Discomfort Is a Sign of Life
What is life and do we really want it?
There is a compact series of verses in Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus evades and dissuades. He retreats from people, and he discourages or places obstacles before those who might follow him. All this seems not to fit with the broadly welcoming picture we imagine we are supposed to associate with Jesus. People wanting what they want, not what he offers, is the theme that runs all through this text.
Here is the passage:
When Jesus saw large crowds around him, he gave the order to go to the other side of the sea. A scribe approached him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go!” Jesus told him, “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” “Lord,” another of his disciples said, “first let me go bury my father.” But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” —Matthew 8:18-22
So, in just the span of five verses, Jesus manages to flee a crowd wishing to see him, shut down a scribe enthusiastic to be with him, and deny the reasonable request of a bereaved disciple. That is a lot of cold water!
Here are three observations from this passage:
1. Crowds are a negative indicator
When Jesus sees he has drawn a crowd, he turns away. Numbers alone do not indicate the success of a message, and sudden big numbers arguably suggest the message has been lost.
A crowd does not gather for the same reason the early hearers gather. The early hearers come because of what they heard. By contrast, many crowd members come because the crowd has caught their attention; there is something of superficial interest they expect to find in the direction the rest of the crowd is looking. Maintaining or building a crowd thus means leaning ever harder into the interests of this later-coming majority.
Jesus did not do this. He saw crowds as a sign it was time to go. The slow gathering of new hearers had crossed a threshold into a rapid gathering of crowd members; thus he gave the order to leave. Anyone still interested in the truth presumably would follow, or would find him in the new place before crowds started to gather again.
2. Home can be opposed to life
Jesus was homeless, a point he took care to emphasized to one who approached him: a scribe who, it would seem, wanted to follow him as a way of having a home with him. What Jesus had to offer was a way, not a home, and there is a difference.
In this world, there is nothing wrong with our having a roof, a resting place, a safe haven. However, to build up the comforts of home is to build a barricade against the challenges calling to us from outside our door. There is a threshold—in this case it is our literal threshold—at which life and home are in tension.
3. The time to live is now
The time to live is not in the future. That is, not at some future time after affairs have been resolved and death has been served. The disciple who asked to bury his father presumably meant something more than attending a funeral service. As with the scribe in the preceding point, Jesus gives a response that suggests he sees something more than is being said. One possibility: The disciple’s father is still living, meaning this disciple is proposing waiting for years before his own walk begins.
The wait won’t work. Life always entails disruption, meaning death can always raise a claim against it. Life involves change and only death offers stasis. Jesus’ final quote from the passage above could be paraphrased, “Let those committed to tidy stasis tend to those in tidy stasis.” Just as he did not promise the comfort of home to the scribe, he did not allow the disciple the comfort of meeting the conditional approval of family and friends.
Jesus offers life; he promises “abundant” life (John 10:10). We know something of life from our experience of it in this world. With life, there is always growth, always dynamism, always the uncertainty of proceeding into the next phase or season of whomever we are becoming or whatever we are next faced with. More life can only mean more of this. Is it what we want? Life is not stasis, but rather discomfort is a sign of life, even a necessity of life, and so we see Jesus discouraging or challenging those who are attracted to something that looks like comfort instead of life.
Photo: “Wild Growth” by Swainboat. Securing home means holding life at bay.