But if we remember that it is Jesus Christ, who came to bring life into the dead world, who says this, then, I think, we shall understand better what He means.  I do not need to explain, I suppose, that by the one ‘dead’ here is meant the physical and natural ‘dead,’ and by the other the morally and religiously ‘dead’; and that what Christ says, in the picturesque way that He so often affected in order to bring great truths home in concrete form to sluggish understandings, is in effect, ’Nay!  For the men in the world that are separated from God, and so are dead in their selfhood and their sin, burying other dead people is appropriate work.  But your business, as living by Me, is to carry life, and let the burying alone, to be done by the dead people that can do nothing else.’

Now the spirit of our Lord’s answer may be put thus:—­It must always be Christ first, and every one else second; and it must therefore sometimes be Christ only, and no one else.  ’Let me bury my father and then I will come.’  ‘No,’ says Christ; ‘first your duty to Me’:  first in order and time, because first in order of importance.  And this is His habitual tone, ’He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.’

Did you ever think of what a strange claim that is for a man to make upon others?  This Jesus Christ comes to you and me, and to every man, and says, ’I demand, and I have a right to demand, thy supreme affection and thy first obedience.  All other relations are subordinate to thy relation to Me.  All other persons ought to be less dear to thee than I am.  No other duty can be so imperative as the duty of following Me.’  What right has He to speak thus to us?  On what does such a tremendous claim rest?  Who is it that fronts humanity and says, ’He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me’?  He had a right to say it, because He is more than they, and has done more than they, because He is the Son of God manifest in the flesh, and because on the Cross He has died for all men.  Therefore all other claims dwindle and sink into nothingness before His.  Therefore His will is supreme, and our relation to Him is the dominant fact in our whole moral and religious character.  He must be first, whoever comes second, and between the first and the second there is a great gulf fixed.

Remember that this postponing of all other duties, relationships, and claims to Christ’s claims and relationships, and to our duties to Him, lifts them up, and does not lower them; exalts, and does not degrade, the earthly affections.  They are nobler and loftier, being second, than when perversely, and, in the literal sense, preposterously, they assume to be first.  The little hills in the foreground are never so green and fair as when they are looked at in connection with the great white Alps that tower behind them; and all earthly loves and relationships catch a tinge of more ethereal beauty, and are lifted into a loftier region, when they are rigidly subordinated to our love to Him.  Being second, they are more than when they bragged that they were first.