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Kerygmania: Luke 9 59-62: and mixed messages about how to treat one's family.
caroline444
Shipmate
I've been trying to read the Bible in smaller sections, trying to properly visualise what I am reading, rather than just taking it at face value. This morning my reading included Luke 9 59-62
Here is Jesus talking to a man who wants to bury his father before following him....
"Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God"
Another man asked to say goodbye to his family, before following Jesus, and Jesus responds with.
"No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."
I find these two passages quite brutal. Burying a parent is such a momentous and emotional thing to do. Often you are saying goodbye to someone who has filled your world for decades. How can Jesus ask someone to walk away from doing that? And as for just marching off and following Jesus, without any explanation or goodbye to your family, I think that is abominable. What are the family to think? That they have just been deserted out of the blue, for no reason? Probably they will start to make up reasons, like maybe the man was having an affair and has run off with someone younger and more attractive? They will then have to come to terms with the fact that the breadwinner has gone, leaving them to fend for themselves....
I feel this is all nonsense, rather than sense, and would welcome some different perspectives.
Here is Jesus talking to a man who wants to bury his father before following him....
"Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God"
Another man asked to say goodbye to his family, before following Jesus, and Jesus responds with.
"No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."
I find these two passages quite brutal. Burying a parent is such a momentous and emotional thing to do. Often you are saying goodbye to someone who has filled your world for decades. How can Jesus ask someone to walk away from doing that? And as for just marching off and following Jesus, without any explanation or goodbye to your family, I think that is abominable. What are the family to think? That they have just been deserted out of the blue, for no reason? Probably they will start to make up reasons, like maybe the man was having an affair and has run off with someone younger and more attractive? They will then have to come to terms with the fact that the breadwinner has gone, leaving them to fend for themselves....
I feel this is all nonsense, rather than sense, and would welcome some different perspectives.
Comments
I've got nothing on the second passage, I'm afraid.
I personally didn't find the apologia all that convincing, since even if we go with that interpretation of Jesus' knowledge, the fact reamins he was still telling the guy to behave in a fashion that would be incredibly taboo at the time(or now, for that matter), regardless of his private motivations.
Plus, there doesn't seem to be any financial motivation for the other guy to say good-bye to his family, thus seeming to suggest that Jesus really WAS saying "Your loved-ones count for jack-shit, buddy". Which raises some uncomfortable questions about his state of mind at the time, eg. Did he think that families weren't worth worrying about because he believed the world would soon be coming to an end?
That interpretation kind of reminds me of the old chestnut about "the eye of the needle" being a narrow gate near Jerusalem. Which is obviously meant to make the passage in question a more comfortable read for rich people, rather than the stunning rebuke to wealth that it would be otherwise.
...IYSWIM.
I'm not sure how this might work with these two quoted examples...
Many thanks for your ideas regarding Jesus's urging that the man not stay for his father's burial. I had never heard any of these proposals before. Certainly if the man's tie to his father under these circumstances was more financial than a case of honouring him - that would make a difference.
Even so, that fact that these two episodes are so close together, suggests a sort of shared urgency for both of them.
I see that early in the next chapter Jesus says "The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields." Maybe this is relevant as to why Jesus may be encouraging people to follow him urgently?
That is an extremely interesting point! Thank you.
So, how would the scenes play out with the Jewish hyperbole factor at work?
JESUS: No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.
MAN: Huh? So, I can't say good-bye to my family?
JESUS: Oh no, you can say good-bye, I'm just kind of making a general point about how important the Kingdom Of God is. Go back, say good-bye, and catch up with us later.
And why would Jesus pick that particular situation to make that point, if he didn't really want the guy to skip the farewells? It's not like there's really a third option between "saying good-bye" and "not saying good-bye".
https://tentmaker.org/Biblematters/hyperbole.htm
I emphasise that I don't believe Our Blessed Lord was saying anything untoward, wrong, or whatever - just that we need to take into account the context, and that Hebrew works/worked rather differently, in some respects, to modern English!
Of course, it could be that the passages themselves are poetry, or at least, fictional accounts of Jesus' actions, with hyperbolic details meant to illustrate the relative importance he attached to certain things. But your willingness to accept this might depend on how much of a literalist you are.
Jewish hyperbole, again...
Could it be that the story is for us - those who read the Bible - rather than being an historical rendition of what actually happened?
Absolutely fascinating. I have copied and pasted that article for future reference. So very helpful. Thank you!
