Enough With The Lame Excuses
MATTHEW 8:18-27
18 Now when Jesus saw a crowd 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 And Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.”
23 And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. 24 And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. 25 And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” 26 And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. 27 And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”
After Jesus calms the storm, the disciples are amazed and say to each other, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!” [8:27 NIV]
Matthew is using dramatic irony here: we (the readers) know something that the disciples (the characters) don't: Jesus isn't an ordinary man at all, but the God of Israel himself, incarnate. Just as the Lord calmed the waters of chaos at the beginning (see Genesis 1) and parted the Red Sea during the Exodus, so here Jesus has those same powers—over entropy and chaos itself.
When someone like that asks you to follow him, providing lame excuses as to why you'd really like to follow him but it's just that you're so busy--that makes no sense at all.
Will there be danger and difficulty? Yes. But disciples of Jesus will also see the glory of God. In the end everything will be okay, and it will all have been worth it.
Let’s go.
EXCURSUS: “THE SON OF MAN”
The term “Son of Man” is how Jesus refers to himself. (He never calls himself “Messiah” or “Christ,” though does affirm it when other people do.) The phrase comes from Daniel 7:13-14:
13 “I saw in the night visions,
and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
14 And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.
The phrase “Son of Man” in Hebrew is a way of saying, “the human one.” In Daniel’s vision, a human is taken up and enthroned in heaven next to God (“the Ancient of Days”) and given dominion over everything.
Why does Jesus use this term so frequently to refer to himself?
“It seems that the reason why Jesus found this title convenient is that, having no ready-made [title] in current usage, it could be applied across the whole range of his uniquely paradoxical mission of humiliation and vindication, of death and glory, which could not be fitted into any preexisting model. Like his parables, the title ‘Son of Man’ came with an air of enigma, challenging the hearer to think new thoughts rather than to slot Jesus into a ready-made pigeonhole.”
Jesus is Israel’s Messiah, but the term was loaded with ideas that were contrary to Jesus’s mission. So, he uses a term that he can provide meaning to until folks can come to truly understand what the Messiah was supposed to be.