“The Letter of the Law VS the Spirit”
Mark 2:23-3:6
Not too terribly long ago in this country there used to be what were termed as the “blue laws” which were meant to enforce the Sabbath.
Back in the early to middle years of the 20th Century, in the average American town, there were no shops open on Sundays; there were no professional sporting events.
People were not allowed to work or play cards or dance.
Blue laws originally came to America with the first colonists.
They outlawed everything from hunting on Sunday to selling any type of goods, even to displays of affection.
For example, in 1656 a Captain Kemble of Boston, Massachusetts, was locked in the public stocks for two hours for kissing his wife on a Sunday after he had spent three years out at sea.
Some colonies made it illegal to laugh too loud and attending church was mandatory.
If you missed 3 Sundays in a row you could be put to death!
In Texas it was illegal to sell pots and pans on a Sunday until 1985.
And in several states it is still illegal for car dealerships to do business on a Sunday.
The most ironic thing about all this is that Christians break the original Sabbath law just by worshipping on Sunday!
Biblically, the Sabbath day of rest is Saturday—just ask someone from the Jewish community or a member of a Seventh Day Adventist Church.
As far as why most Christians set aside Sunday for worship…
…well, the first would be that the early followers of Jesus met together on the first day of the week to remember and celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
And the second reason is to send a clear message that we are no longer under the law but under grace.
And as a people whose relationship with God and whose eternal futures are not based on whether or not we keep the law, we are free to meet together and worship and keep the Sabbath whenever it is good for the community of faith to do so.
(pause)
But, in our Scripture passage for this morning, the Pharisees are kind of acting like the early colonists policing people according to what they could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath—except in this case it was Saturday.
In our first example, Jesus and His disciples are traveling through grain fields and as the disciples walked along, they were picking off the heads of grain and eating them.
This was considered to be work, which it was unlawful to do on the Sabbath and the religious leaders call them out on it.
In answering them, Jesus offers a legal opinion, one He gets from Scripture itself although the particular story He uses has nothing to do with the Sabbath.
He says, “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 consecration bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat.
And he also gave some to his companions.”
Jesus is referring to an incident from 1 Samuel 21:1-6 where David asked the priest Ahimelech for bread…when the only bread available was against the law for him to eat.
…Mark’s Gospel mistakenly uses the name Abiathar instead of Ahimelech.
A Scribe probably made a copying error somewhere along the way…it’s not unusual…
But the key is that God didn’t condemn Ahimelech for giving David the bread because it satisfied his hunger.
Jesus is arguing that if it was alright for David to eat the holy bread when he was hungry, then it is fine for Jesus’ disciples to pluck grain and eat it on the Sabbath when they are hungry because the rules are not God--only God is God.
And sometimes following God’s call means breaking the rules because people matter more than rules.
For Jesus, the Sabbath was made for humans…
…it wasn’t made to rule over humans and make their lives miserable or oppressed.
Whenever blind authoritarianism confronts common sense, Jesus seems to hold to common sense.
Which is a relief and a bit of sanity in this often insane and unbending world.
Again, what seems to matter most to Jesus, not just in this story but all the way through the gospels, is people.
And if the rules get in the way of people finding grace or healing, love or forgiveness, then Jesus breaks the rules to give them what they need.
“Go learn what this means,” Jesus tells the religious leaders more than once in the Gospels, “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”
Now, all this emphasis on mercy over sacrifice got Jesus into a lot of religious hot water.
His intimacy with tax collectors and every other kind of sinner, as the Pharisees liked to call them, His indifference to fasting, and here to rules about the Sabbath enrage the religious people so much that they start building political alliances in order to have Him killed.
And this is because they elevated the Scriptures over humanity—the laws over people.
Let’s use an example from our Scripture passage from Mark.
When it came to the Sabbath, the Sabbath was treated as if it was greater than God.
Let me try and explain.
It was as though God is the guardian or protector of the Sabbath, making sure that people keep the Sabbath holy, and finally awarding salvation only to those who are faithful Sabbath Keepers.
In other words, in this kind of thinking the main thing is the Sabbath.
God made the Sabbath and then made Himself subject to it, then made people subject to it.
But people weren’t made to be servants of the Sabbath; the Sabbath was made to be a servant of people.
In Deuteronomy 5:12-15, God institutes the Sabbath in the Ten Commandments so that the Israelites who once toiled in slavery to the Egyptians could forever enjoy at least one day of rest.
