Lord of the Sabbath
Matthew 12.1-8
At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.”
The Pharisees liked to press Jesus on his theology and, here, it appeared they caught him red handed in a violation:
Observe the sabbath day to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. ‘Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your ox or your donkey or any of your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you, so that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. – Deuteronomy 5.12-14
In Israel the farmers were not supposed to completely harvest their crops—they were to “cut corners”, leaving a small portion of the crop for the needy. This regulation was part of the social welfare system required by God, which is why the disciples were not accused of theft. But the Sabbath was another matter; no one was to harvest on the Sabbath. As an example, when the Israelites were given manna in the desert, it appeared every morning except the Sabbath. The people were to gather as much as they needed each day for that day, except Friday, when they were to gather enough for both Friday and the Sabbath. At first, some went to gather on the Sabbath, anyway. God was not pleased. Sabbath day observance was not to be trifled with in Israel.
So, how did Jesus respond to the Pharisees complaint? He could have dodged responsibility: “Sorry, old chaps. You know, I do the best I can with this bunch but they are country boys, and a little slow in these matters. We’ll have a sit-down and sort this all out. It won’t happen again.” But that wasn’t his reaction. First of all, he accepted responsibility, and then he argued that what the disciples had done was perfectly fine. His arguments were brief and audacious.
He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests?
Jesus began his response to the Pharisees as a lawyer would, presenting case law. His argument seems to be, “You know there are exceptions to the rule about working on the Sabbath, right?” Some have interpreted Jesus’ response as meaning that, while ordinary work is not permitted on the Sabbath, critical work is. We might look at the times Jesus defended his work of healing the sick and disabled on the Sabbath, for example. In Luke 14.5 he argued, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” In this same passage is was noted that no one had a response, implying that everyone recognized and practiced exceptions.
So it is probably right to infer that Jesus was using the exceptions argument, but I suspect this was not all he had in mind. David did not take the bread on his own. Rather, he requested it of the priest Ahimelech, who judged that it was appropriate for David and his men to eat it. Jesus, therefore, is alluding to his own authority to allow the disciples to glean on the Sabbath.
Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.
The second argument also seems to be a case law exception. No one is permitted to work on the Sabbath, except that the priests had to carry out their priestly responsibilities every day. In other words, the law itself built in exceptions to the rule of no work. But, again, it seems that Jesus has a greater point to make. He says, “something greater than the temple is here.” This seems like a non sequitur; there is no connection between the two sentences other than the word, “temple”. But Jesus’ suggestion would have accosted the Pharisees’ ears like a clanging bell from inside a bell tower.
What could have been there that was greater than the temple?
What’s so great about the temple, anyway? Let’s answer the second question first. To do this it is necessary to look back at Jewish history. The Hebrews were established as a nation when they exited Egypt, en masse. Their escape was possible only because God traveled with them. His presence was manifested by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The pillar literally held the Egyptians at bay as the Hebrews crossed the Red Sea. The pillar then accompanied the Hebrews through their 40 years of wandering.
Later, the presence of God filled Solomon’s temple on the day of its dedication. From that day forward, in the Temple, in the Holy of Holies, above the Ark of the Covenant, and between the outstretched arms of carved cherubim, the Presence of God remained. The presence of God in the Temple was crucial to Hebrew identity, as well as for protection and for all hopes about the future.
The Temple represented the very presence of God. What could be more important than that? The only thing that could be greater would be God, Himself. To the twenty-first century ear, the passage could be rendered, “I, God, am not in the Temple; I am here before you.”
The Apostle John picked up on this theme in the introduction to his Gospel. Chapter 1, verse 14, reads: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. Most translations choose the word, “dwelt.” But the Greek word used by John is literally “tabernacled”. The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. The allusion is important. God dwelt with his people through the exodus, then in the temple, and then in the person of Jesus Christ. (This dwelling did not end at his resurrection. The point of Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit has come to indwell all of God’s people.)
The Pharisees would have been apoplectic at the “blasphemy” committed by Jesus but, before they could respond, he continued his argument:
And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.
This was a strange argument. The entire sacrificial system was established as a reminder of the impurity of the people, and of their consequent need to be made pure. It was also a reminder of God’s grace, in that he provided a means of purification through animal substitutes. What was Jesus thinking?
He was quoting from Hosea:
Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth. What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early…..for I desire steadfast love [mercy] and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. – Hosea 6.3,4,6
There is no reason to think that Hosea (or Jesus) was demanding a cessation of the sacrificial system. What he was saying was that Israel had lost sight of the point of the law. The law was fundamentally guidance for how people were to live together with justice, kindness and grace. These character traits were God’s, and were what God sought to have internalized by his people. The sacrificial system, however necessary, was initiated to address failures. The sacrificial system, and by extension in this context, the entire legal system, was not the object of worship. Jesus was saying, “You love the law but you do not love people. The point of the law is to guide you into loving one another, as well as loving me. The result of your confusion is that you have come to love self-righteousness, and in your self-righteousness you despise those you were to have loved. You love the letter of the law but you are a stranger to its spirit.”