Gosh, I am so glad I bought up this issue before encountering the Luke 14:26 verse!
Thank you very much for explaining how you see this. I found what you had to say made a lot of sense. A lot of things are beginning to fall into place....
I think that passage is an example where the hyperbole argument works better. In fact, I can imagine people these days talking that way, in a situation perceived as urgent.
A: You need to come into the office this Saturday, we're WAY behind thanks to your screw-ups last week!
B: But that's the day of my kids' soccer-game.
A: F*ck your klds! You shoulda used birth-control!! Now I better you see in here at 9 o'clock sharp on Saturday!
Obviously, the boss isn't literally saying he should have used birth control, just telling him his kids aren't the important concern in this situation.
I don't think the hyperbole reading works as well in the "burying my dad" or "saying good-bye" passages, because those are situations where you would just tell the person exactly what you want them to do.
Over to the rest of you, as to how those points are interpreted!
Indeed. Like I said at 1:09 AM, the stories make more sense if they're just hyperbloic fiction meant to drive home Jesus' values.
(Though they also make sense if they're literally true, and portraying the worldview of someone with a highly elevated sense of his own importance.)
I must say that I find no sense whatsoever in your view here. We know that the standard practice was to bury the dead on the day that they died, before sunset. The notion that the father had died that day and the son had the time to go to an event with Jesus rather beggars credulity, wouldn't you say? Given that we know that ossuaries were in common use, and we know pretty much how they were used, the "old chestnut" actually aligns with known facts -- which is a circumstance sorely lacking in the eye of the needle canard. Whether those facts throw any light on the Biblical story is a matter to be decided, but the notion that they aren't actually facts is just absurd.
Did the man meet Jesus as a result of going to an "event"?
The exchange is part of a series of encounters that Jesus and his followers had "as they went in the way", which seems to suggest that he met the man by chance, not that the man had deliberately sought Jesus out.
And anyway, I didn't say that it couldn't have been an ossuary burial: by "interpretation", I meant your speculation that the placement in an ossuary might not be such a big deal. I'd kind of assume that this burial, of whatever kind it was, would be a big deal, otherwise, what would be the point of relating a story where Jesus tells someone to skip it?
Luke 9
(relevant passages near the bottom)
I'll go with the idea of hyperbolic fiction. In fact the extremes of the suggestions made in this verse lend themselves to it now seeming obvious......especially in the light of what Alan Cresswell said about Luke 14:26
"You don't think people might take this literally, do you Moses?"
"Oh come on! Of course not! How could they be so stupid?"
I can easily imagine the sentence recorded being followed with “and what will be the next excuse? When the kids grow up? When you’re financially secure? When you retire? I’m calling you to abundant life now. Don’t put it off; follow me now.”
I hear echoes here of this offering from a group of singing nuns*, based on the parable Luke records just before the verse that @Alan Cresswell cited about hating family.
*With a nod to @Amanda B Reckondwyth
In other words, it's something you really SHOULDN'T be doing if you have family commitments ...
Or to put it another way, I’m not so sure physical and spiritual following aren’t both being talked about here.
But He also criticises the Pharisees for their failure to honour their parents according to the commandments by their misuse of Corban (Matt 15: 1-9; Deut 5: 6-21).
I dunno, I can't see anything in that section that suggests anything other than literal following.
The guy in v57 says 'I will follow you wherever you go', which implies literal following, and if the guy in v61 needs to say goodbye to his family, that also implies he was literally following Jesus instead of being with his family.
Maybe I am Mr Cynical, but I think there's a tendency to assume that every verse in the Gospels is primarily intended as material for a Sunday sermon, and that every verse is therefore relevant to the immediate situation of the congregation. I'd say it probably isn't, unless some member of the congregation has decided that what the Lord really wants him to do is go off to Brazil and shelter street children, or similar.
Excellent t. Including your previous comment about the re-burial. There is no way any Jesus told anyone to not go to their father's funeral on the day of his death or not even tell the missus and kids that he was abandoning them.
I was very interested by Nick Tamen's points especially his suggestion that the 'dead who bury the dead' are not the actual dead but the spiritual dead.
However, in the Book of Tobit the burial of the dead is highlighted as the moral deed of the righteous. And was combined with the words of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats to produce the list of the seven acts of Christian mercy by the medieval church.
And what did St Paul really mean here? (What is 'the baptism of the dead,' for a start).
