Why Paradoxes in the New Testament
Text: Luke 9:60
Series: Restoration Sermons
Date:
Speaker: Ed Rangel
Location: Waupaca Church of Christ
Bible Version: NASB 1995
Sermon Type: Expository
Learning Objectives
By the close of this lesson the hearer should be able to:
- Define "paradox" in both its classical and common sense and explain the working definition: "truth standing on its head to attract attention."
- Identify four specific New Testament paradoxes — losing life to find it, giving to receive, last becoming first, and the dead burying the dead — and state the principle embedded in each.
- Explain why paradoxes are an effective teaching method rather than a failure of clear communication.
- State why spiritual truth requires effort and why that effort is productive rather than punitive.
- Explain why the method of paradox is consistent with Jesus's character as a logical and purposeful teacher.
Thesis
Paradox is not a deficiency in Jesus's teaching — it is a deliberate strategy. When truth stands on its head, it demands attention that straightforward assertion does not. The paradoxes of the New Testament are not puzzles for the uncommitted; they are invitations to the kind of sustained thought that spiritual truth requires and that changes the person who does the work.
Burden
The sermon is a defense of a teaching method. Some hearers encounter the paradoxes of Jesus — "lose your life to find it," "the last shall be first," "let the dead bury their dead" — and experience them as frustrating or irrational. The purpose of this outline is to show that the method is rational, deliberate, and effective, rooted in Jesus's character as the model teacher and in the nature of spiritual truth itself. Understanding why the paradoxes are there prepares the hearer to receive them rather than resist them.
Introduction
"But He said to him, 'Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God'" (Luke 9:60). Taken without context, the statement sounds callous — a man wants to bury his father before following Jesus, and Jesus tells him to let the dead bury the dead. Pressed literally, it appears to sanction leaving a corpse unattended. Something else is going on. This is a paradox — and understanding what a paradox is, and why Jesus uses them, is the key to hearing the sentence correctly.
"Variety is the spice of life" is the spirit behind the method: variety in the form of teaching attracts and holds attention to principles that straight assertion might not reach.
I. What Is a Paradox?
The outline offers three definitions that build on each other:
"Truth standing on its head to attract attention." The image is exactly right. A person standing on their head in a public square will attract a crowd that a person standing normally would not. Truth presented in an inverted, surprising, counterintuitive form catches attention that a direct statement might pass by. The purpose is not to confuse but to arrest — to stop the person who would otherwise walk past and make them look.
A seeming contradiction. The paradox appears to say two things that cannot both be true: How can you find life by losing it? How can giving result in having more? The surface contradiction is the hook. The person who stops at the surface dismisses it; the person who goes underneath finds the principle.
Kernels of truth in parables and paradoxes. Just as parables carry truth inside a story, paradoxes carry truth inside an apparent contradiction. The kernel is real; the apparent contradiction is the shell that protects it and draws attention to it.
II. Some Examples
Four New Testament paradoxes illustrate the principle:
Losing and finding life (Luke 9:24): "For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it." The apparent contradiction: saving leads to losing; losing leads to saving. The kernel: life organized around self-preservation produces a diminished life; life given in service to Christ produces the life that is life indeed. The paradox forces the hearer to define what "life" means before the sentence can be understood — which is precisely the work the sentence is designed to produce.
Giving and taking (Matt. 13:12): "For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him." The apparent injustice: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The kernel: spiritual receptivity increases spiritual capacity; the person who uses what he has been given develops the capacity for more; the person who buries what he has been given loses even that. This is the economy of the kingdom, which operates differently from the economy of the market.
Last and first (Matt. 20:16): "So the last shall be first, and the first last." The reversal of expected order. The kernel: the kingdom's ordering principle is not chronology or merit but the householder's grace; the one who arrived at the eleventh hour receives the same penny as the one who arrived at dawn.
Dead bury the dead (Luke 9:60). The shocking sentence. The kernel: there are degrees of death — the physically dead are dead in one sense, but the spiritually dead are dead in a more fundamental sense; a person alive in Christ cannot wait for the spiritually dead to attend to temporal obligations before attending to the kingdom; the urgency of the kingdom exceeds the urgency of burial customs.
III. Paradoxes Stimulate Thought
The method works because attention must precede learning. The person who is not interested will not learn, regardless of how clearly the truth is presented. Jesus's paradoxes create interest by refusing to be immediately transparent.
Jesus's teachings inspire and stimulate. The Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the paradoxes — they do not allow the hearer to be passive. They demand engagement. The person who works through "blessed are the poor in spirit" arrives at a truth he could not have received in a straightforward statement, because the work itself is part of the formation.
IV. Spiritual Truth Requires Effort
"Must work for what we get" is not a lament but a design feature. The spiritual truth that costs no effort to receive costs nothing to the person who receives it — which means it produces nothing in the person who holds it. The discipline of working through a paradox develops the mental and spiritual capacities that the truth requires to take root.
Study develops mental powers. The person who wrestles with a difficult text and arrives at its meaning has developed something in the wrestling that a person handed the answer has not. This is why Jesus did not write a systematic theology; he told stories, asked questions, and inverted expectations. The pedagogy was intentional.
Paradoxes require study. They are not designed for the person who wants the answer without the work. They are designed for the person who wants the truth enough to stay with the question until it opens.
