From Jim McGuiggan... Matthew 12:1-8: The Sabbath's a Person

Matthew 12:1-8: The Sabbath's a Person

Matthew 12:1-8 shows Jesus coming into conflict not with the commands of God but with an established understanding of God’s command. Christ loved the Sabbath because it came from the heart of his Holy Father whose unfathomable generosity and righteousness is expressed in the Sabbath command. 

The Sabbath expressed God-given freedom and release from bondage and Jesus embodied the very heart of God in that respect. He himself was all that the Sabbath stood for and expressed, only he said it better than the Sabbath and in him the truth in the Sabbath plumbed greater depths.

Matthew 11:28 is followed by 12:1-8 for perfectly good reasons. The Jewish scholar, Jacob Neusner in his Introduction to Judaism well expresses the difference between the Jewish Sabbath and a gloomy “Christian” Sunday when he speaks of its pleasures and joy and Bible reading and praise.

For hardworking peasants under Roman taxation and domination the Sabbath was a godsend. It was assurance and hope and the thought of downing tools and enjoying the provision God had given them was something to look forward to. The Sabbath would remind them of Egyptian slavery and domination and of God’s rescue—Rome would be no different for God was the God of Rome. Leaders took this gift that God gave to his people and made it a burden, a yoke that rubbed them raw. The Sabbath lost what the Sabbath meant. Looking at such people Jesus said in Matthew 11:28, “I’m the Sabbath!” 

And that’s something like what he meant when he said in 12:8 that he was the Lord of the Sabbath. He wasn’t saying that the Sabbath meant one thing but that he as the Messiah was claiming executive privilege for himself and his disciples (as Calvin claimed he was doing). He was claiming that the Sabbath was to be understood in light of him. He was not putting a new interpretation on the Sabbath and much less was he saying something like, “I make laws; I don’t obey them.” No, Jesus said he came to fulfil the law and the prophets (compare Matthew 5:17).  

These leaders should have known that the disciples were guiltless and they would have known it if they had understood Hosea 6:6. It wasn’t the case that Christ’s Messiahship trumped the Pharasaic authority. It wasn’t a case of them saying, “Here’s our authoritative ruling” and Jesus saying, “I’m the Messiah and I outrank you so your rules don’t apply to me or mine.”  He said something like, “If you had understood Hosea 6:6 you wouldn’t have made such rulings.” Their conflict was not with Jesus alone but with the God of the prophets. Their conflict was not with a new interpretation but with an old and abiding truth. 

So when Rendel Harris years ago said that the disciples in Matthew 12 were plucking freedom and eating liberation he didn’t mean they were gaining freedom from God’s Sabbath. God’s Sabbath never stood for anything else but freedom and joyful release and God’s Son in his very person and work embodied that for poor souls that were captive in all the ways that a poor soul can be captive! 

©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.

Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.