Let The Dead Bury Their Dead… What Do We Make of That?

What do we make of it when Jesus says to a young man whose father has just died, “Let the dead bury their dead!”?

The young man did not seek Jesus and come to Him, instead, Jesus called the young man, and the young man had a ready excuse. What does Jesus say next? He said, “Go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Even if the young man would not follow Jesus right away, nevertheless Jesus gave him a job to do. A job that would encompass the rest of his life.

The life of Jesus was not only dedicated to offering Himself up for our sins, but also to making sure that the whole would come to know His kingdom. Sometimes we are very reluctant messengers.

Because of the faithfulness of believers who proclaimed the kingdom of God, the message of Jesus had gone out and changed the world to its very core.

Deacon Michael takes on these difficult words of Jesus and shows how they are the way we are to love God and, yes, love our neighbor.

-- Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael

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The gospel reading today and the gospel reading yesterday sounds very harsh. It really does.

For Him to say, "I'm gonna follow you. Let me bury my father first.". And Jesus says, "Let the dead bury their dead."

He is complaining about He doesn't have any place to lay His head. That we are supposed to follow Him. Follow Him.

It comes over as a very harsh message.

And it is almost is that it is not harsh, it is that it is almost revolutionary. That the transformation of Christ, of the world, does not allow us to withhold part of ourselves from Christ.

The physical thing of taking care of the dead. Following Christ is not an impossibility from what Jesus is saying. It's: Follow me, and then as you encompass everything in your lives, bury the dead.

It's transforming absolutely everything. And that's part of the message that is there.

The first reading today, the reading of Abraham... I love this reading. If there are fifty, if there are ten [good men], don't destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. We know He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

We see in the Old Testament, instances where God is extremely angry at someone for not doing what He said when He said, "Kill every man, woman, child and animal in that village."

The God in Abraham withholding the punishment [of Sodom and Gomorrah], for ten [just men]. But we see a vengeful God. We see a God that demands obedience. We see the God that is the "an eye for an eye." The image of the Old Testament God.

An image that is totally transformed. And an image that today is looked on as something that is unacceptable. And the best way to talk about this, is the concept of collateral damage. It's a good military concept. It's also present in policing.

In the ancient world, and for a long time even after Christ because it took so long for it to get out, one of the things that you do is, if you're in a war, and a particular area is giving you trouble, you wipe them out. Genghis Khan was absolutely famous for this, but it's not limited to him.

What happens, though, with the presence of Christ, is it then becomes: "Is it appropriate for us to kill every man, woman and child in Farmers Branch because a group of people within Farmers Branch decided to resist us?"

The people who are not the resisters are called collateral damage. To accomplish an end you have to cause damage to be able to do what you need to do.

It really came to its culmination, or aberration, in World War II. Collateral damage, for example what the Nazi's did in Poland, in Warsaw particularly. It didn't matter if a person was a fighter or a person just happened to be there, they died.

The British were famous for fire-bombing Dresden. They killed everybody in Dresden. It wasn't just the military, it fact Dresden was really not even a military target.

The United States in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

So what happens in this transformative effect of Christ, this radical transformative effect of Christ that we see in the gospel? It applies to everything.

“Love the neighbor"... isn't restricted to certain defined parameters. We see this in the concept of just war, starting with St. Augustine evaluating it, and we see this over time in a code of conduct of military people, where you aren't supposed to do certain things.

In a very large part, the stories about King Arthur and his Round Table are very much about love of Christ guiding the effect of what you do in a military context.

After World War II it came to prominence through the founding of the UN. But the basic concepts that we see in the concept of collateral damage and just war, go back to the radical teaching of Christ of loving they neighbor.

If you look into, for example, the military development of weapons in the United States over the last forty or fifty years, you have, first, the weapon that can wipe out everything. The atomic bomb. That can just wipe out everything. But then you see an incredible amount of effort to design the weapons to reduce collateral damage.

Why would you want to reduce collateral damage? If that village is giving you a whole bunch of trouble, just wipe it out. You don't have to worry about it any more. Instead of trying to be able to only kill the people who are the antagonists.

That's what we make a great deal of effort to do at this point as a military tactic and weapons tactic. And this pervades the whole world. You see great outrage all over the world in an area that isn't Christian, where people have gone in and killed a whole bunch of civilians.

Well, it served their purpose, but there is collateral damage. Because you don't want to have collateral damage.

So if in something that is as dramatic and awesome, just totally awful, as war, the teaching of Christ comes in and guides military tactics and the development of weapons and everything, for the purpose of reducing civilian casualties.

Requiring a just war and reducing civilian casualties. That is an implementation of "love thy neighbor" in a very real sense. And it gives us a view of how totally radical the teachings of Christ are for us [now], and during His time.

So that if we are dealing of that kind of radical teaching that requires a transformation of the believer, that is a radical transformation, the context of Jesus saying "let the dead bury their dead" becomes more understandable because once you have undergone the transformation of "follow Me", and "love thy neighbor", the context of the entire way that you live your life has been transformed, and has been given meaning in a very real sense.

So when you hear Jesus saying, when this man says, "Let me go first and bury my father" and Jesus says, "Follow Me. Let the dead bury the dead." that gives an idea of how radical the teaching of "Love thy neighbor" really is. That it requires you to do something that is repugnant, but for the good.

It doesn't say that he is not going to be able to bury the dead, He is saying that he is going to be so transformed by following Christ that the nature of the obligation of burying the dead, the nature of everything in our lives, is transformed. It's different.

Loving they neighbor is such a transformative event of loving God, loving Jesus, and ultimately loving neighbor, because our love for God and love for Christ is a radical transformative thing in every aspect of our lives.

That places everything that Jesus is saying, as we were talking about yesterday and today in these readings, of, "Don't go back and say goodbye to your parents... drop what you are doing... don't worry about burying the dead," because the ultimate part of that story is that when you are His follower, and truly have adopted His teachings of loving God and loving neighbor, that transformative effect is so great that the things that you would do, they become something different.

It's so radical that it changes the nature of the most horrible thing that man has been able to accomplish, and that is war. It makes us do war differently. It make us look and say, "We are in a war with Robert and I should figure out how, in a war with Robert, I don't kill Margene. She's collateral damage.”

And that transformative, radical transformative effect of the commandments of Jesus and the loving of Jesus is what we are called to do. It isn't a passive thing. It is an active thing that causes, literally, physical, mental, emotional change in every respect of what we are and brings us to the ultimate transformation that we hope and pray to experience, that when we die, we become a follower of Christ, a worshiper of God in Heaven for all eternity.

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