When the Pharisees make the Sabbath a burden on people Jesus says in essence “The rules are not God, only God is God.”
“The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.
So, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”
Our Gospel Lesson for today moves to another Sabbath.
This time Jesus is in a synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there.
And some folks in the audience were watching Jesus closely to see if He would heal the man so that they could accuse Jesus of breaking the Law.
Knowing what they were doing Jesus asked them: “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?”
But the people didn’t say a mumbling word.
And we are told that this made Jesus angry and deeply distressed because they had stubborn hearts.
And Jesus healed the man because it was God’s will.
And because of this the “Pharisees went out and began to plot” with a political party called “the Herodians [about] how they might kill Jesus.”
So, now we have politicians and religious leaders working together to control lawbreakers.
This is where it leads when laws become more important than people.
This is a difficult truth of the Cross.
Sometimes humanity would rather kill Jesus than be transformed His love.
This conflict over the Sabbath points to a deeper and more dangerous conflict.
The religious leaders were right in perceiving that Jesus was offering them a new vision of what life is about—a new vision and understanding of what God is about.
Jesus is proclaiming in Word and in deed a new way of understanding Who God is.
Jesus proclaimed it to the people of His generation—and to every generation, including ours—that God is not confined to our way of understanding God.
And this is very threatening to people.
It scares people.
It goes to the heart of how they have always configured things…made sense of things and their relationship with God and their place in the world.
It’s one of the continuing mysterious realities of life in the Church, a reality exposed by this passage and others like it.
Do we prefer a dormant God Who is subject to our beliefs about Him or the alive and active God Who is ever present in our lives and continues to reveal Himself through the activity of Holy Spirit?
It’s been said that when God gets too close to us, challenging us as Jesus challenged the religious order of His day, we begin to construct our crosses and prepare a place for Him there too.
What field is Jesus walking through in my life, in your life today—plucking ears of corn from our sacred beliefs about Him?
Who is Jesus healing that you or I might believe should remain sick?
Is Jesus doing anything in our time that makes us believe that He is foolish at best and dangerous at worst?
The conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees is a conflict that lives in virtually every human being and operates in every congregation.
The Pharisees are portrayed as being obsessed with religious authority, traditional observances and righteousness which appears to make them blind to the compassion and joy that pour off of Jesus toward all of humanity.
Some have noted that it would have been easy for Jesus and His disciples to honor the Sabbath.
After-all, His disciples weren’t starving.
They were simply wandering through a field, idly plucking off tips of grain.
And the man’s shriveled hand could have been cured at sundown.
Jesus isn’t being compelled to decide between lifesaving actions and life-giving religious rules.
By refusing to follow the rules, Jesus invites all of us to get a glimpse of a terrifying form of faith in which the letter of the Law is over-ruled by healing power, compassion, and love.
This might make me want to wonder whether some of the rules I have always taken for granted are actually in conflict with the Good News of Jesus Christ?
It can be tempting to side with the Pharisees—getting angry and irritated with everything that seems to fall outside the customary and familiar understanding of what I have thought and believed.
And there are times for this, I suppose.
But our Gospel passage for this morning also reminds us, I think, of the terrible price which is paid when what is familiar becomes idolatry.
In every generation there have been good and well-meaning people who invoke the name of God on programs, policies, laws and so forth that end up undermining the love and grace shown in Jesus Christ.
History is littered with voices from the Inquisition to the time Slavery, to the subjugation of women and the Third Riech that invoked the name of God as the reason for what was being done, promoted or upheld.
Jesus chooses healing and life over rigid rules.
Jesus chooses compassion and mercy over sacrifice.
How can I do the same?
Where are the places in my life where I am doing more harm than good?
And is it because I’m convinced that the rules tell me to do things that way?
Where am I letting a strict adherence to some sort of code—whether it’s the law or something invented in my own mind—rule over my life?
Where do I succumb to blind authoritarianism even when it confronts common sense?
What law or laws have I turned into idols?
What or who am I worshiping?
Sometimes I have a lot of empathy for the Pharisees.
And that is because I am often so much like them.
Let us pray:
Lord, you speak freedom to my spirit.
You don’t call me to a soft or uncontrolled existence, but to the Law of love, which should permeate and spread through my entire life and being—thrilling me and those around me.
May I allow it to do so.
In YOUR mercy I pray and trust.
Amen.
