What did Jesus mean when he said "Let the dead bury their own dead", in Luke 9:60?

For this blog I’m going to focus on what Jesus meant when he said “Let the dead bury their own dead”, as it is seen in Luke 9:60. I chose this particular scripture because it is one of those sayings where I feel Jesus sounds a bit harsh with his words and I wanted to crack down on the significance of what he was really saying beneath the surface. 

Franz, on the website http://www.ldolphin.org/deaddead.html, explains that there are two different times in the four Gospels that Jesus tells a disciple that he could not take a leave of absence to bury his father. Once in Mathew 8: 21-22 and another time in Luke: 9:60. Franz says, “Critical scholars suggest that Jesus was encouraging His disciples to break the fifth commandment, honor your father and mother, by not giving their fathers a proper burial.” The majority interpretation would say that Jesus meant for the spiritually dead to worry about burying the physically dead. However, the interpretation is not consistent with Jewish burial practices in the first century AD.

The Requests

The first request by a disciple was written in Mathew 8, as Jesus was about to take the twelve to cross Galilee and into the Decapolis city of Gadara. One disciple did not want to go because he thought of the Gentiles as “unclean.”He asked Jesus if he could go bury his father and Jesus replied. Critics say that this could have been Peter because he had trouble associating with the Gentiles. As it is in Luke, Jesus again says the same thing to another disciple because he felt it was more important for him to go with the others to Perea.

Jewish Burial Practices in First Century AD

            According to http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/ancientburial.html, burial was very important in Israel. There are many instances where we see that Jewish burial had certain standards, as in Abraham’s purchase of the cave at Machpelah (Genesis 23). In the New Testament, standards of Jewish burial were raised quite a bit as we see when the disciples took Jesus’ body and poured myrrh and aloes on him. We also see that they wrapped his body in linen cloth with spices. Jewish custom also says that burial should be without delay, out of respect for the dead. It refreshes the soul and then can be admitted to God’s presence. This also had a lot to do with climate, because the Israelites did not embalm their dead.

 

                                       

So, according to these customs, I could see why the disciples had put some urgency and careful thought about the matter. According to  http://www.gotquestions.org/let-dead-bury-dead.html some Jews at the time wanted to stay behind for one year, in order to rebury the bones of their fathers.

So what did Jesus mean?

            First of all, before we can analyze what Jesus meant by “the dead” we first need to figure out who the dead were. According to http://www.gotquestions.org/let-dead-bury-dead.html the word dead is use in two different ways: To be dead to the law (Romans 7:4) and to be dead to sin (Romans 6:11). The Jews use the word dead to express the idea that it has no influence or power over people. People who do not follow Jesus on Earth are dead to him, along with Earthly possessions. This is why he calls them the “spiritually dead” and says that they are the ones to bury the “physically dead”. In other words, people of the Earth are supposed to follow Jesus first and leave the dead behind, according to the majority interpretation.