But Jesus was not quite finished. He ended the discussion by adding, “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” The phrase, “son of man,” is probably selected by Jesus because of its use in Daniel:
I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. – Daniel 7.13,14
Jesus often referred to himself as “the Son of Man”. This phrase, like so much of what Jesus had to say, comes from the Old Testament. We, too, must be familiar with the Old Testament or we will miss the meaning of much of Jesus’ speech. He could have just said, “I,” but “son of man” clearly carries much more meaning.
It is not uncommon to hear critics of Christianity suggest that Jesus never specifically claimed to be God. Such criticism is linguistic provincialism. This brings to mind an example of this that I encountered recently. The context was a scientific argument about the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Most scientific experts today believe the cause was a large asteroid strike. The article quoted what it considered a “poetic scientist” as calling the earthly cataclysm “an Old Testament version of hell.” (Ooh, we all know what that means…and it sounds really bad!) The problem is, there is no imagery of hell in the Old Testament. The Old Testament speaks of “Sheol,” but never amplifies or illustrates its meaning. Sheol basically means the place where dead people go, or just, the grave. Perhaps the blood, guts, smoke and brimstone the scientist was evoking was from Greek mythology or, more likely, The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri. Those who confuse the writings of Dante with the writings of the Old Testament are the same ones who imagine that Dan Brown is a biblical scholar.
Probably the most striking example of Jesus “not really claiming to be God” is found in chapter 8 of the book of John. Here Jesus makes the peculiar statement, again to Jewish religious leaders: “Before Abraham was, I am.” To the 21st century ear, this sounds strange; to a first century Hebrew, the meaning was both shocking and clear.
Moses was an 80-year-old man, minding his sheep on the Sinai Peninsula when God appeared to him in a burning bush. God had a mission for Moses—to deliver the Hebrews out of bondage. Moses must have been mightily impressed by this burning, talking bush, but he was less than excited about stepping back into Egypt where he was wanted for murder. Neither was he confident the Hebrew leaders would be happy to see him after a 40-year absence. “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” – Exodus 3.13,14 This was God’s peculiar name for himself and the Israelites obviously knew it even before God spoke to Moses from the bush.
When “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am,’ the Jewish leaders demonstrated that they understood what he meant—they picked up stones to throw at him and to kill him—the prescribed punishment for a blasphemer. Jesus’ claims to be God were emphatic and precise, much more so than if he had simply said, “I am God.”
So, let us return to the text where Jesus claims to be “Lord of the Sabbath”. If they had somehow missed his claim to be God when he said “something greater than the temple is here,” he makes it impossible to miss by making the same claim in different terms.
His final argument is: “I am God; what my disciples have done is okay because I said so.” He pulls rank. Of course, integral to his particular rank as God is that he only speaks truth. Therefore, whatever he says must be true. It is axiomatic. This simplifies many questions. Jesus had already explained his reasoning in several ways. Sometimes we are slow on the uptake. Sometimes there is no clear explanation. Sometimes, because Jesus is trustworthy, we obey when we find obedience difficult.
The Pharisees were not convinced by Jesus’ arguments. A few verses later we read, The Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him. – Matthew 12.14. His claim to be God was too much for them to swallow.
Their perspective is not unusual; there are many who react with anger against Jesus’ claims to be God. Most people today have adopted the bland view that Jesus was a great teacher but was not divine. This is a great American tradition. Thomas Jefferson, crafter of the Declaration of Independence and America’s third President, shaped his own “gospel” by cutting and pasting from the New Testament. His redacted version focused on the morals and teachings of Jesus but left out references to miracles, references to Jesus’ deity, and references to the resurrection.
In contrast to Jefferson, C.S. Lewis wrote: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the devil of hell, you must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”
So now we have spent a good deal of time looking at this passage about the Sabbath and we have barely even touched on the subject. We have barely discussed what is appropriate activity for the Sabbath, or addressed the question of whether the Sabbath should be treated differently than other days. I believe these are questions worth working through carefully, but another time.
The passage in Matthew is apparently about Sabbath day observance. But more fundamentally it is about whether Jesus was (is) God. The Pharisees clearly did not think so. The Romans, Pilot in particular, did not think so. The disciples didn’t seem to think so, that is, until the resurrection. For some reason that crew of cowardly misfits was transformed by seeing Jesus alive after he had been crucified. Eleven of the twelve were martyred as they pursued their calling to be witnesses about Jesus’ life.
Believing Jesus to be God seems like a bad idea. Jesus and most of the Apostles got themselves killed for it. If this world is all there is, believing in Jesus is definitely a bad idea. But if Jesus is really God, believing in him becomes the very best of all ideas.
Recent Comments