Doing the Right Thing at the Right Time
By The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
June 17, 2012
Text: Mark 2:23-3:6
I never knew how complicated it would be to buy a refrigerator. I thought you just went to a store, bought one that keeps things cold, and brought it home. Oh, how naive I am! First, it has to fit the space that you are going to put it in. Second, you will have to have a door that will turn the right way according to the walls you have. Third, the handles have got to be at the right height. Do you want the freezer box on the bottom, the top, the middle, or somewhere around the back? Do you want something that will actually cook your food for you as well as freeze it for you? I mean, it seemed to have everything from ice-makers to wine coolers. You name it, and fridges these days have got it! And, I must say, which one we would finally go with was one of the biggest ordeals that tested our marriage vows!
We settled on something that we are both comfortable with. I want you to know that. But, one of the things I never imagined I would find is a refrigerator that was religious. This for me was something startling! There is actually within a lot of the good refrigerators a place for Sabbath rest. I am sure you have seen it before and it is no news, but if you haven't, there are refrigerators that have an option of not putting the fan or the light on when you open the door. This is for those who are Orthodox Jews, who could not use the refrigerator on a day that is set aside as the Sabbath if the fan and the lights were working.
Naturally we bought one of those, thinking this must be a good refrigerator. It was fascinating! Those that have what is known as “Shommer Shabbat” abide by the rules of the Sabbath strictly and do so with a sense of rigour and commitment that even takes them down to the refrigerator they buy. I respect them for it.
Unfortunately, it is not always universally respected. In fact, in our society with its cultural pluralism, we often look down on very specific religious rites. They are called into question, or seen as being futile or silly. It is the same as the way we Christians set aside the Sabbath on Sunday, the day that we remember the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. To a world that really has no time for many of the particularities of faith and it almost seems as if it is of a former era or of another time, out of step with culture. Then there is this cultural decision that suggests that any particularity that is rigorous, anything that demands something of you, again is out of step with the freedom of our world. So, if you have minute religious laws, or if you have observances that you think are important, they are often decried and ridiculed, not only for being out of step, but for leading to self-righteousness, which seems to me in common parlance to be the greatest sin in our culture - self-righteousness!
Yet it goes even further. Sometimes the animosity isn't towards particular rituals and rites that have within them a code of righteousness. Often, whenever anyone breaks one of those laws to which they adhere or are supposed to adhere, they are called hypocrites and a finger is pointed at them. It is hard to be an observant religious person in our culture. It doesn't matter what it is - and it is a shame!
It is a shame even more so because I think that it clouds the way we often read the Christian scriptures as well. When we read the stories of Jesus, we are informed by the culture that we are in and with our suspicion of self-righteousness and with suspicion of any of any potential hypocrisy, we wonder if in fact the observance of laws is not something that is outdated. When we go to the stories that we read this morning, we read them through the lens of our culture, Mark has placed two great stories of Jesus together.
In other Gospels, they are in chronological order, occurring at different times, but Mark in his editorial work puts them together in order that you can read them as a whole section. These are the stories where Jesus is brought into conflict with the teachers of the law. We look at these stories, and we read them through the lens of our own culture, with all our own suspicions. I think we need to read them again as they were originally intended in order that we may understand them more fully, for what Jesus is doing is pointing to three distortions, the first of which is the distortion of the usage of the law in his time.
The story begins with Jesus' disciples picking some grains on the side of the road as they are walking by. Some of the religious teachers and teachers of the law, the Pharisees, observe Jesus' disciples picking the sheaves and they point to it and say, “This is not allowed on the Sabbath. The Sabbath is a day of rest and what they are doing is harvesting.” So they try to trick Jesus into coming to their defence. He falls into their trickery. He will not have his disciples impugned incorrectly. He stands up for them and he stands up for them by using none other authority than King David.
He turns to that obscure passage that I read from I Samuel, and I am sure when I first read it you must have wondered where am I was going with this story. It is a simple story about David and his troops needing bread. They go to the high priest, Ahimelech, they ask him for bread, and Ahimelech says, “I have no ordinary bread for you. I only have consecrated bread.” Well, you are not allowed to have consecrated bread. It is for the public worship of Yahweh. It is not just to feed those who are on the roadside.
