Rules

Mark 2:23-3:6

A few weeks ago, at the Trinity Preschool Pizza Night, I watched a magician perform for a rapt and enthusiastic audience of two- through five-year olds and their families. I knew he was playing tricks on our minds to entertain us – sleight of hand – and some of the kids were watching for it. Though when they tried to call him out on it he doubled down and showed us even more magic.  He won more laughter and joy when he made us think we understood the trick – and then showed us our guess was wrong and there was still magic to wonder at after all.

I think Jesus might be doing something like that with the Pharisees – and maybe with us – in today’s gospel stories. On first glance, we see two short stories about Jesus breaking Sabbath rules to do good, to feed the hungry and to heal, to make a miracle. But when you’re watching closely – armed with a natural skepticism about magic shows or a little scriptural commentary – well, what we see may not be what we think we see.

Don’t worry about my disciples plucking grain on Sabbath, he tells the Pharisees. If King David, great and holy hero of Israel, could take the sacred temple bread to feed his starving soldiers, after all….

You and I, accustomed to Jesus being more right than the Pharisees, might naturally find this a satisfying explanation.

Except.

Well, except that Jesus’ disciples probably weren’t starving like David’s soldiers were. Just moments ago in the story they were in trouble for not fasting when the Pharisees did. They certainly get too busy to eat regular meals at a later point in the Jesus story – but at this point in the story, context suggests they were just snacking.

So they are breaking the Sabbath rules, and doing so in a way that certainly doesn’t meet David’s precedent.

Jesus looks like he’s defeating the Pharisees with truth and logic. But that’s not what’s happening. He seems instead to be creating a diversion: Look over there! It's King David!

Then it’s Sabbath in the synagogue, where Jesus already has a history of casting out demons, and now there’s a man with a crippled hand in the congregation. So Jesus knows the crowd – and the Pharisees – are going to be watching for another healing. And he immediately challenges them all: “Is it right to do good on the Sabbath?” he asks them. Duh. Of course, Jesus.

“Is it right to save life, or to kill?” It’s been established precedent forever that yes, you can break Sabbath rules to save lives. Didn’t we just cover this, with David and the starving soldiers? But to kill, umm….? No one answers him.

So he turns to the man they’re watching, tells him to stretch out his hand, and just like that, we see that he’s healed! Whole! A miracle! Jesus broke the Sabbath rules to do good!

 Except.

Except he didn’t.

Jesus doesn’t actually do any prohibited work in this story. He doesn’t treat the man’s condition. He doesn’t even lift the man’s hand for him.  He just says, “show us your hand” and we see that the healing has already been done.

It looks like he’s breaking the rules but he’s not.

He’s messing with us. Messing with the Pharisees, the crowds, the reader.

It’s sleight of hand.

Unlike your average stage magician, I don’t think Jesus is using this religious sleight of hand, this “what you see is not what you think” trick to hide something from us. I think instead that, Jesus being Jesus, he’s being deliberately provocative, messing with us in order to get us to wonder more, and to see something we are used to not noticing.

I think he’s trying to get us to see that the rules were made not to be broken, or to bind us, but out of our own benefit. And that the Sabbath itself is healing.

Jesus doesn’t do work on the Sabbath to heal that man with a crippled hand. Instead, he just asks the man to show everyone the healing that has already happened, in the midst of Sabbath. Show that the Sabbath, created for our benefit, is – in and of itself – healing.

And the rules about what not to do – no harvesting the grain, no traveling, no work for yourself or your servants or your animals – those aren’t rules to limit us, but to heal us. We don’t keep religious rules for God's benefit, or the church, or religion as a whole. Instead the rules keep us; the rules work for us to keep us whole in our relationship with God, with one another, with ourselves, created in the image of God.

There are two primary reasons given in scripture for the keeping of Sabbath.

One, that we stop all work this one day in seven to do what God does: to rest, in imitation of God, in the image of God, as God rested in creation.

 And also to give thanks. We stop work in thanksgiving for God’s action in freeing God’s people from slavery, from forced labor. We fast from work, and from receiving the work of others, one day in seven because our work – and the work of others that we benefit from – ultimately belongs to God, not to Pharaoh, or the boss, or the time clock, or even to ourselves.

Now, snacking on grain as you walk through a grain field may not seem like work to you, or to me, or apparently to those first disciples of Jesus. It’s not work, compared to actual harvesting, reaping, and the daily production of flour and bread and animal feed from that grain, or compared to the billable hour, the eight-hour factory day, or 24-7 parenthood. 

Snacking on grain as you walk through a field is skimming the emails on your phone while you’re in between things. 

It’s not fully work, perhaps, but it is a failure to rest; a failure to stop, a failure to resist the idols of the world, a failure to pay primary attention to the image of God in ourselves and in others.

And Jesus seems to be saying to the Pharisees, to you and me, that that’s okay. Because, you know, important and urgent things trump Sabbath.

But he’s not.

He’s saying that getting caught up in the rules is, itself, a failure to rest, a failure to stop what we are doing and attend to what GOD has done, is still doing.

When he tells the Pharisees that the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath, I think he’s reminding them that the Sabbath is about how God keeping us is more essential than us keeping rules.

And then he shows them that the Sabbath itself heals. Heals a man whose injury isn’t life-threatening; who could as easily have been treated the next day, whose need would never justify breaking the rules. This man is healed, in front of the curious and the eager and the plotters and the doubters, by the Sabbath itself.

Because the Sabbath has always been about restoring us to wholeness, and keeping the Sabbath has always been about rejoicing in the gifts of God.

But we forget that.

Sin – evil, the idolatry of the world – plays tricks on us, uses slight of hand to get us to believe that keeping the rules properly is what makes us whole, or righteous.

And by focusing our attention on that, hides from us the ongoing action of God that makes us whole and righteous; the action of God that makes keeping Sabbath natural for us, as a reveling in grace and gratitude, strength and love.

I’m pretty sure that Jesus did want his disciples, the Pharisees, you and me, to truly keep the Sabbath. Not to follow the rules, but to live so fully in the presence and image of God that the rules follow us.

To Sabbath so naturally; to rest so naturally, to fast from work and from the work of others, to renew ourselves in the image and imitation of God so fully, that the “rules” are simply how others describe what we do, and the ways others learn from us to be renewed and healed and whole, resting in the image of God.