2nd Sunday after Pentecost
Jun 2, 2024
Mark 2:23-3:6
You all know the adage that goes “rules are meant to be broken.” That quote originally came from an American General, Douglas MacArthur (who famously broke a lot of rules). The actual quote is: “Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.”
In our rule-abiding society we are surrounded by dos and don’ts. Rules can be as large as how we govern and as small as please replace the toilet paper roll if you’re the one finishing it, not to mention if it is to unroll from the top or the bottom. Rules extend into what to wear (no white after Labor Day–but clearly they did not live in Texas), communication (whether or not one uses the oxford comma), education, sports (except for the Astros), travel (take your shoes off at the airport because one guy had a device in his shoe 20 years ago), church (why do we stand, kneel, sit down, repeat) and every endeavor we care about but interpret differently.
This Sunday we enter the Gospel of Mark where we will stay for several weeks and this Gospel does not mess around. In just this second chapter, the response to Jesus’ teachings has gone from curiosity to hostility. Early on he has managed to disrupt the social and religious norms of the day to the point where the folks in power feel threatened and decide that they are going to find a way to destroy him.
But there are some things in this passage that we need to look at closely. Let’s start with the Pharisees. Somehow over the course of time the Christian rhetoric has made them the designated bad guys. But are they any different than most people? Clifton Black, Professor of Biblical Theology, writes, “Pharisaism was a lay reform movement within first-century Judaism, dedicated to [excellent] adherence to Torah [the Law] in all walks of life…Pharisees were celebrated by their Jewish contemporaries for “practicing the highest ideals both in their way of living and in their discourse” (Antiquities 12.15 [circa A.D. 105]). They were regarded as upstanding, devout, Bible-believing pillars of the community. To paraphrase Pogo Possum from Walt Kelly’s old comic strip, “We have met the Pharisees, and they are us.”
Take for instance this first part of our reading when Jesus and his disciples are walking along the grainfield. They start plucking the heads of the grain and eating it. I don’t know what kind of grain this is, but they had to be pretty hungry to eat it straight off the plant. The Pharisees have obviously been part of Jesus’ traveling cohort and they see this activity on the Sabbath and object, “What are they doing?” They question Jesus, holding him accountable for the acts of his followers.
Now here’s the thing, the Law of Moses actually allows for picking the grain. It is written in Leviticus, “When you harvest your crops on your land, do no harvest all the way to the corners of your field. If grain falls onto the ground, don’t gather it up. Leave it for the poor people and foreigners in your country. I am the Lord your God.”1 The Pharisees aren’t arguing about the right to eat the grain, they were questioning it because it could be considered work on the Sabbath. They shouldn’t be traveling and they should have planned ahead and packed a lunch. (I can actually hear this in my best mom voice.)
At the time of Moses, at the time of Jesus, and in our time, too, God’s purpose was and is to make sure that the hungry have access to food. God does not want a religious law or a civil one, for that matter, that denies access to food when people are hungry. Sure, it’s not good for profits, but God cares about everyone having enough, not profits. All of this the Pharisees probably understood. Yet he, some upstart teacher from Galilee, is telling them that he has authority over them to interpret the Law correctly when they’ve spent their entire lives devoted to that work. “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” he says to them. It’s that claim, “lord of the Sabbath” that puts them over the edge.
This group of Pharisees that are following Jesus have lost sight of the purpose of the Law and have become legalistic about the rules. “Why is the Sabbath given? According to Deuteronomy, it’s the first labor law, given to a people who have just escaped slavery to help them establish a fairer and more just society than the one they have just escaped, one in which all people and animals have time to rest and recover. That’s the point. That’s why the Sabbath matters…so that humans and animals can have time to rest and recover.”2 It’s a day devoted to God and echoes all the way back to the creation when God rested. Rest and recovery is still a fundamental principle for us, too, and too many of us have lost sight of its importance.
Then we quickly come to the scene that ties in closely to the point Jesus was trying to make in the grainfield. This time he is in the synagogue. And there’s a man there with a withered hand. It doesn’t say if this is a set up or if the man has been there every day. Jesus kind of throws down here–he knows he’s being watched to see if he’ll heal the man…on the Sabbath…in the synagogue, no less.
Now Jesus could have healed him later, outside the synagogue. He could have waited until sundown when the Sabbath was over. A few hours probably wouldn’t have made that much difference. But that wasn’t the point. He knows what kind of problems this is going to stir up with those in power. He knows he’s challenging the system. But if the system is not going to care for God’s people, then Jesus isn’t going to go along with it.
Again it’s that the very people who love the Law and defend it and teach it, have lost sight of its original intent. Here was a man whose withered hand prevented him from working, and given that most jobs were labor jobs, had probably kept him in poverty, and no one had done anything to rectify this. It was their hardness of heart in the face of the needs of others that made Jesus angry. So Jesus asks them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath?” and looks at them. And they don’t say anything–because there’s really only one obvious answer. Does the Sabbath serve humankind or humankind the Sabbath?
Again, I want to be perfectly clear before we start making the Pharisees the designated bad guys, though. Jesus called his own disciples out on this stuff, too. And Jesus never walked away from the Pharisees. Jesus always, until the very end, kept engaged with the Pharisees, kept talking to them despite their opposition. He never gave up on them. And there were probably a lot of Pharisees that listened to Jesus that understood and agreed with what he said. Again, it’s not that the teachings that have been handed down are unimportant. Jesus’ point is about why they are important.
The laws and traditions were not given so that we could twist ourselves to fit them, but to help us establish a just and good society where all receive the support they need–material and spiritual both. That’s a hugely important matter. It is the spirit of God’s law that should be our guiding principle, not the literal and legalistic revision. “Jesus did not negate the significance of Sabbath but reminded them (and us) that religious and legal systems should promote human welfare rather than restrict it.”3
The Gospel today also challenges us to remember why the Law of God, and any law, should be implemented. For the good of God’s people. For healing, restoration, and meeting the needs of everyone in the community. Jesus’ actions help us identify when systems are used to unfairly disadvantage the most vulnerable on the pretext of honoring religious institutions and beliefs. As in the time of Moses, the Law was about liberation.
Stretch out your hand, Jesus said to the man. In that act of obedience, Jesus took the risk of setting the wheels in motion that would lead to his death. And it was worth it to Jesus to confront the broken system because that man who had no power, no prestige, and was in need of healing to restore him to well-being and to fully function in society, was worth Jesus’ very own life. Remember the Sabbath, the Law says, and keep it holy.
- Leviticus 23:22 ↩︎
- Anonymous Comment. https://www.pulpitfiction.com/notes/proper4b ↩︎
- Raj Nadella. When Systems Stifle. https://sojo.net/preaching-the-word/when-systems-stifle?parent=225368 ↩︎
Magdalena's Musings 