It is particularly not to be consumed by anyone who has been involved in impure activities leading up to it. It is not allowed for those who are taking it on the Sabbath even. Nevertheless, David and the high priest come to the conclusion that David's warriors need the bread in order that they might continue to do their work and they are given it. Jesus says, and I paraphrase, “Look, even King David got bread that was supposed to be set aside for the Presence (in other words, as a sacrifice in the holy of holies), even David has this bread on the Sabbath and you are picking on my disciples who are simply walking along the road picking a grain of wheat. How can you complain about them?”
There was such a ferocious debate in the time of Jesus about the law and how stringently it should be observed that Jesus was participating in an ongoing debate between the Pharisees, who believe that the Torah, the written law, and the oral law, (the teaching of the rabbis) was authoritative. In other words, it was not just the Torah (that which is written down), but the interpretation of what is written down. Those interpretations became more minute and more specific and narrower and narrower as time went along.
The Sadducees, another group of Jewish thinkers, only believed that the written Torah was authoritative and not the oral law or the little minute details of rabbinical teaching. The Esseres, another ascetic group, believed that everything had to lead to the purity of the individual and no matter what happened, observance of the law down to the most minute details were essential for the Kingdom of God to come. The Zealots believed everything in the Torah except “Thou shalt not kill” and for that they turned their backs.
Jesus now is like a rabbi. He comes into the midst of this debate. It has been brought about by the accusation against his disciples and Jesus defends them. He takes a very different approach to the law than the Esseres or the Sadducees, the Pharisees or the Zealots. Jesus goes back to the original intention of the law, which was, according to Exodus 23, that people find rest in the midst of their busy lives.
He goes back to the very Decalogue the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), that you keep the Sabbath holy because you worship the one and only Lord. The Sabbath is a sign of one's faith in the covenant that God has made with his people and all the other minute interpretations, all the other silly - according to Jesus - ways in which the law is interpreted are not applicable. Jesus believes that the law is being distorted and his disciples are scapegoats for this distortion. It is fascinating! That is why they turned on him. The Pharisees wanting to get in line with the Herodians, a group that we don't know much about, but probably were loyal to King Herod, turned on Jesus because they couldn't stand his authority and the word that he was bringing.
The distortion went even further. Jesus saw that there was a distortion of faithful witness going on and I think the second story is the most telling of all. Jesus encounters a man with a withered arm. Jesus sees this man and the Pharisees again try to bait him. They try to fool him and trap him, they want to see if Jesus is actually going to contravene the Sabbath laws as they interpret them and I do want to say that “as they interpret them” because they want to see if he will heal this man on the Sabbath. And, Jesus does.
You might not think that this is particularly important for the man with the shrivelled arm. It is not as if, as later commentaries in the second century suggested, the man's life was not in danger but clearly his livelihood was, and his status within the covenant people was. As a person with a withered arm, he was ritually unclean and could not worship God. He might not have been able to work and to make a livelihood for his family and so the restoration of the man with the withered arm was far more important than the initial reading would suggest.
I liken it if you want to use a popular image, to the movie Shrek. It was the movie I viewed on a plane this last week. I must have gone with a cut-rate airline for sure - showing a ten-year-old movie! It was the only thing on really, except the news so, I watched it, and I thought “Oh no, this is going to be pathetic.” This is a children's movie, and I didn't want anyone to catch me watching it. You know what it is like when you get in those sorts of situations. The woman next to me kept looking at me as I was laughing through the movie, and I felt like a child.
It is the story of an ugly green ogre who befriends a talking donkey. You can see why I didn't want anyone to see me watching it! Then the ogre falls in love with a beautiful princess, and the beautiful princess is saved, and they spend a lot of time going places, and they camp out together, and Shrek and the donkey become good friends, and finally, it all seems like the story is over and Shrek is going to go back to his home, and the donkey is astonished, because Shrek says to the donkey, “I am going back to my home” and the donkey thought, “Well now, surely with our friendship, it is going to be our home.” And Shrek said, “No, no, no, it's my home, and I am going to go there, and when I get home, I am going to build ten foot walls around my house.” Poor Shrek had been hurt, and so the donkey thinks that Shrek is an “ass” pardon the pun.
