The very first words of these verses, ‘And another of His disciples,’ show us that the incident recorded in them is only half of a whole.  We have already considered the other half, and supplement our former remarks by a glance at the remaining portion now.  The two men, whose treatment by Christ is narrated, are the antipodes of each other.  The former is a type of well-meaning, lightly formed, and so, probably, swiftly abandoned purposes.  This man is one of the people who always see something else to be done first, when any plain duty comes before them.  Sluggish, hesitating, keenly conscious of other possibilities and demands, he needs precisely the opposite treatment from his light-hearted and light-purposed brother.  Some plants want putting into a cold house to be checked, some into a greenhouse to be forwarded.  Diversity of treatment, even when it amounts to opposition of treatment, comes from the same single purpose.  And so here the spur is applied, whilst in the former incident it was the rein that was needed.

I. Note, then, first of all, this apparently most laudable and reasonable request.

‘Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.’  Nature says ‘Go,’ and religion enjoins it, and everything seems to say that it is the right thing for a man to do.  The man was perfectly sincere in his petition, and perfectly sincere in the implied promise that, as soon as the funeral was over, he would come back.  He meant it, out and out.  If he had not, he would have received different treatment; and if he had not, he would have ceased to be the valuable example and lesson that he is to us.  So we have here a disciple quite sincere, who believes himself to have already obeyed in spirit and only to be hindered from obeying in outward act by an imperative duty that even a barbarian would know to be imperative.

And yet Jesus Christ read him better than he read himself; and by His answer lets us see that the tone of mind into which we are all tempted to drop, and which is the characteristic natural tendency of some of us, that of being hindered from doing the plain thing that lies before us, because something else crops up, which we also think is imperative upon us, is full of danger, and may be the cover of a great deal of self-deception; and, at any rate, is not in consonance with Christ’s supreme and pressing and immediate claims.

The temper which says, ‘Suffer me first to go and bury my father,’ is full of danger.  One never knows but that, after he has got his father buried, there will be something else turning up equally important.  There was the will to be read afterwards, and if he was, as probably he was, the eldest son, he would most likely be the executor.  There would be all sorts of affairs to settle up before he might feel that it was his duty to leave everything and follow the Master.