Lord of the Sabbath

I was always a compliant child when I was young. I don't remember very many times when I was in trouble, though I did get a few spankings for throwing rocks at girls and a couple of times for fighting. I had a strong sense of what was expected of me, and it was very important to me to meet those expectations.

As I got older, though, I had more and more instances where the expectations from my church and family were in direct conflict with the expectations from my friends. Being the compliant people-pleaser that I am, I found a way to conform to both sets of expectations and compartmentalize them to whichever group of people I was around at the time. And I became an expert at justifying myself in doing so.

But you could not find a stronger advocate of doing the "right" thing than me. I was the moral-est kid you may have ever met. I was an expert at following the rules. When the rules suited me.
This is one of the problems with moralism in general.

Aside from the fact that following the rules has never been a path to eternal life, human beings are really great at justifying our own bad actions while holding the often contradictory standards of moral behavior. This is actually one definition of Cognitive Dissonance. We see ourselves as good people, so when our own actions violate our moral code, we find a way to call what we did actually a good thing.

It becomes difficult when one moral good comes into conflict with another moral good. Like stealing bread to feed your starving family.

Matthew 12 contains a couple of these moral dilemmas that Jesus intentionally brought to the consciousness of the religious leaders of Israel, specifically related to the Sabbath Law.
The Pharisees had taken a simple law, "Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy", and so defined the specifics of what was and was not allowed that there were 39 different categories, and thousands of specific rules as to what you could and could not do on a Sabbath day.

So Jesus walks through a grain field and His disciples grab some grain to eat because they were hungry. And then Jesus decides to heal someone who had come to the synagogue. Both of these were forbidden.

When the Pharisees called Him out for breaking the Sabbath rules, Jesus first reminded them that their hero, King David, didn't just feed himself on the Sabbath but ate the sacred bread from the Tabernacle. Then Jesus challenged them to consider the greater law, "I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice". To fully offend these Pharisees, Jesus even called Himself the "Lord of the Sabbath"!

You can imagine that this hit all the Pharisees' buttons!

The religious leaders couldn't see or admit where they were breaking greater laws by defining the Sabbath laws to their finest detail. They valued strict adherence to the rules over the greater law of compassion, and overlooked their own failure to follow the rules themselves, or their own tendency to adjust the rules to justify their own bad behaviors.

It's so much better to be people of grace and compassion, to love and forgive than to judge and condemn.

As if that's our job, anyway.

Let's focus on welcoming and offering kindness and forgiveness to people, some who may expect the opposite from church, and let the perfect Lord of the Sabbath set the rules and bring justice.