Served by the Sabbath

The second sunday after pentecost

Shepherd of the Hills Ev. Lutheran Church (WELS)

Mark 2:23-38

²³ One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. ²⁴ The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” ²⁵ He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? ²⁶ In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.”

²⁷ Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. ²⁸ So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” (NIV)

Here we go again.  It may be a different account, but the story is more or less the same: the Pharisees witness Jesus or his disciples supposedly breaking the law and are all too willing to judge and condemn.  But before we lay into them yet again, before we condemn them, let’s not forget that although they had long since become woefully misguided in their emphasis and abuse of the law, initially at least, the Pharisees may have had better intentions.  The Pharisees were one of the sects that more or less sprang up after God’s people had been taken away into captivity and then a remnant of those exiles was eventually allowed to return back home.  However, upon returning home, there was a willingness on the part of a number of the Jews to adopt Greek customs.  This served as a great cause of concern to others.  The response to such perceived liberalism was to return with a stricter conformity to the law of Moses.  Obedience and conformity to the law appealed to many who saw it as a safeguard against outward influence, which could potentially undermine the Jewish faith if not kept in check.  The Pharisees were a part of that group that saw a rigid adherence to the law as the only feasible solution to retaining their special status of being God’s chosen people.  While we can appreciate their zeal, we cannot overlook the reality that it was terribly misguided.

So is ours when we follow suit and run to the law, perceiving it to serve as some sort of safeguard against losing our Lutheran heritage, or even the Christian faith altogether.  And there’s no denying that we do it, is there?  The law is simple.  It is cut and dry.  Do this.  Don’t do that.  If everyone just followed it accordingly, things would go so much smoother.  What we have a tendency to overlook, however, is how frequently we pick and choose the law to suit our own purposes.  We prefer to highlight certain laws that others need to do a better job of keeping, while turning a blind eye to the ones that consistently trip us up.  I am happy to point out that he drinks too much, but prefer not to dwell on how inclined I am to gossip about it all the while.  I do not shy away from making mention of the 80% in the congregation who do “very little around here” compared to the 20% who do all the work, but somehow I fail to notice that in all my busyness I’m gradually becoming more and more removed from opportunities to simply sit at the feet of Jesus in worship or Bible class.  I can lament how little so many others give in their offerings while ignoring that my marriage and family are falling apart all around me because I am dropping the ball as the spiritual head of the house and am a far cry from the Christ-like husband I’m called to be.  See how we identify with the Pharisees in our zeal to run to the law and use it as a club to beat fellow Christians into sanctified living, while failing to apply the same standards to ourselves? 

The Pharisees were attempting to straighten out the disciples in the same way when they encountered Jesus and his disciples amidst the grainfields.  At the same time, they genuinely believed that by their understanding and application of Sabbath laws they would finally catch Jesus in the wrong and discredit his ministry.  So, as the disciples were making their way through some grainfields, picking grain along the way, the Pharisees were sure to point out their transgression to Jesus: “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” (v.24).  Now the Pharisees’ zeal for the law meant that they didn’t just have sets of laws, but sets and subsets of laws.  So the number of infractions the disciples were guilty of as far as the Pharisees were concerned were numerous.  It was one thing to pick the grain on the Sabbath, but then to sort through the heads of grain, rub them in their hands and eat them on top of it was a double no-no.  They couldn’t believe Jesus would let this go on, for even if he wasn’t doing it, he was accountable for failing to rebuke his followers for such a thing.

Jesus certainly didn’t give them the response they had expected.  Instead, he took a page out of history and pointed to an example in the life of David: “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions” (v.25,26).  David had been on the run from Saul, who was hunting him down.  While running from Saul, David came to the high priest, who proceeded to do the unthinkable: he gave David and his men some of the showbread to eat.  Twelve loaves of bread, one for each tribe, were baked and consecrated as an offering to the LORD each Sabbath.  After that, the bread could be eaten only by the priests.  However, as Jesus pointed out, in this particular case, David and Abiathar went against what God had commanded and David and his men ate bread that was reserved only for priests.  Jesus’ purpose in raising the issue with the Pharisees was not only to catch their attention by using such a high-profile and well-respected example such as David, but also to lead them to consider why God had allowed such a clear violation of his law to go unpunished.

