Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the Sabbath Day from Matthew 12:1–14
Make anything of value and it will not be long before someone tries to counterfeit it. I am not referring to pirated versions of the same thing, as in recordings, but to cheapened, tawdry versions. Quite a different thing trying to pass itself off as if it were the real thing. The classic example, of course, is money, just cheap paper that’s made to look as if it is worth something, and the untrained eye might actually think it is worth something, but the experts soon show it is worth nothing.
Costume jewelry that is sometimes worn instead of the real McCoy in order to keep down insurance also comes to mind. In North America there was a scandal not many months back. Some machine manufacturers had been producing bolts for aircraft maintenance which had not been up to specification, and now the wonder is how many planes are flying up there with bolts without adequate tensile strength?
But nowhere is the penchant for making deceptive counterfeits more common and more dangerous than in revealed religion. There are flagrant examples and there are more subtle kinds. One thinks in the former category of Mount Sinai. There God delivers his people from slavery, yet it is not long, even though he is in the very process of revealing himself to Moses and, thus, to all the people in the Ten Commandments and the entire covenant …
It is not long before the people are, nevertheless, bowing before a golden calf to the resounding chant, “This is the god who brought you out of Egypt.” Sheer counterfeit and blatant, but there are more hidden examples: Ananias and Sapphira. Far more interested in a reputation for generosity and godliness than in generosity and godliness themselves. Or one thinks of the prophet Amos. Quick to condemn the people of his day because they kept up all their ritual aspects of Christianity but had forgotten justice, mercy, integrity, compassion.
Indeed, the remarkable fact is that very often those who know least of the transforming power of God in their lives are those who glory most in a counterfeit, legalistic version of Christianity. There are bishops who are more concerned about vestments and liturgy than about the purity of the gospel.
Lest you think I’m treading where I ought not, there are Baptists who devote far more nervous energy in defending the priority of the Authorized Version than in winning their neighbors to Jesus, there are church members who are far more exercised about the pecking order in the parish than about the quality of their prayer life, and in none of these cases is the desperate lack of proportion even noticed!
I hasten to add that using vestments, reading the Authorized Version, and establishing administrative order in a parish are not intrinsically evil. Still less am I suggesting that all bishops, Baptists, and church members be assigned forthwith to the pit. The point, rather, is that one of the easiest ways (certainly one of the commonest ways) of counterfeiting real, vital Christianity is to focus on adjacent values, to treat the periphery as if it were the center … to lose the center, bring in the periphery, and treat it as if it were the center.
That is what is going on in the passage before us: Matthew, chapter 12. These verses are about Sabbath conflict. That is, what is appropriate behavior under the Jewish Sabbath? In the Old Testament Scriptures it was agreed for bad work and commanded worship on the seventh day of the week, the Sabbath, but what exactly was work? In broad terms, the assumption in the Old Testament is that work is your regular employment and labor. It is what you normally do the rest of the week, so Sabbath rest (whatever else it involved) entailed cessation from such labor.
If so, then in this story, the disciples are not really breaking the Sabbath law as defined by Old Testament Scripture. They weren’t farmers who were trying to sneak in a little overtime on the sly as they went out there to thresh a little more grain and increase the income. They were itinerant preachers, semi-retired fishermen and the like, who were simply taking a Sabbath day stroll and grinding a little grain in their hands, munching it as they went by … the ancient equivalent of a snack.
In first-century Palestine, however, some groups had become very conservative in their interpretation of work. A body of oral tradition thought by some to be as authoritative as the written text grew to dominance. The Pharisees, in fact, defined 39 categories of forbidden work, and harvesting was one of them.
When they saw Jesus’ disciples doing this little bit of plucking of the heads of grain, their minds clicked through. “Aha! Item number 27. Harvesting.” Hence, verse 2: “Lord! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.” Indeed, so complex were the Sabbath rules in Jesus’ day that one sage wryly remarked, “The rules about the Sabbath are as mountains hanging by a hair, for teaching of Scripture thereon is scanty and the rules many.”
Indeed, some Jews, covenanters from the community of Qumran by the Dead Sea, were so conservative in their treatment of Sabbath that they made the Pharisees look positively libertine. It is not to be thought that the Pharisees did not enjoy the Sabbath. It is not to be thought that they were so encumbered by rules that they themselves secretly found it impossible to enjoy. Far from it.