V. Spiritual Truth Is Elusive
The mysteries of human life elude scientific grasp. The three-step scientific process — classification, analysis, explanation — is the method of natural science. It describes what can be observed, measured, and reproduced. Spiritual truth is not in that category. You cannot classify the kingdom of God the way you classify a biological specimen; you cannot analyze the love of God the way you analyze a chemical compound.
This is not a deficiency in spiritual truth but a fact about its nature. The truth that matters most — about God, about the soul, about death and life and judgment and grace — is of a different order from the truth that science investigates. It requires a different faculty: the faith that the letter to the Hebrews describes as "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1).
Paradoxes are suited to this elusiveness. They honor the fact that spiritual truth cannot be stated with the precision of a chemical formula; they acknowledge the gap between the way the world is and the way it looks, and they use that gap as the site of instruction.
VI. Reason for the Unreasonable
Jesus was the model teacher. He did not produce confusion for its own sake; he presented his teachings logically and with consistent purpose. Some of his teachings seem unreasonable on the surface — and he always gave reasons for the unreasonable. The reason for "let the dead bury their dead" is in the next clause: "as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:60). The urgency of proclamation is the reason the burial can wait. When the reason is seen, the paradox resolves — not into simple contradiction but into a demand: which is more urgent?
The apparent unreasonableness of a paradox is an invitation to find the reason. The person who stops at "this makes no sense" has declined the invitation. The person who stays with it — who asks "what must be true for this to be true?" — is the student Jesus designed the method for.
Application
Two applications:
Do not dismiss the difficult sayings of Jesus as irrational. The discomfort of a paradox is the discomfort of being asked to work. The work is the point. "Blessed are the poor in spirit," "the meek shall inherit the earth," "love your enemies" — these are not confused statements; they are invitations to the sustained attention that produces the transformation they describe.
The eleventh hour of application: where are the paradoxes in your own Christian life? Where have you found that giving produced more than keeping? Where have you found that dying to self produced a fuller life? The person who can answer these questions has done the work the paradoxes were designed to produce.
Conclusion
"Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:60). The paradox is now transparent: there are two deaths in the sentence, and the one that matters more is not the physical one. The person alive in Christ has a task that exceeds every other obligation — including the burial obligations that mark the most solemn moments of human life. The kingdom's urgency is the reason for the apparent callousness. It is not callous at all. It is the most alive sentence in the passage.
Truth standing on its head attracts attention. The truth that attracted our attention is the urgency of the kingdom. And now that it has our attention — what are we doing with it?
Invitation
"Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it" (Luke 9:24). That is the central paradox of the gospel. The life that is saved by being given to Christ is not the same life that was given — it is the life that is life indeed (I Tim. 6:19).
Believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, for whose sake the life is given and by whose resurrection it is returned. Repent. Confess his name. Be baptized for the remission of your sins (Acts 2:38). And discover the paradox from the inside — that losing finds, that dying lives, that the last entry into the vineyard receives the first penny.
Word Study
| English Term | Greek Term | Basic Meaning | Usage in This Sermon | Sermon Significance | Key Texts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paradox | paradoxos | contrary to expectation | contrary to expectation | para (beside, contrary to) + doxa (opinion, expectation); a paradox says something contrary to what you expected to hear; it violates the prediction and forces re-examination; the term does not appear in the NT but describes a class of Jesus's sayings that share this quality. | from |
| Dead bury the dead | aphes tous nekrous thapsai tous heautōn nekrous | "let the dead bury their own dead" | "let the dead bury their own dead" | the first "dead" is spiritual; the second is physical; the sentence requires two different definitions of the same word to make sense; the paradox is the instrument that forces the hearer to notice the two meanings. | Luke 9:60 |
| Lose his life | apolesas tēn psychēn autou | to destroy, to ruin, to lose | to destroy, to ruin, to lose | apollymi in the active sense is to destroy; the person who loses his life for Christ's sake is not passively losing it but actively surrendering it; the paradox is that the active surrender is the act that saves rather than the act that destroys. | Luke 9:24 |
| The last shall be first | hoi eschatoi prōtoi kai hoi prōtoi eschatoi | the chiasm (A-B / B-A structure) is itself a formal paradox | the chiasm (A-B / B-A structure) is itself a formal paradox | the sentence reverses its own order; the structure embodies the content; the saying does not merely describe a reversal, it performs one. | Matt. 20:16 |
Scripture Interlock Table
| Theme | Boles' Outline | Supporting Scripture |
|---|---|---|
| "Let the dead bury their dead" — urgency of kingdom over burial obligation | I; VI | Luke 9:60 |
| Losing life to find it — central gospel paradox | II | Luke 9:24 |
| Giving and taking — kingdom economy | II | Matt. 13:12 |
| Last and first — grace exceeds chronology | II | Matt. 20:16 |
| Paradoxes stimulate thought — faith assurance of things hoped for | III | Heb. 11:1 |
| "Whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it" | Invit. | Luke 9:24 |
| Baptism for remission of sins — entering the kingdom whose urgency the paradox asserts | Invit. | Acts 2:38 |
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Converted from H. Leo Boles, Outline 116. Primary text: Luke 9:60 (stated by Boles). OCR corrections: "s/1ice" → "spice" (introduction); "PAR~ADOXES" → "PARADOXES." Doctrinal audit: paradoxes treated as deliberate, rational teaching strategy rather than obscurantism; the four examples developed to show the kernel of truth in each; spiritual truth's difference from scientific investigation stated without denigrating scientific inquiry; invitation retains full obedient response (Acts 2:38).
