The Gospel Reading shows Jesus in a position of conflict with the religious leaders of his day, a position we find him in repeatedly. This time it is over the observance of the sabbath. This is a story we need to hear, not only to understand the life of Jesus, but to apply it to ourselves as religious folks. In Jesus' critical encounters with the Pharisees or scribes or the Jews, we must avoid the temptation to look down on them by placing ourselves above them. The faults of the religious people of Jesus' day are repeated often in the history of the church and in our day, as well. The warning of Jesus not to be concerned about the speck in someone else's eye when we have a log in ours is particularly appropriate here.
The problem that is addressed is greater than the issue about sabbath observance. It goes to a basic understanding of God's instructions to the people. Although the word torah, which refers in general to all God's instructions and particularly to the first five books of the Bible, is often translated as "law," it is not law in the strict legal sense we use in everyday life. It is more the sense of instruction or guidance. The Torah, the law, the instructions of God, are given for our good. In the long discourse of Moses in sharing with them the law of God, he tells them that it is given "for your own well-being."
The instructions of God are not given on a whim. God does not simply make up a set of rules to see if people will follow them. This is the loving guidance of a caring, personal God. This is a loving parent sharing with beloved children the wisdom they need to live full and joyful lives. This is not a set of regulations that God has established in order to have an excuse for exiling us from God's presence and it certainly is not a means of excluding others from the love and grace of God which is what was happening in Jesus' day.
We do not have to assign terrible motives to the religious folks who Jesus was dealing with at the time. For the most part we can assume they were doing the best they could to try to follow the way God had laid out for them. They were occupied by Rome and their religious freedom, although not completely taken away, was very restricted. Although they did not offer allegiance to Caesar as a god, they were forced to pay him tribute in the form of money or crops. Many of their customs and ways of life were put on hold during the occupation. The laws that could be followed, therefore, became more important to them. This would not have been so much a problem if they had not taken the next step. It began to be a situation of those who had the means and were able to follow the laws of the temple and the laws of Rome seeing those who could not do so, as being unfaithful. Those who could afford to pay the tithe to the temple along with the Roman taxes thought themselves more holy than those who were forced to pay the Roman tax under pain of death only to find they had not even enough left to feed themselves and their families. Instead of looking on these people as oppressed and abused, they were seen as sinners.
Into this scenario stepped Jesus with the message that God was not understood as fully in terms of being a demanding judge as in being a compassionate Father. It is not obedience to the law that lies at the heart of the matter but rather being faithful reflections of the God who created us in the divine image. God is best understood not in terms of the stern taskmaster who demands obedience above all, but as the wise teacher who lovingly shows us the way to live.
It is not that Jesus abandoned the law. He directly denied that in both his living and his teaching. He observed the law when it brought glory to God and did not interfere with his sharing of the good news of God's grace. He went to temple and to the synagogue, he observed the holy days and he read and studied the scriptures. He declared that he had not come to destroy the law but to bring it to its full completion. He also understood that the law was given for our well-being and we were not created to give glory to the law. He understood that while the law was created to point us to God it could, sometimes, get in the way. When the woman who had been suffering for eighteen years came into Jesus' life on a sabbath day, he understood the true nature of God was to have compassion on her in her affliction and not to honor the sabbath. He did not teach people to ignore the sabbath but rather to receive it as a gift rather than a burden. It is part of God's compassionate gift of inviting us to rest in trust that God will take care of us rather than a cold, unbending law about what we can or cannot do.
People are often uncomfortable with this type of freedom, yet it is what God offers us. Paul talks about it as the freedom we have in Christ. We are not bound to the law, because in Jesus we understand that the law was made for us and not we for the law. The law is our servant in teaching us about God and how we can live with God, ourselves, and one another in peace and harmony. It teaches about who God is and how we can relate to our Creator-God who is also our loving, eternal parent. It is not a burden but a joy. It is not a curse but a wondrous gift from God so that we might know we are loved and cared for as we walk this earth.
It was a difficult lesson for the religious folk of Jesus' time to accept and it is often difficult for us to grasp. It makes things so much easier if we just have the rules to follow so that we know we are okay. Rules give us a yardstick by which we can measure our lives and then feel good about ourselves. When we have failed to live up to its expectations we can at least look around at others who are not doing as well as we are and especially at those who do not even try. The problem is that it gives us comfort in the wrong place. It gives us confidence in our own good works instead of in the grace and love of our God.
This is what we mean by living by faith. It is not our good works or our good beliefs that make us loved by God. It is God's love that makes us loveable. We trust in the compassion of a God who loves us and cares for us and guides us in life. We trust that we are loved by God and respond to the directions we are given because we know that they are for our well-being. We trust God's grace and love enough to walk away from the strict keeping of the law when keeping the letter of the law means withholding compassion from one of God's children.
Most of us have abandoned keeping a day set apart for leisure, worship, and recreation. We have done so to our own peril. God knows that we must slow down and rest and, more importantly, we must give up the pretense that the world revolves around us and on what we do rather than on the gracious presence of God. We have missed the mark by using freedom in Christ to abandon the good counsel of God rather than to give us the freedom to follow God more closely. Every day, we pay the price in poor health and tense relationships. Each week, we break the heart of God who sees us needlessly adding to the stress and burden of life rather than enjoying it as a gracious gift.
There are few of us who would refuse to cook or buy a meal on Sunday for a starving child because it would desecrate the sabbath and yet every day the love and grace of God is denied to others because they do not meet up to the expectations we have for them. We take the caring instructions of God and turn them into hurdles for people to jump in order to get to God instead of being clear paths to lead them to God. We take upon ourselves the work of enforcing God's Law instead of sharing the love and compassion of God with others so that they, too, can find in God's good instructions a way that leads to a full, joy-filled life.
This is not a call to go back to slavishly refraining from all activity one day a week. Nor is it a call to abandon the law as old-fashioned and irrelevant. It is certainly not a call to invite the state to impose God's instructions as legal prohibitions. It is rather a call to hear, with Jesus, the loving voice of a caring parent instructing us in the wisdom of life. It is a call to hear, with Jesus, the invitation not to use God's gracious instructions as a tool to bar others from the presence of God. It is an invitation to receive joyously the instruction of God as it was meant to be, for our well-being.