This is the message given in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish on Sunday, January 31, 2021. The Bible verses used are Mark 2:23--3:6.
One of the most important Bible passages to most of us is the Ten
Commandments. We study them in Sunday school. We study them in
confirmation class. There are Bible studies based on them. I
suspect some of you had to memorize them at some point. Maybe you still
can recite them. My Mom can.
The Ten
Commandments were even more important to the Jewish people of Jesus’
time. Those people did not just study them. They did not just
memorize them. They were expected to live them. And they were
expected to live them to the letter. The Ten Commandments were supposed
to govern every aspect of your everyday life.
One of those Ten
Commandments, of course, is this
one:
Remember the Sabbath day by
keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work,
but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall
not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female
servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.
And in our Bible reading for
today, we have to examples of Jesus breaking the Sabbath law. In one of
them, Jesus and the disciples started picking crops and eating them on the
Sabbath. In the other, Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath.
To the religious leaders of the
time, especially the Pharisees, that sort of thing was Just Not Done. You
were not supposed to do any work on the Sabbath. Period. That was a
law that went back to the time of Moses, when God gave the Ten Commandments to
Moses. God had said you are not to do any work on the Sabbath, not you,
not your kids, not your servants, not your animals. Nobody. Now
they did, out of practicality, have to make some exceptions. For example,
you were allowed to feed and water your animals. You could leave your
house, as long as you did not go very far. They had all kinds of rules
about what did and did not constitute work. Some of them got kind of technical.
But everyone knew that picking crops was work, and that healing was work, and
so you could not do those things on the Sabbath, because God said so.
And here was Jesus, this person
who people called the Son of God, this person who had been raised in a Jewish
home, this person who surely had to know better, doing those things. And
so were his disciples. The Pharisees could not believe it.
Jesus acknowledged that they
were not following the rules, but he explained it. And here are his
reasons. First, he cites Biblical precedent. He cites the story,
found in First Samuel, of King David being allowed to take some consecrated
bread, which only priests were allowed to eat. Not only was David, who
was not a priest, allowed to eat some of that consecrated bread, but so were
his soldiers. So, Jesus says, there are precedents for breaking some of
these religious laws when the situation requires it.
But Jesus’ reasoning is more
than just, “We had to break the Sabbath laws because we were hungry.”
That would’ve just been an excuse. His real reason is this: “The
Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.”
Think of the implications of
that statement. Again, we’re not just talking about any old rule
here. We’re talking about one of the Ten Commandments. We’re
talking about laws that came to Moses directly from the mouth of God.
What Jesus said about the law
about not working on the Sabbath, and by implication what Jesus is saying about
all of the other Ten Commandments, is, look, God did not give you these laws to
make your lives harder. God gave them to you to make your lives easier.
God did not intend these laws to make your lives miserable. God intended
them to make your lives better. God did not give you the Ten Commandments
to create burdens for you. God gave them to you to ease your burdens.
And that’s demonstrated further
when Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath. Jesus says to the Pharisees, look,
the way you’re interpreting these rules is making life hard for people.
You’re telling me that I cannot heal this man because it’s the Sabbath. Does
that really make sense to you? Do you really think God wants this man to
continue to suffer, even if it’s just for one more day? Would God really
rather I walked away and let this guy continue to live in pain and misery
rather than help him, just because it’s the Sabbath?
We read that, or hear it, and
of course it makes perfect sense to us. We wonder why in the world the
Pharisees could not see it, when it seems so obvious. And yet…
You know, the Pharisees were
not trying to be evil or bad or anything. They were trying to get it
right, just as much as anyone else. They just had fallen into a trap, and
it’s a trap that it’s really easy for us to fall into, too.
What God had done in the Ten
Commandments, and in a lot of the other Old Testament laws God gave the people
of Israel, is lay down some basic principles for living. And they’re
really good principles. All of us, including me, would be a lot better
off if we lived the way God told us to live.
But what the Pharisees did was
turn those basic principles into a bunch of inflexible rules. Do
this. Don’t do that. Doing this is right, doing that is
wrong. If you do this, you’ll go to heaven. If you do that, you’ll
go to hell. The Rules are The Rules. Period. No exceptions.
The thing is, as human beings,
we like rules. I mean, we get frustrated with them sometimes, but by and
large, we like them. That’s why we make so many of them. Rules make
things simple. If we have a rule, we don’t have to take circumstances
into account. If we have a rule, we don’t have to use our judgment all
the time. We just find out what the rule is and follow it. It saves
a lot of time and effort to just have rules.
But what Jesus is telling us is
that God does not look at it that way. And we should not look at it that
way, either. Because if we do, the rules can get in our way. They
can get in the way of doing good. They can get in the way of following
God. They can get in the way of loving people the way Jesus told us to.
Now don’t get me wrong
here. I’m not saying that there’s no such thing as sin. There
is. I’m also not saying we should just casually ignore all of God’s
principles and do anything we want to do. Jesus did not say any of those
things, either. Jesus did not tell the Pharisees, “throw out all your
rules and do anything you please.” As I said, God’s principles for living
are really good principles, and all of us, including me, would be better off if
we lived the way God told us to live.
But what Jesus was saying is
that a slavish adherence to rules can get in our way, just like it got in the
Pharisees’ way. As I said, the Pharisees were trying to get it
right. They thought that, by slavishly following the rules, they were
doing what God wanted them to do. They could not see that, sometimes,
their strict adherence to the rules was keeping them from loving people and
helping people. They could not see that, sometimes, following the rules
to the letter could lead them to do the exact opposite of what God wanted them
to do.
It’s something for us to think
about. Because all of us have rules, whether we realize it or not.
We have rules for what we do when we get up in the morning. We have rules
for how we spend our days. We have rules for how we do our jobs. We
have rules for how we live our lives. We have rules for how we treat
people. We have rules for who we like and who we don’t like. We
have rules for who we care about and who we ignore. And we have rules for
what’s right and what’s wrong, who’s good and who’s bad. A lot of the
time, we may not even have realized that we made these rules, much less that
we’re living by them. But we have, and we are.
The rules we have are not
necessarily bad or wrong. Sometimes they may be exactly the same as the
principles God laid out for us. But we need to take a look at them.
We need to know what rules we have. And we need to make sure our
adherence to those rules is not getting in the way of serving God and loving the
people God created. We need to make sure we have not fallen into the trap
the Pharisees did, where following the rules was leading them to do the exact
opposite of what God wanted them to do.
So let’s take a look at our
rules. Let’s understand where they came from and why we have them.
And let’s understand that, even if they’re good rules, we still need to make
sure they’re not getting in the way of what Jesus said are the two most
important rules: to love God and to love other people. If they are,
we need to change them. Because ultimately, the rule of love is the
standard by which every rule we have needs to be measured.
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