Teacher Of The Law

             When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake.  Then a teacher of the law came to him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.”

 Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” (Matthew 8:18-22)

 

I noticed something I don’t remember ever reading before. The man who came up to Jesus and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go,” was a teacher of the law. He was a lawyer, a scribe – a person of authority and very likely of some measure of wealth. Matthew tells us what Jesus said, but not the way He said it. Did He show contempt for the teacher? Was He simply trying to show the teacher what following would cost, and let the teacher decide? What if the teacher was Joseph of Arimathea? It’s an interesting notion. I’m not saying the disciple was Joeph of Arimathea, just that we’re quick to judge.

In the second example above, Jesus tells a disciple – it says the person was a disciple already – to follow Him and “let the dead bury their own dead.” It doesn’t tell us what this person did. I think I’ve always assumed that the disciple gave up being a disciple.

What this passage makes clear is that following Jesus, being a disciple, costs. It is likely to cost us anything and everything we hold too closely. Being a disciple means learning to be like Jesus, who didn’t think giving up “everything” was too much to ask. This doesn’t answer the question of what God does ask of us. He called the twelve to leave everything and follow Him.

Jesus sent a lot of people away once He encountered them. The man possessed by a legion of demons was told to stay in his home town. People healed of leprosy, blindness, and paralysis were sent to the priests or home. As far as we know, the Woman at the Well, the Woman with the Flow of Blood, and the Syro-Phoenician Woman didn’t leave their homes to follow Jesus.

We’re tempted to think that those Jesus didn’t invite into His inner circle (which is certainly where the teacher of the law would expect to end up) were being rejected as a disciple or numbered among the unbelievers. And we might be right, or wrong.

The other temptation I face, sometimes without realizing it, is to believe that if we are not A, we are -A. If we’re not in the inner circle, we’re not included at all. I have said that my clearly wrong conclusion is that if I am not as smart as Jefferson, DaVinci, Newton, and Einstein, I’m stupid. If I’m not Moses, Joshua, David, or John, I may as well stop pretending to be a Christian. In other words, because I am not an eye, I’m not a part of the body. How many people struggle with this? At one point or another, probably all of us.

And here are the two questions that come to mind:

Who told you that  you were naked…a failure… a -A…not part of the body…unacceptable?

What makes you think God hasn’t gotten you to where you are with the idea of using you where you are instead of where you aren’t?

It's one thing if you are being rebellious, and another if you're not.