For many of them the Sabbath was, rules and all, a joyous festival, something to which they returned with great delight, and this should not be surprising, for rules and ritual provide an enormous amount of stability and meaning in the lives of many people. People like things done the same way. For all of our comments about innovation for children, those of us who have children know how much children rely on a certain sense of order and stability and repetition. If you get the verses of a 22-verse children’s song mixed up, they’ll let you know it!
The difficulty is, when this sort of attitude invades the church, we may then begin to substitute mere repetition for vital Christianity and feel secure in what we do. Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong with ritual, with regularity, with rules. Indeed, I have a fair bit of sympathy for C.S. Lewis, who argues he can live under almost any liturgical system in the church as long as it doesn’t change too fast, because, he says, “I get distracted, and I forget what I’m there for.”
I have some sympathy for that, and in my own family (partly, perhaps, because my wife is a decent Anglican) we have tried to establish any number of family traditions and do things regularly, partly because it builds a kind of heritage for the children. In December, every Saturday we do something coming up to Christmas as a family. It’s plotted out, and around all the festivals there are detailed orders and patterns, and the children expect them even though they’re young.
In biblical religion, ritual and rules can easily swamp what is vital and real, and the end result is, to use Paul’s words, “a form of religion that denies its power.” It is a brand of very subtle, counterfeit Christianity. What then does this passage teach us about real Christianity, as it stands over against the particular counterfeit the Pharisees were espousing?
1. Real religion must not be reduced to religious rules.
I hasten to add I am not saying there are no rules, but it must not be reduced to religious rules. We begin with Jesus’ answer in verses 3 and 4. “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests.”
It is important to note in the first place how Jesus does not answer. He does not say, “My friends, your exegesis is appalling. Your interpretation is wrong. My disciples are innocent, because after all, this is not what the Old Testament has in mind by work. They’re not doing their regular employment. They’re not trying to do something to keep themselves warm. It’s just a little Sabbath stroll and a snack. Lay off!”
Instead, he makes a far more fundamental charge. He alludes to an account reported in 1 Samuel 21. And after running through the night with some of his men, leaving them on the outskirts of town, he is famished, weary, at the point where his physical weakness is endangering him. He comes to the priest Ahimelek at Nob where the tabernacle was then situated. He pants in the door and he says, “Give me something to eat,” and Ahimelek says, “I’m sorry. I’m fresh out. All I have here is the shewbread, the consecrated bread.”
This was bread that the priests and the priests alone laid before the Lord in the tabernacle once a week on the Sabbath. Then the next Sabbath they came in and took the bread out, put in some fresh stuff, and they ate the old bread. According to Mosaic law, only they were allowed to eat it. Clearly, there had just been a transfer, and as a result they had some of this freshly taken-out bread (a week old and stale, I suppose, in that sense), but freshly taken-out bread freely available.
The priests had not yet eaten it, but David shouldn’t. He was not a priest. Yet, what David does is lie through his teeth. He says, “Well, actually I’m on a secret mission for King Saul. I can’t tell you the details, but I’m very hungry and I have to leave in a big hurry, and if you could give me some of that it would sure be much appreciated.” Ahimelek slides around the rules, and David eats and takes some out for his troops as well, and that is the event to which Jesus here refers.
It is not a parallel to what is happening in Jesus’ day at the level of hunger. David was hungry to the point of starvation, to the point of feeling faint and weak. There is no hint of that in the disciples. They’re just feeling a little peckish between meals, and if they’re really hungry, they can trot into the nearest town. Nothing is that far away in Galilee.
Nor is there any evidence the disciples and Jesus are on a journey to go and preach somewhere, thus investing their action with kingdom significance, for the Jews likewise allowed exceptions to the rules for reasons of mercy and necessity. Mercy? That might just about cover David. Necessity? If you really have to do something and there was no other way or time you could do it …
There’s no suggestion here they’re heading off in that sort of direction, for if that were the case, the Pharisees would have clobbered them for exceeding a Sabbath day’s journey. In fact, what are the Pharisees themselves doing out here? They’re just having a Sabbath day stroll. That’s what they’re doing, so one has to ask, why is it Jesus draws this parallel? What’s the point?
