This Week: Proper 4B
Gospel: Mark 2:23-3:6
This week’s gospel has two themes to tackle. They’re related, but hit differently.
- The confrontation and
- The withered hand.
These paired stories are both clearly about the Sabbath, but we might say they reflect different teachings about the Sabbath. Or perhaps different parts of the Sabbath Law.
We might compare them as
- teaching about David and
- the true purpose of Sabbath.
Or we we might relate to them as
- how we instruct our disciples and
- how to think of healing.
Really, there are a lot of options here.
But I suspect that the two stories each have something that draws a person’s attention in particular.
1. That stuff about David.
We’re very familiar with the idea of Jesus having to deal with people who don’t like his teaching. So nothing about the confrontation itself surprises us. But his response here, referencing David, feels like a deep cut. What is that about?
We don’t start with David, but with Sabbath Law. And particularly the nature of Sabbath that requires interpretation.
God said not to work on the Sabbath. Or put others to work. But what counts as work? Well, that needs interpretation. And tradition had developed an assortment of ideas that feed into our interpretation.
One of those is not to farm.
So, did Jesus’s disciples violate the law? I doubt American jurisprudence would say they did. But these first century Hebrews didn’t ask us, did they?
But Jesus saves this critique for the next one. Here, he sets himself in the Messiah’s seat.
Liberating sustenance
Jesus compares this moment, of allowing his followers to pick grain on the Sabbath, to David feeding his companions from the bread of the Presence. Which is bold. Woof. That is a scorching take.
But Jesus probably doesn’t see it that way. And not just because he’s divine or sure of himself or knows that he’s right. It is probably only a hot take to people obsessed with whether others are following the rules rather how exclusionary and destructive the rules can be.
Jesus doesn’t bring this up to flex or out himself as the Messiah. He’s saying something about need.
When people are hungry, we feed them.
Rules that deny food from the starving can’t protect the sanctity of the divine. They make us complicit in a person’s death.
Jesus knows that this is what makes his take so spicy. Precisely because our obsession about the rules, being right, and not rocking the boat will inevitably draw our attention to the wrong part of the story.
2. Breaking Sabbath Law to fulfill it.
The other thing that inevitably draws our attention is of the same substance. Jesus’s response to “working” on the Sabbath is the same in the second encounter. And it brings with it the same values.
Just as Jesus speaks of saving lives by feeding them on the Sabbath, he speaks to saving lives by healing.
The nature of this story is made plainer in a Synoptic telling of it, where someone asks Can’t it wait until tomorrow?Which definitely sounds like a fair request…again, if we care more about the law than about Jesus’s convictions.
It certainly can’t wait until tomorrow if we think life is at stake. Or if we are the one suffering.
Honestly, we proved this maxim when we developed an opioid epidemic specifically because we don’t think it can wait.
Jesus confronts the way they use the law to restrict the freeing character of the law. The urgent character of the law. Even the generous, loving character of the law.
We turn it into a thing to enforce rather than a pattern for flourishing.
This is about our cynical preference for control.
When we dig all the way down, we can see how much more committed we are to enforcement of the law than we are to delighting in the law.
People of faith throughout ever age don’t just like speaking for God (who doesn’t?), we like enforcing God’s judgment. We like being righteous.
Think about the experience of sitting at a traffic light and someone runs a red. What do we think? I hope a cop pulls them over.
When someone does something wrong? I hope they get their comeuppance.
Our attention is not on the law itself. Or its spirit or benefit. We want control. To focus on its violation.
But the law is about giving life, freeing us from need, ensuring we all are fed.
Sabbath is about ordering our lives, our world, even life itself around this freeing nature. Orienting us away from work and toward living. Away from comparison, frustration, and violence and toward equality and joy.
Sabbath is for life. And Jesus exposes just how common it is for us to be OK with picking death.