Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 8:20

"And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the heaven [have] nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." — Matthew 8:20 (ASV)

The foxes have holes — Our Lord’s answer seems to indicate that the scribe's offer was little more than a performance. The scribe had not counted the cost and, like the young ruler who had great possessions, needed to be taught. To follow the Son of Man was not to be an adherent of a new sect or party, or the servant of a king marching toward an earthly throne, but to share in poverty, hardship, and homelessness.

Nests — The word is sufficient for popular use, but strictly speaking, the “nest” belongs only to the brooding season of a bird’s life, and the Greek word has the wider meaning of “shelter.”

The Son of man — The passage is remarkable as the first in this Gospel where the name occurs—a name that was later so prominent in our Lord’s teaching. This is therefore the right place to trace the history and significance of that title.

In the Old Testament, the term is the literal translation of the Hebrew ben-adam. This latter word expresses the general weakness and frailty of human nature, just as the Hebrew ish expresses its greatness and strength. It therefore represents humanity idealized under that one aspect of its being. Examples of its use in this sense include Psalm 8:4, What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him? and Psalm 146:3, Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. In some passages, the English version expresses the same thought by rendering the sons of Adam and the sons of Ish as “low and high” (Psalms 49:2), or the former word alone as “men of low degree” (Psalms 62:9).

The title gained new prominence around the time of the Babylonian Captivity from its use in the prophecies of Ezekiel. There, it appears frequently—no fewer than eighty-seven times in all—as the title with which the prophet is addressed by the voice of the LORD. We can scarcely doubt that it was used there in the fullness of its earlier meaning. It was designed to teach the prophet that, amid the greatness of his work, he was still subject to all the weaknesses and temptations of human nature and should therefore have compassion on the infirmities of others.

Yet a new aspect of the name was presented in the mysterious vision of Daniel 7:13, where One like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and was brought to the Ancient of Days... and there was given to Him dominion and glory and a kingdom. The word used is not, it is true, ben-adam but bar-enosh, yet there is no traceable distinction in meaning between the two. Here, then, the thought was clearly this: that One who shared human weakness should also be a sharer of God’s glory and the Head of the divine kingdom.

The prominence that the Maccabean struggles gave to the predictions of Daniel drew attention to the name as it had been used in this way. The “Son of Man” became one of the titles of the expected Christ. The Targum, or Aramaic paraphrase of the Psalms (likely written before our Lord’s ministry), explains even a passage like Psalm 80:17 (the son of man whom thou madest strong for thine own self) as referring to the Christ. Thus, when the crowd in Jerusalem was questioning in their hearts whether Jesus was the Christ, they were not startled by this application of the name. Their question, Who is this Son of Man? (John 12:34), is an expression of their wonder that things so different from what they expected of the Christ should be predicted of One who claimed the title.

It was therefore with these ideas attached to it—involving both fellowship with the lowliest of humanity and participation in the eternal glory of the Most High—that our Lord claimed the title and used it with such remarkable frequency. We might almost say that it serves as the chief connecting link between the teaching of the first three Gospels and the fourth. It appears thirty-two times in Matthew, fourteen in Mark, twenty-six in Luke, and twelve times in John.

It is remarkable that this title never passed into the common language of the Apostolic Church, nor into the theological or liturgical phrasing of Christendom. It is not used in any of the Epistles. Outside the Gospels, it is found only in the exclamation of Stephen (Acts 7:56), with a clear reference to Daniel 7:13, and possibly in the visions of the Apocalypse (Revelation 1:13; Revelation 14:14). The minds of believers loved to dwell on the glory of the risen Christ and apparently viewed this title as belonging more to the time of His humiliation. Its absence from the other books of the New Testament, and its presence in the Gospels, is, in any case, an indication that the Gospels were not a later development.