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.