There are all the factors of Jesus' use of Aramaic figures of speech and hyperbole. And the linguistic translation of Aramaic into NT Greek and then into modern English. And the different historical and cultural contexts which separate us from C1st Palestine. So these can leave us with a gap in meaning which is hard to bridge. But very interesting to explore and well worth unpacking. They can reveal embedded cultural contextualisations in the texts.
However, there is no doubt that in SOM Jesus intentionally reprioritised the Law to a different moral standard. And He may be doing the same thing here because the cost of discipleship is a key theme of the gospels. In the story of the Rich Young Ruler Jesus challenges the would-be disciples' particular attachment to material wealth. But family responsibilities can also be cited as a reason not to pursue the spiritual path.
In the story of the denarius Jesus settled the dilemma pragmatically by saying 'Render unto Caesar what is due to Caesar and unto God what is due to God.' And in the Golden Rule He summarised the entire meaning of the Law and the commandments as the duty to love God and your neighbour as yourself. My own understanding would be that when you place God at the centre of your life then everything else falls into its proper place.
As I said earlier, my sermon on a similar saying was that this challenges our priorities, and especially those determined by social norms and expectations. The word hyperbole has been used several times in this thread, and quite rightly IMO. There are lots of things in this world which are good and righteous, including love and care for family (including making sure there's a respectful farewell - in a funeral or when just going away for a while). But, if we're really putting following Christ as our priority then anything that gets in the way of that is a problem.
The evangelists were writing for a C1st audience and assume a knowledge of the contemporary culture and language that we don't now have. So you have to factor that into your hermeneutic too.
The Church historically constructed its doctrine by letting scripture interpret scripture and basing orthodox belief upon the consensus of meaning rather than the anomalous texts ('I did not come to bring peace but a sword'). But the anomalies can be quite revealing if you analyse what you think they are doing there.
Scripture is also an ongoing revelation and so the Church revisits it from time to time to revise its theology and practice on the light of contemporary culture. Pseudo Paul says that Christian women have a choice between long hair and no hair. And as late as the 1970s women would wear hats to church. But modern society regards hair and hats as being incidental to the life of faith.
In order for the comparison with "knock yourself out" to work, that phrase would have to be used as hyperbole, not metaphor, which is how Jeses was allegedly using the commands to ship the burial and the farewells(ie. as hyperbole).
Telling the guy to skip the burial wasn't a symbol for an entirely different thing(eg. skip the burial really means don't eat pork), it was an exaggerated way of telling him that burying his father isn't that important. IOW, by the standards of conventional morality, then and now, he was being pretty damned offensive.
And, again, it's not clear to me why Jesus would use that kind of command in an actual conversation. It would be the equivalent of parents saying to their son "We're too poor to give you any presents for your birthday this year", when what they really meant was "You're not goint to be getting as many nice things as last year". Hyperbole generally isn't used in those sorts of situations, unless it's the case that the listener would automatically understand that it wasn't meant literally.
Which maybe is how Jesus was using it in those passages, but then, are we to assume that the guy just went back to the burial anyway, because he knew Jesus didn't mean it literally, and was just trying to impart the lesson that family isn't that important?
I would think, though, that that koan is meant to impart the idea that the actual person of Buddha is really not that important at all to the practice of Buddhism. The monk who came up with that was expressing contempt for the idea that Buddha is a figure who should be in any way revered by his followers.
Is that the same sort of thing that Jesus was saying about family loyalties, ie. they are irrelevant, even detrimental, to living a Christian life? I could go along with that idea, based on the text, but there does seem to be some resistance to it, on this thread and elsewhere.
Boy wants to bury his father.
Jesus says "let the others do the burying, you go and be the bearer of the Good News."
It just seems to me that Jesus is saying that boy has a different role to play in the funeral proceedings.
Ditto with hand to the plough.
Boy wants to join Jesus' disciples. He has stuff he has to set to rights at home and farewells to make.
Without doing this, he will always be looking in the rear view.
ISTM Jesus is saying "Yeah go do that because you will be useless to us if you don't"
AFF
Wonderful points raised....I was especially interested in what you said in the third paragraph, about 'basing orthodox belief upon the consensus of meaning rather than the anomalous texts', and the example you gave about the sword. I also liked what you said about analysing those anomalies - which is what we are doing here. It is very interesting.
As a comparative newbie, reading a Bible where all Jesus's words are in a red font, there does seem quite a lot of pressure to see most his words as stern teaching. It has been extremely refreshing (& liberating?) to question this, with the help of this thread.
(Forgive us our tangents - as we forgive those who tangent against us).