Had they gotten Jesus’ point, they would have recognized their error in calling out the supposed unlawful behavior of Jesus’ disciples.  They would have seen that there is in fact something that trumps a mere rigid obedience to God’s law: the greater law of love.  The Pharisees consistently missed that essential point of God’s law.  God’s laws were intended to serve as a guideline for love in action, but the Pharisees routinely sacrificed the law of love for rigid, uncompromising obedience to the law, obedience according to their own standards of the law, which were so often tipped in their favor. 

The disciples were eating the grain in the fields.  Love in action on the part of the Pharisees may have led them to conclude that the disciples were hungry and then offered them something to eat.  Instead, they become fixated on an awareness that it was the Sabbath and such behavior was unlawful.  It wasn’t love that drove them to approach Jesus and his disciples, but spiritual arrogance and a desire to sit in judgment of others.  The whole perception the Pharisees had toward God’s law was that it was a means by which they could show themselves worthy and deserving of God’s favor.  Loving others was not a part of the plan in their eyes.  If forced to make a choice between showing love to others or pompously showcasing their obedience to the law, the Pharisees would choose obedience to the law every time.

Jesus gave them a wake-up call.  He told them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (v.27).  Contrary to the idea that God had somehow established the Sabbath for the purpose of man being able to showcase himself before God, Jesus was telling them that the Sabbath was to be a blessing to them.  Think of it this way.  A husband had been talking for the better part of a year about how badly he wanted a new car, even though his wife didn’t feel they needed one.  Finally the husband gets a new car… as a birthday gift for his wife.  Is he fooling anyone?  Of course not; it was clear that he was the one who wanted the car all along. 

So the Pharisees assumed that God’s reason for setting up the Sabbath was really self-serving, so that he could give them another avenue by which they could put on display their pristine obedience to him, as if he needed their praise and attention on this set-apart day.  But Jesus was making it clear that the Sabbath wasn’t around to serve God, but men.  It existed not to be served by man, but to serve man.  The Sabbath was not to be the master, but the servant.

It should have been clear from day one when God established it at creation.  Already at creation, the seventh day was to a be a pattern, not for slavish obedience, but for spiritual rest.  Chapter two of Genesis concludes the week of creation this way: “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done” (Gen. 2:2,3).  The almighty Creator had no need of rest, but was highlighting an ongoing blessing he desired for the crown of his creation: the blessing of rest.

That God who by his booming voice brought all things into existence is at the same time “the Son of Man… Lord even of the Sabbath” (v.28).  As such, he determines the purpose behind the Sabbath, and it’s not that he might tie us down to slavish obedience, but that he might give to us the restful peace he won for us.  The Sabbath was never a gift given by our Savior to serve himself.  It was – it is – intended for our blessing.  He knew how frequently the Pharisee in each of us – the one who overlooks the plank in his own eye for the specks in others’ – would be in need of the assurance of his forgiveness.  So he invites us to regularly receive his Sabbath, his rest, which he alone can offer. 

Here then is the essence of the Sabbath, which the Pharisees so blindly overlooked – love, by which Jesus forgives, restores, and upholds.  It’s the rest he offers through Word and sacrament – the means of grace.  It’s his gift to us, not for himself, but for us.  It’s why we gather here on the first day of each week, not because we must, not because entrance into heaven demands it, not because the Lord is won over by our coming into his presence, but because through the Sabbath he seeks to serve us with his grace and forgiveness, to serve us with his rest. Amen.

“For the freer confidence is from one’s own works, and the more exclusively it is directed toward Christ alone, so much better is the Christian it makes.” (Luther)