Let the dead bury their dead?

I seem in the last week or two to have done very little other than arrange funerals and bury the dead. Yet on each occasion I do this, I am struck by the immense privilege I am being given in being part of these profoundly important moments. To have the chance I hope, to give some comfort to a family in their loss, to give glory to God by speaking of his image as it was found in the departed person, and for that person to in some sense stand at the gate between this life and eternity.

For me, this ministry is at the heart of what I am called to be, the moment at which I am both proudest and most humble about being called to this way of life.

Let the dead bury their dead while you come and follow me? Are we not following him when we are burying the dead?

Even the words themselves can be offensive. I'm put my foot in this myself – once, when I was getting sick of people phoning me up to ask about 19^th century graves in the churchyard so that they could do their family history research I quoted this verse to someone – let the dead bury their dead, I have the living to minister to. Unfortunately the person I blew my top with had been the administrator of a council cemetery for a living – pick your audience Richard – and I got in trouble with some fairly senior people. Claiming that Jesus said it first didn't get me out of trouble either.

But did Jesus say it? What does he mean? Is this remark as shocking as it seems? Well yes and no. It is a shocking statement. It is now, it would have been more so then – respect for parents is enshrined in the ten commandments. Extended families lived together and depended on each other even more closely in the 1^st century than they do today. If anything that seems to undermine family values is controversial today, it would have been that much more incendiary then. This man would have been shocked, maybe deeply angry. The crowds and disciples too. Nothing I say this morning should blunt razor edge of those words.

But there is some context here, and also a lesson in reading the bible – in not allowing it so speak directly to us today.

Firstly, Jesus is walking through the same lands that Elijah and Elisha had walked in 850 years earlier in our OT reading. Elijah finds Elisha ploughing in the fields and throws his mantle over him as a sign of calling. But Elisha, quite rightly and respectably, wants to put his affairs in order first. He also needs to wind up his affairs – sacrificing his oxen and cooking them on the remains of his plough is a sign of his leaving his old way of life behind completely – seeking what we might call 'closure', before he can move on, and being properly mindful of .

There are also several parallels as the story continues. Elijah and Elisha are also rejected in Northern Israel, and when troops are sent to arrest them, they call down fire from heaven to consume them – that is what the disciples are referring to when they ask Jesus if they should call down fire from heaven. We can hope it is an in-joke, some dark humour at a difficult moment. It may not have been.

But the big contrast is between Elisha who is allowed to return from following his master, and those in the gospel who are told it is all or nothing and they must choose right now.

One clarification is important. When the man says 'Let me bury my father' he doesn't mean that his father has died and he needs to make funeral arrangements – he means that at home he has to take care of his obligations to his father until his father dies and then he is free to make his own decisions. Then, as now, there are deep obligations that we have to care for older or frailer members of the family which constrain what we can do. I don't know if this makes what Jesus says easier or not. There is not the immediate emotion of bereavement – but rather the long term, agonising decisions that people have to make about how to care for others while still being able to live their own lives in the way that they feel is right. In our time, as the population tends to live longer, and retirement ages rise (thank you coalition government, I'll be working into my 80's at this rate), this will be even more of an issue.

It was, indeed, a difficult tension for my mother for many years because her mother lived with us for a time and over that time her needs became greater and more demanding as her physical and mental health deteriorated. Eventually my mother made that tremendously difficult and personal decision to find a place for my gran in a local nursing home. As it happens this was what my gran had been waiting for all along, because in the home she found that her room came with two pull cords. If she pulled the white one, someone would come in a few minutes and she could get a cup of tea. If she pulled the red one someone came running straight away and you could order your tea much quicker. She never got that sort of service at our house.

For the man in our gospel reading, even difficult but necessary options like nursing care were not available of course and the consequence of his leaving the family to follow Jesus were stark. The divide in his loyalties must have been unbearable. We can only feel sympathy for him, and since the gospel goes on to imply that he remained where he was, we can hardly hold this against him. Would we want him to do otherwise? Just because he would have been doing something for Jesus, would that have made it right?

