January - February 2006
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Brother Abedi and his family finally arrive in Guyana, in safety from persecution to start a new life.
Editorial : "Let the dead bury their dead".
The Lord’s comment, “Let the dead bury their dead”
(Mt. 8:22), reveals how He had a way of so radically challenging the positions
held by normal people of the world, to a depth quite unheard of and He
did it in so few words. And even more wondrous, the Lord appeared to have
come out with this so pithy and semantically dense statement almost ‘off
the cuff’, when presented with a man declining to follow Him immediately
because he had to bury his father. So let’s see in what ways the
Lord’s comment was so radical.
Respect for parents, as expressed in burying them, “was at the
heart of Jewish piety… under Hasidic-Pharisaic influence the last
offices for the dead had gained primacy among all good works… the
duty to participate in a funeral procession could even override study
of the Torah”(1). And of course the Lord knew this, He knew just
how fanatic the Jews were getting about burying parents - and it’s
exactly that issue which He chooses to pick on in His relentless demand
for our ‘all’ in following Him. Quite apart from the particular
obsessive situation in first-century Israel relating to burying parents,
there was a widely held view amongst both Greeks and Jews that burial
of a father could only properly be done by the son, and if this wasn’t
done, then the man was effectively not properly buried, which even Biblically
is used as a curse. And ‘just’ for delaying doing the Lord’s
service for a day, the Lord demanded all this of a person. He’s
no less demanding today, even if His radical call is articulated over
different issues. It may mean ...Read More...
Duncan Heaster
EDITORIAL: “Let the dead bury their dead” Duncan Heaster
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