'And a certain scribe came, and said unto Him, Master, I will
follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest. 20. And Jesus saith unto him,
The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the
Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.'--MATT. viii. 19-20.
Our Lord was just on the point of leaving Capernaum for the other side
of the lake. His intended departure from the city, in which He had spent
so long a time, and wrought so many miracles, produced precisely
opposite effects on two of the crowd around Him, both of whom seem to
have been, in the loose sense of the word, disciples. One was this
scribe, whom the prospect of losing the Master from his side, hurried
into a too lightly formed and too confidently expressed undertaking. The
other presented exactly the opposite fault. That other man in the crowd,
at the prospect of losing sight of the Christ, began to think that there
were imperative duties at home which would prevent his following the
Master, and said, 'Suffer me first to go and bury my father.' A sacred
obligation, and one which Christ would not have desired him to suspend,
unless there had been something more behind it!
These two men, then, represent the two opposite poles of weakness, the
one too swift, the other too slow, to take a decisive step. And Christ's
treatment of them is, in like manner, a representation of the two
opposite methods which He adopts for curing opposite diseases, and
bringing both back to the same state of health. He stimulates the too
sluggish, He represses the too willing (if such a paradox may be
allowed). His treatment is at once spur and bridle. To the one man He
administers a sobering representation of what he is undertaking with so
light a heart; to the other He gives the commandment that sounds so
stern: 'Leave the highest duty, if you cannot do it without conflicting
with your higher to Me.'
And so I think that Matthew's arrangement of this pair of companion
pictures is to be preferred to that which we find in Luke, who
localises the incident in a different part of our Lord's ministry, and
on a different occasion. I deal now only with the first of these two
contrasted pictures, and consider the lightly-made vow, and Christ's
sobering treatment of it.