But for Jesus himself, there was a great sense of urgency. There was no time left for anything else. There was no turning back for him at this point. No temptations to return to his former life could be heard– a quiet life as a carpenter in a small provincial town - however sweet that may have sounded. You see, up to this point Luke has been basing his gospel very heavily on Mark's gospel – telling stories of Jesus' glory. Crowds respond to him, he is welcomed. Wherever he goes there is success, healing, transformation. But now Luke parts ways with Mark. Mark gets Jesus to Jerusalem in 1 chapter. In Luke, it takes 8 chapters, and the shadow of the cross falls heavily across them. They are dark and troubled stories he tells. Stories of pain, of division, of sacrifice, of rejection and confrontation, judgement and violence and death. Read chapters 9 through 18 quickly and the atmosphere is like the journey in to Mordor in the Lord of the Rings.

It is all smoke and fire. It is all or nothing. Everything is at stake. There can be no turning back, the narrow way has been chosen and those around him must be under no illusions about either the cost or the urgency of their decisions. They need to attend to the needs of now.

There is a profound difference then between this context where Jesus is setting his face to Jerusalem and all that awaits him there and the context in which we live our lives.

We should not universalise everything we read in the bible, assume it applies to us directly. One example of that direct approach is given by Rabbi Lionel Blue, a Jewish author and broadcaster who has long had what he calls 'an affair with Christianity'. In his autobiography he tells of the time when he decided to explore being baptised as a Christian, but he is deeply aware of the pain that this would cause his elderly Jewish mother – it will kill her he says. He knocks on the door of a vicarage to speak to the priest. Unfortunately he interrupts the vicar in the middle of his dinner – never come between a cleric and his pot noodles you have been warned – and standing on his doorstep the priest listens impatiently. When he has heard the problem he simply quotes this scripture, together with Luke 14 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his mother and his father he cannot be my disciple”. The message is clear he says. Make your choice. Then he shuts the door and goes back to his meal.

Lionel Blue says he went away to ask his Jesus for his opinion and his Jesus' reply isn't repeatable here. So Blue decides that he can best serve Jesus by loving his mother and putting his own desires aside – and he remains unbaptised.

However crass and insensitive that priests behaviour, or whatever your view of Rabbi Blue's decision – these words of Jesus still make us confront some troubling tensions in life.

However much family values may be closely tied up with Christianity, the family is not everything. - for all our hopes, our expectations, our desires for what family can be, sometimes family falls a long way short. It can't be held up as the ultimate virtue.

And whether or not these relationships are a source of strength or a cause of pain, we often have to make less than ideal choices where we struggle to know how to be faithful.

There are some people, and I know some, who have had to make the painful decision that in order to attend to the needs of now – in order to do what they know to be the right thing, they need to let go of a relationship, even with parents – or a particular form of that relationship.

There are others who in order to follow Jesus faithfully will need to return to those relationships and invest them with new energy, restoring them where they are damaged, make the sacrifice of taking up a relationship rather than giving one up.

Sometimes the disturbing revelation may be that our love for some people over others, however natural and justified, is what blinds us – stops us from showing the impartiality of God. Stops us from seeing how his love could reach out wider than our own closed circles.

The basic message is that we should take nothing for granted, regard nothing as sacrosanct, except our faithfulness to Jesus. And yet even that can limit our love. It is the disciples love for Jesus that allowed them, whether in seriousness or jest, to contemplate calling down fire on whole villages. This is the archetype of religious discrimination. Hating those who reject you is also a major religious theme for many in thinking about God and God’s future. The cycle of violence easily becomes a devout response. James and John loved Jesus. That was a problem - for them and others.

Blind loyalty to anything or anyone, even family, even Jesus, can result in our missing our calling, missing our opportunities, failing to see the needs of now and respond to them.

And perhaps there is a warning in this difficult text – when we do need to choose our priorities, choose a side – we need to reflect very carefully before we presume we know which side he is on, what his priorities actually are.