His point is David ate the bread of consecration, and strictly it was unlawful for him to do so. David did this, probably, on a Sabbath, since that was the day when the shewbread was changed, but David’s action was illegal, not because he ate it on the Sabbath, but because he ate it at all. Nobody except a priest should eat it.
The point, then, Jesus is making is surely far deeper. David ate and formally he broke the law, but Scripture does not condemn him. This suggests the Pharisee’s entire approach to the law was faulty. Their understanding of what the law meant on this particular detail was inadequate to explain some of the phenomenon in their own Scripture. Jesus’ understanding of it could explain it. We’ll come to that in a moment. Theirs could not.
He begins by asking a question which is designed to make them reflect. “Have we got the right end of the stick in our interpretation of Scripture?” The point, then, at very least, is real and vital religion, whether in David’s day or Jesus’ day or in ours, cannot be reduced merely to a question of rules. One must ask questions about the power of God, the revelation of God, the transformation only he gives, character brought into line with the Lord Jesus Christ himself, confession of sin, bowing before the cross. One cannot simply make Christianity a religion of rules.
2. Real Christianity observes a hierarchy of values.
The first point is in danger of suggesting something I would not want to suggest. It is in danger of suggesting rules can so be relativized that quite frankly, nothing has to be maintained. Nothing has to be kept. Can we set aside the law of God at a whim? On appeal, perhaps, to vital Christianity shall we slink unnoticed into situation ethics?
Suppose the law David had broken was adultery. Could you imagine Jesus coming along and saying, “Well, you know, under certain circumstances you can break that one too”? Isn’t it interesting that, in fact, David did break that law, but that’s not the example Jesus uses. Indeed, there is a principle here articulated in verse 5.
“Haven’t you read in the Law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple desecrate the day and yet are innocent?” In other words, the Sabbath broadly forbids work, and there are the priests working. They have to do their regular work. They have to put out the morning sacrifice and the evening sacrifice. In fact, on the Sabbath it’s double. They do extra work. Ask the vicar!
And yet, we are told, they don’t desecrate the Sabbath. They do desecrate it! They’re breaking the law, but they’re innocent. What is the assumption? The assumption is there is a hierarchy of values, and the same argument is used by Jesus elsewhere. For example, in John, chapter 7, verses 21–23, Jesus pits Sabbath law against circumcision.
The circumcision law required a male child be circumcised on the eighth day, but supposing the eighth day came up on a Sabbath, then what do you do? The rabbi was not supposed to work on the Sabbath. The rabbi was supposed to perform the circumcision. What do you do? “Well,” Jesus says, “you know what you do. You circumcise the baby. There’s a hierarchy of values, and in this case circumcision takes preeminence over Sabbath restriction.”
That’s the same argument that is appealed to here. There is a hierarchy of laws. “Haven’t you read in the Law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple desecrate the day and yet are innocent?” What relevance does that have to Jesus’ disciples? He tells us in verse 6. “I tell you that one greater than the temple is here.”
Now you are getting very close to the heart of the issue. Jesus says the temple demands superseded Sabbath demands, so the priests, therefore, were innocent, but higher than both (higher than the temple laws) is the demand of Jesus himself. That’s what the text says. “One greater than the temple is here.”
In other words, Jesus is exonerating his own disciples from any breach of Sabbath law as understood by the Pharisees because they are related to him. Now there is more to be said about that in a moment, but the appeal, basically, is to a set of hierarchical orderings that have to be understood to make sense of the Bible.
I know a preacher who shall remain nameless. He is sufficiently well known that if I mentioned his name at least some would know to whom I refer. He is a lovely, godly man. He can preach like an apostle, and in his prayers he takes you into the throne room of God. Yet, somehow … somehow … there is a warp in his thinking so that everything is related to everything in such a way that everything has the same value.
Whether you’re talking about defending the deity of Christ or the centrality of the cross or whether you’re talking about how you actually dress on a Sunday afternoon, everything is defended in his system with the same level of intensity because he can relate that to something else to something else to something else to something else until finally it’s related to the very deity of Christ himself or to inerrancy or something!
