The Son of Man Has Nowhere to Lay His Head
The Son of Man Has Nowhere to Lay His Head
`Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head'(Matt. 8:20; Luke 9:58)
This saying comes in the first of a series of interviews (two in Matthew, three in Luke) between Jesus and would-be disciples. It can be called a hard saying only in the sense that it warned the would-be disciple of the hardships that would be involved in following Jesus. For the man - a scribe, or expert interpreter of the law, according to Matthew - was not volunteering to become a follower of Jesus in the general sense of following his teaching; he proposed to join his company on a permanent footing: `I will follow you wherever you go', he said. Jesus warned him that, while wild animals have places where they can rest by night (the foxes in their dens and the birds in their nests), he himself did not know from day to day as he moved around the country where he would find shelter, or even if he would find shelter, for the next night; and his companions must be prepared to share the same uncertain lot. This lack of any place which he could call his own was only one aspect of the humiliation of the Son of man - a humiliation which many of the disciples found it hard to accept.
The saying has been made harder than it really is by attempts to understand the phrase `the Son of man' as something more (or less) than a way of referring to Jesus himself. One suggestion is that the phrase here simply means `man' in general, and that its application to Jesus is secondary. That is to say, the saying is in origin a proverb meaning that wild animals have their natural resting-places but man is homeless. There is no evidence for the currency of such a proverb, and in any case it would not be true.
Another suggestion was made by T. W. Manson, in line with his view that `the Son of man' in the teaching of Jesus primarily denoted God's elect community, the true believing Israel, which Jesus was constituting around himself (and which, in the crucial hour, was embodied in Jesus himself). If `the Son of man' has this corporate sense in the present saying, then the foxes and the birds might be expected to have a comparable sense. He proposed therefore, tentatively, to understand the saying thus: `everybody is at home in Israel's land except the true Israel. The birds of the air (the Roman overlords), the foxes (the Edomite interlopers), have made their position secure. The true Israel is disinherited by them: and if you cast your lot with me and mine you join the ranks of the dispossessed, and you must be prepared to serve God under those conditions." (The `Edomite interlopers' were the Herods; Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, is described by Jesus as `that fox' in Luke 13:32.) But it is unlikely that the would-be disciple would have understood those allusions; it is best to take the words about the Son of man as referring to Jesus himself. `The saying refers to the continuing hardship and loneliness involved in following the Son of Man'.2