Then, there is this incredible moment in the movie, when Shrek says: “Look, I am not the one with the problem, okay. It is the world that seems to have a problem with me. People take one look at me and go ”˜Ah, help! Run! It's a big, stupid, ugly ogre.' They judge me before they even know me. That is why I am better off alone.” The donkey thought that Shrek had built the walls around his home to keep others out, but rather, he had built the walls to protect himself within.
The man with the withered arm was like Shrek. He was somebody who was reaching out to Jesus because he knew that with his unsightly arm he was neither religiously clean nor socially acceptable or employable. These Pharisees wanted to trick Jesus because Jesus wanted to heal him. What does Jesus do? He heals him! And then he turns to them in anger, and says, “Is the Sabbath for good or is it for evil? Is it for life, or is it for death?” for he knew even the most fervent interpreter of the law knew that the law of the Sabbath was never there to prevent the saving of human life. It had become something that had broken down the witness of God and Jesus would have none of it. Jesus made this incredible comment, “I am the Lord of the Sabbath. Don't try and trick me. Don't anger me. Don't push away this man with the withered arm. This is God's will.”
I love what Max Lucado says in his wonderful book, Upwards: “Legalism has no pity on people. Legalism makes my opinion your burden, makes my opinion your boundary, and makes my opinion your obligation.”
The problem wasn't the law; the problem was the legalism with which it was being applied. And, Jesus said, “No!”
There is a final distortion and it is using these texts for the sake of religious licence. One of the problems that we have with the reading of this is that many people take what Jesus said about legalism and thought it meant that Jesus was rejecting the law outright. How could that be when you think about it? Jesus was an observant Jew. Jesus was part of the covenant community. Jesus read from the law and the prophets. Jesus used references to the law to make his point. Why would Jesus be against the law? Yet we read this story and we think that Jesus is against the law, and therefore what he is doing is giving us a form of licence, giving us a sense in which there are no obligations: we have complete freedom because Jesus has taken on the Pharisees.
We make the same mistake, I believe, when we misinterpret the Apostle Paul. I just spent a week ten days ago studying the Book of Romans with one of the world's leading New Testament scholars, James Dunn. He makes the point that we even misunderstand the relationship between Paul and the law. Paul does not see the law as an entirely bad thing from which we must be freed by the Gospel. He argues, quite cogently that in fact even for Paul, the law was still a sign of God's grace and our faith is what makes us believe in the law, so therefore we are justified by our faith, but the law is the way we live it out. The Gospel has come to extend that covenant to the Gentile world to bring us into the covenant with God apart from the law, because we are Gentiles, because of the Cross of Jesus Christ, but that in fact Paul is not, as has sometimes been said, completely against the law. He is not anymore than Jesus was completely against the law.
The problem is the way we've interpreted Paul's view of the law and with our own culture that believes that all sorts of religious ritual is something to be tossed out, means that we feel we have complete and utter licence. Therefore, there is no obligation to keep the Sabbath in any way, shape or form and make it different. There is no need to worship God and to set time aside and to believe that you can somehow be a follower of Jesus Christ without any obligations whatsoever. I run into this every single day of my life, and it is wrong! It is false thinking! Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath but he is still the Lord. He is worthy of our praise. He is worthy of our devotion. God is worthy of our sincerity and our commitment. This is not a licence to forget about God completely because Jesus opposed the Pharisees on finer points of legalism.
In our mainline churches, where this false teaching has really crept in, we need to put it straight, and put it straight once and for all. Jesus wants us to be faithful. He wants us to live faithful lives. He wants us to be dedicated to the worship of his Father on a regular basis. He wants us not to keep all the minute laws for we are Gentiles but to be faithful to God. I think that eventually, down the road, when our society wakes up and wipes its eyes and realizes that it has squandered itself on its experiment of the worship of materialism that drives us to drive out religious observance for the sake of money or comfort. When we wake up from this dream, we will realize that at the end is God and when all the customs of our culture change there is one who doesn't: God.
To those of you who are fathers here this morning, I implore you this Father's Day to bring your children up, or if they are grown up already, encourage them to seek to be faithful to God alone, for in the end, the customs will come and go, the traditions will ebb and flow and our society's values will change, but Jesus is still Lord of the Sabbath. He wants us always to do the right thing at the right time for him. Amen.