Suddenly, everything has exactly the same weight, and to be in his presence after a while leaves you with a feeling of ponderousness that is so weighty you feel depressed. In biblical Christianity, in vital Christianity, we need to ascertain again and again and again that rules of cultural or social acceptability must not transcend rules regarding holiness, prayerfulness, zeal. Basic, unalterable, unchangeable Christianity.
3. Real Christianity finds all the light of revelation and authority coming to a sharp focus in Jesus Christ.
We turn now to verses 7 and 8. “If you had known what these words mean,” Jesus says, and now he cites Hosea, chapter 6, verse 6, “ ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.”
At this point, Jesus is reiterating his first two emphases. We need to understand what is going on in Hosea’s day. In Hosea’s day, once again, many of the people under the old covenant are busy adhering to the ritual laws bound up with the temple, and in this they are quite punctilious. They are quite faithful, but it is at a time of national moral decline just the same, and to this desperate situation God says to Hosea, “Listen! I desire mercy not sacrifice.”
That way of casting things (“I desire this and not that”) is a Semitic contrast that basically means, “Listen! If push comes to shove, I desire this above that.” God is not here saying, “I hereby abolish the entire sacrificial system. Wipe it out. I desire mercy. I don’t give a hoot about sacrifice.” That’s not what God is saying.
He’s saying you cannot have vital, biblical faith that centers on mere ritual but does not display mercy. “I desire mercy not sacrifice.” Again, the same point is being made. There is a hierarchy of values. Then Jesus adds something different. Verse 8: “For,” he says, “the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
What does that mean? At very least, Jesus is repeating his claim to be not only above the temple but above the Sabbath laws themselves. He is the Lord of the Sabbath, not only because he is one with the One who assigned it, but he is Sabbath’s superior, Sabbath’s master. Indeed, that to which Sabbath points. Sabbath serves him.
You see, in the ancient world if someone was the master, if someone was the lord, then those or that which over whom he was lord served him. For Jesus to say, “I am the Lord of the Sabbath,” is to say more than, “I set the rules around here.” He is saying something deeper. He is saying, “Sabbath serves me.”
Now we see how this fits into a pattern that is common in the New Testament. It is exceedingly important. Elsewhere, for example, Jesus is presented as the One who is the real Passover Feast. Of course, there was a Passover Feast connected with the old covenant, but he himself is the Passover Lamb.
Elsewhere, the Feast of Tabernacles, another Jewish feast with its heavy symbolism in a water-pouring rite and in a festival of lights. It is on the Tabernacle Feast itself that Jesus comes along and says, “I am the Light of the World.” That is, “This feast of lights points to me.” Or he comes along at the very time when the water is being poured out in the water-pouring rite, and he says, “Those of you who are thirsty, come to me and drink. I am the real drink. I am the living water.”
In area after area of Old Testament covenant religion, he insists again and again and again that rightly understood those things are anticipations of him. They point to him. So also with the Sabbath. “I am the Lord of the Sabbath,” he says. “Sabbath points to me.” Now we understand what this section is doing in the Bible at this point right after the end of chapter 11.
How does chapter 11 end? At the end of chapter 11 Jesus is saying, “Come to me all you who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest.” The very next section finds the Pharisees promulgating their own brand of rest, but it is not rest for their souls. It is not knowledge of God. It is not forgiveness of sins. It is not entrance into God’s rest. Sabbath, rightly understood, points to him. Indeed, that is the very argument of the author of the epistle to the Hebrews in Hebrews, chapter 4.
There, in a tight argument, the author of the epistle to the Hebrews shows the Sabbath rest into which God enters at the end of creation, the rest that the people enter when they go into the land of the Canaan, and the Sabbath rest one day a week all point, finally, pervasively, deeply, to the rest God’s people enter when they put aside their works, when they put aside their self-confidence, when they put aside their self-conceit and find their rest in God alone.
“I,” he says, “am the Lord of the Sabbath.” Christians may disagree about how the old covenant principle of one day in seven should be observed today. What we must not disagree on under any circumstance is that the ultimate and deepest fulfillment is in the rest we have in Jesus Christ. We must come to him who is the Lord of the Sabbath and find our rest in him or all else is counterfeit Christianity.
4. Real Christianity remembers there are people out there.
Verses 9 and following: “Going on from that place, he went into their synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, they asked him, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?’ ” Do you sense the disproportion? They’re looking for a reason to accuse him on the Sabbath. That’s what Sabbath meant to them. A great way to trap people. No sense of disproportion or embarrassment.
