Luke 6:1-11. If you haven’t already read this story, here’s a link:
https://www.bible.com/bible/111/LUK.6.NIV#:~:text=1One%20Sabbath,do%20to%20Jesus.
This passage elaborates on the last one about the wineskins and patched garments, and it provides some real world application. The Sabbath day is a holy day, a day that is different from the rest. It’s a day designed by God where we are told to pause from our work and trust God to take care of us. It’s a day where we redirect our focus. It’s easy get weighed down by the seemingly endless task of existing. There is always another meal to prepare, another load of clothes to wash, another shift or project in order to earn the money we need to buy that meal and those clothes. One of the most natural responses to the relentlessness of life is to keep pushing. Don’t stop.
But then God said, Stop. For one day a week, rest. God even set an example for us. After he created the world, he rested. God himself rested. This is a mind blowing thought to which I definitely need to give more consideration. And then he said, I want this for my creation. Among the things he created us to do, among the learning, and worshipping and building and growing, he wanted us to rest.
That’s the context of this passage, but it’s not even the point, so we are going to have to press on. In this passage we have the religious law butting heads with the one who designed and declared the law of God – in particular they were not seeing eye to eye about the bit in the law that says to treat the Sabbath differently.
To be fair, “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy” is a bit vague. I’m sure more than one person asked, “What do you mean by don’t work? Can I make a sandwich?”
I think a lot of us hit our moral peak at about 5 years old. You know, when we start trying to figure out the letter of the law and how to push it as far as we can. “You told me to go to bed, you didn’t say I had to lie down in it.”
So over the years, some godly leaders (I’m assuming they were godly. They were trying to help. They wanted to make sure people knew how to obey God’s law) wrote out guidelines for following each of God’s laws. The Sabbath turned out to be pretty complicated actually. I mean seriously, define work! I’m no expert in Jewish law but there were maximum distances they could walk and allowances made for pulling their farm animals out of holes if they fell in. There were even rules around preparing food. It appears from this passage and others, that those helpful rules became every bit as important to the religious leaders as the law itself.
So, along comes Jesus and his disciples. As they are wandering through a field on a Sabbath day, a few of them pick some heads of grain and squish the kernel casings off between their fingers and eat them. But squishing kernels of grain was kind of like grinding and threshing, which was definitely work according to the guidelines. And on another Sabbath Jesus miraculously heals a man whose hand has apparently atrophied and is useless to him. He tells the man to stretch out his hand, and the guy does, and the hand is restored to normal working order. But healing, that’s doctor’s work! Yikes, we aren’t allowed to work on the Sabbath!
On both occasions the teachers of the law confront Jesus, “God gave us laws and you are disobeying them!” This is serious! The Ten Commandments were the basics. Everything else, how to live rightly before God, worship him appropriately and treat the people around you, kind of elaborated on those. So when the religious leaders accused Jesus and his disciples of breaking the Sabbath, this was no small matter.
But Jesus’ reply in both cases says a whole lot more than to simply justify their behaviour. And what he said did not make his accusers happy. In the first reply, he reminds them of a time when King David, who is still considered Israel’s greatest king, also broke a law because he and his friends were hungry. There was bread prepared weekly that was placed in the temple before God. At the end of each week when new bread was brought in, the old bread was to be eaten, but only by a priest. But David and his men, who were not priests, had taken and eaten that bread when they were desperately hungry. The point was that no one had accused them of evil. They weren’t trying to steal bread from the priest. They weren’t disregarding the law. They were avoiding starvation. So Jesus points out that there is past precedent for eating in order to meet a need. This already would have upset the religious leaders, but I think what really pushed them over the edge was what Jesus said next, “Don’t you know that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath?”
In one sentence, Jesus said two potentially offensive things.
- He used the title ‘Son of Man’ in relation to himself. Jews knew that title was a reference to a passage in the book of Daniel in which he used the same term to prophesy about the coming Messiah. So Jesus is overtly claiming to be the Messiah which could be good, except
- Jesus says the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. Wha? Lord of a day set apart to worship God? So…what are you saying Jesus? You have authority over God’s day? Well that would make you…
Anyways, that was understandably upsetting to religious leaders. On top of that, and what seems to have been the greater offense, he was using his authority to interpret the law himself rather than follow the detailed regulations that had been set out by the religious leaders. And he wasn’t shy about it. In the synagogue when he healed the man’s hand, he had him stand up in front of everyone. It wasn’t a, “Here, let me help,” out in the lobby when no one was looking. It was, “Come on up to the front! Let’s get that fixed for you. Right here. Right now.” And on top of all that, he directly confronted the religious leaders as he did it.
He questioned the way the commandment had been interpreted. “Really? Healing someone on the Sabbath is a violation of the commandment? That’s how your rabbis have interpreted that? No, they got that wrong.”
Again, wha? As a Jew you don’t just get to say the law is right or wrong.
But Jesus did.
As someone who grew up in a Jesus loving home, surrounded by godly people who have tried really hard to honour him with their lives, I have had to give a lot of thought to how the law of God has been interpreted for me. I grew up with people who were ok playing cards with an Uno deck, but not a standard deck of playing cards. My Granny, who I love and admire and who lived her life for Jesus, believed drinking alcohol of any kind was simply a sin. When the Bible says Jesus turned water into wine, it wasn’t fermented. It was just very good grape juice. One school I attended had clear rules about the correct length of both girl’s skirts and boy’s hair, and I’m pretty sure some people thought those lengths were recorded in Leviticus somewhere. Don’t misunderstand me. Rules are usually a good thing. They help humans live together by creating mutually acceptable standards for interaction. But, like the religious leaders, I need to be careful that I don’t mistake our laws for God’s laws. And I need to make sure that I don’t wield those laws as a weapon over the heads of my fellow humans when my real job is honouring the one who gave them to us. My focus should be to follow the intention of his laws, not just sit defiantly on the edge of my bed when he sent me there because he knows I need a nap.
