Spirituality Column #760

June 8, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

All the Rest

By Bob Walters

“And some of the Pharisees said to [Jesus and the disciples], ‘Why are you doing what is prohibited on the Sabbath?’ … And [Jesus] said to them, ‘The Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath.’” Luke 6:2,5

This isn’t what the Pharisees wanted to hear.

We Christians keep saying Jesus is perfect but we also notice that in the eyes of the Pharisees, Jesus caused a lot of trouble … particularly on the Sabbath.  And what they especially didn’t want to hear from Jesus was that He was “Lord” of anything.

This passage in Luke 6 was both the first we hear of Jesus’ attitude toward the Sabbath and it is also His first encounter with the Pharisees.  The Pharisees here would have picked up – and be enraged by – Jesus’ direct, personal reference to the prophet Daniel’s vision (Daniel 7:13-14) of a coming “Son of Man” with “everlasting dominion.” 

Jesus was telling them that He himself was the fulfilment of this prophecy, and as we eventually learn, Jesus was the fulfilment of all prophecy: the perfect will of God.  This was news that threatened everything the Pharisees were: their authority, stature, power, wealth, security … and their self-perceived favored position with God.

Jesus was looking at the Pharisees and saying, as He did so many times in so many words, “Time’s up.  You have failed God, failed the faith …  and MY time is nigh.”

At issue in Luke 6 was the disciples picking grain – “reaping” (working) – on the Sabbath because they were hungry. Another time Jesus healed a man with a withered hand, right in front of them, on the Sabbath.  In John 5:1-15 during a festival Sabbath, He healed the lame man by the pool at Bethesda, telling him to pick up his mat and sin no more.  In Luke 13:10-17, Jesus heals the bleeding woman – with no expression of faith on her part – who had been sick for 18 years.  The Pharisees charged Jesus with Sabbath violations in all instances and criticized the healed man for carrying his mat.

Jesus was deliberately doing divine signs (John is the “book of signs”) on the Sabbath as a proclamation to the Jews of his relationship to the Law. Jesus was/is not under the Law, he is the fulfilment of the Law; Jesus is not subject to the rules, He is the complete unerring righteousness of God.  The Pharisees were not ready for that.

The Law was general and did not account for the varying situations of personal hunger, health, help, and salvation – rescue from a well, say – that might occur on the Sabbath.  Jesus wasn’t about applying rules; He was about applying salvation.

After healing the man’s withered arm, knowing what the Pharisees were thinking – and they weren’t happy – Jesus asked them, “Is it allowed on the Sabbath to do good or evil, to save a life or to destroy?” The Pharisees saw the healing as a “work” of man.

They did not see it for what it actually was: a work of God. 

What Jesus brought into humanity, or rather, reintroduced into humanity, was the personal perfection of God which God declared and celebrated on the Seventh Day of Creation.  God blessed that rest, made the day holy, and made the Sabbath a Law for humanity to rest and remember perfection – “the Sabbath is made for man” (Mark 2:27).

When God brought us the perfection of Jesus, the Sabbath became bigger than merely a “day of the week.”  It was God telling us that Jesus is all the rest we need.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is going to go at least one more week with this series.