“He said to them, ‘If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a man than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.’ Then he said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other. But the Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus.”
Here it is Jesus’ activity that is called into question, not that of his disciples. First-century Jews discussed at length what was and was not lawful in caring for the sick on the Sabbath. The general thrust was you’re allowed to engage in that kind of work on behalf of the sick that is necessary to prevent death or to relieve extreme pain. Otherwise, wait till the next day. As one of the synagogue rulers elsewhere said to some who came to Jesus for healing, “There are six days of the week to be healed on. Come the other days.”
But Jesus’ principle is more fundamental: it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. This is not saying that doing good is always required 24 hours a day, for then there would never be rest at all. Jesus himself is certainly elsewhere concerned with rest. “Come aside and rest a while.” He’s not living in some sort of utopian ideal.
What he is saying, however, is that doing good is always lawful, it is always sanctioned, it is always permitted, and there is a tremendous irony in the verses themselves, for while Jesus does good on the Sabbath they are involved on the Sabbath in plotting his murder, so great is their dislike of his authority claims.
That is why this section is related to the next few verses in the chapter. Do you ever get the impression when you’re reading through the Gospels there is sort of an isolated story here and a further blurb here and another one down a bit and it’s hard to see what the flow is? In fact, when you pause and read the flow again and again and again, it leaps out to you from the page, and here you see what the connection is.
Jesus is doing good on the Sabbath. He is healing. He is transforming. In the very next verses we read, “Aware of their acrimony and of their plotting, Jesus withdrew from that place. Many followed him, and he healed all their sick. He warned them not to tell who he was.” Then we are told, “This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: ‘Here is my servant whom I have chosen, the one I love, in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations.’ ”
Then this: “He will not quarrel or cry out; no one will hear his voice in the streets [like some rancorous trumpeter]. A bruised reed he will not break …” That is, he’ll find a stalk in a swamp, bruised, and instead of snapping it off as if it is worthless, he will tape it up in the hope it will regain its fibrous strength and grow straight and tall in the winds.
“… a smoldering wick he will not snuff out …” A candle is blown out and it still has a glowing ember at the end. Instead of wetting his fingers and snuffing it out, he blows on it gently and fans it back into flame. That is the way he treats people. “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, till he leads justice to victory.”
Real religion remembers there are people out there. Real Christianity remembers there are people out there. That means at the end of the day this story is telling us things that are foundational in Christian faith. Elsewhere, Jesus says, “The first commandment is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and the second is to love our neighbors as ourselves.”
In yet another place Jesus says, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples if you love one another.” Any form of religion that does not so transform us that we aim by our faith to serve others is cheap and shoddy. It is, finally, counterfeit. Then we must ask ourselves, “Is our Christianity real or counterfeit?”
This kind of passage is not directed to the irreligious and to the immoral. Another kind of passage is addressed to that sort of person. This passage is addressed to conservatives like me, like most of you, I suspect … conservatives for whom good, structured show is sometimes more important than a vital relationship with Jesus Christ, and there we must be brought back to basics again and again and again.
We are told our religion must never, ever degenerate to mere rules. It must never, ever remove its focus from the primacy of Jesus Christ. It must always remember there are people to be served. God help us so to do. Let us bow in prayer.
Our Father, we freely confess we have sometimes been satisfied to develop mere discipline instead of a repentant heart. We have sometimes been more interested in what we could get away with than in devotion to your dear Son. We have sometimes been interested in defining our faith by dos and don’ts instead of by grasping that, finally, we are redeemed, we are transformed, we are saved for all eternity by your grace, and all of our obedience is but the response of broken and contrite hearts to that grace.
So make us holy, we pray, and grant that in our confession of Jesus as Lord we will not seek to surround that confession with endless protective rules but, rather, to follow everything he says and everything he commands and everything he demands and everything he teaches with wholehearted allegiance and obedience, recognizing by grace we have been saved, by grace we stand, by grace we grow in obedience, and by grace we grow in conformity to your dear Son.
Forgive us our sins and lead us at the last into the mighty freedom of the sons of God when all who are his children by adoption will enter into the joy of a new heaven and a new earth. We ask in Jesus’ name, amen.
