David: Hey, everyone. David here with our second installment of our sermon series on the Book of Mark. Our local church has been going through the Book of Mark, and I've been able to preach some of those sermons, and we got some good responses when we shared a few of those with you all, so we decided to share four more of them.
Uh, last time, we took a look at kind of the opening of Mark and John the Baptist's ministry being the fulfillment of Elijah's ministry, and today, we're gonna continue Mark's thesis around who is Jesus by looking at Jesus's lordship over the Sabbath. So Mark's main point is that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah, the promised King from the Old Testament, who has come to rule and reign with God's people as God Himself. And to prove that, he's going to show you so many different things about how He teaches, and His miracles, and who He fulfills, and all these things.
But in this passage, uh, or this collection of passages, Jesus looks at fulfilling the Sabbath, and we see His relationship to the law of God, the Word of God, especially as it relates to the Pharisees' relationship with the law of God and the Word of God. And here we get this kind of combative, um, competition between, quote-unquote, "rabbis," teachers of the law, and it's Mark's way of showing us that Jesus is God, the Messiah, the true deliverer of the Word of God, who's come to bring a Sabbath rule to His people. So I hope you enjoy these, uh, this sermon, looking at the, uh, passages about how Jesus fulfills the Sabbath.
We're going through three stories today, um, all of which have, um, a similar focus. It's kind of Jesus versus the Pharisees in how He interprets and applies the Old Testament law known as the Torah, and we're gonna look at this. I think y- y- we could probably have three different sermons looking at...
Well, let's talk about fasting, let's talk about Sabbath-keeping, and let's talk about healing, like, three of those main things, a- and that would've been really fun, but that's not what I'm doing today.
Uh, and so what we're going to do is we're going to see w- in Mark's Gospel, in the sweep of what he's trying to accomplish, what are these three stories doing for his overall thesis, which we've called, "Who is Jesus?" Mark is trying to prove to his original audience who Jesus was because he started his gospel by making a radical claim that Jesus is the Messiah, the, the promised King of Israel, the descendant of David, the Son of God, God in the flesh, and those are some pretty insane things to say about a human being from a small town called Nazareth with a common name of the time, of Jesus.
And so Mark is writing this whole thing, trying to show us and prove to us who Jesus is, and so far, throughout his gospel, he's done that in a lot of different ways, and we've looked at those throughout our last several weeks together in Mark's Gospel. But today is kind of this climax of Mark's thesis, and especially how it corresponds to the Pharisees, because you have three stories where Jesus is at odds with the Pharisees about how to interpret the law, and at the end of it, the Pharisees decide to kill Him for law-breaking. So at the end of this, Jesus gets this death sentence from the Pharisees, and they're going to seek to destroy His life for Sabbath-breaking.
That was a, that was a command in Exodus, that if anyone breaks the Sabbath, they are to be killed. And so the Pharisees are trying to obey the law, Jesus is trying to teach us how to obey the law, and they're at odds with each other, and these three stories build up to that climax. So that's what we're gonna look at today.
If you wanna write down kind of three headings, if you're keeping notes, um, and you wanna be super, uh, witty or dumb, however you wanna view this, you have three Ws if you wanna write them down. We got three stories: wine, wheat, and withered. I just thought that was funny.
Okay, moving on. [laughing] Never coming back to that again. [laughing] Forget I said it if, if I dis- was just, just completely discredited in your, in your eyes.
Um, as w- before we look at, at all three of these stories, I gotta give you a little bit of background about who the Pharisees are, because the Pharisees, I think, f- for a lot of us, and for me for a really long time, can kind of be pigeonholed, um, or painted with a broad brush, uh, for what they believed. I was like, "Oh, they're these legalistic meanies, you know, who just, uh, thought they could save themselves through their works." Uh, and their, their views are way more nuanced than that, a- and, and we need to be a little bit more gracious to them. I mean, now, Jesus had strong words against them, I'm not trying to skirt around that, but let's round them out just a little bit.
The Pharisees were a, a religious faction inside of the, the Israelite faith, and they were devoted to law-keeping, and they wanted to keep the law because they believed that law-keeping would bring the Messiah. It would bring the Kingdom of God back to Earth. If they just kept the law perfectly, then the Messiah would come, and He would conquer their enemies, and He would, He would reestablish Israel as a blessing to the world.
And so they were these zealous, devout followers of Yahweh, who were trying to keep the law so that they might bring the Kingdom of God to Earth. Um, and so, like, that's, that's a good endeavor, I think. [chuckles] Uh, um, but it, it kind of got i- a little crazy after a while because they were like, "Well, if we have to keep the law in order to bring the Messiah, let's make sure everybody keeps the law perfectly." So what they did was they started adding a bunch of other laws around the laws that God gave, and you can kind of think of them as like guardrails or fences around the laws that God gave.
And it's like, okay, God said, "Don't break the Sabbath," and that means, like, if you're a farmer, you know, don't harvest that day, don't plant that day. But let's put a fence around it, and let's just say, "Nobody touch any-
... farming equipment or a piece of stock of grain or anything like that. Just don't do it, and then we'll be totally safe from Sabbath-breaking. And so they, a- a- and, and these, uh, these oral laws ended up getting cauterized in the second or third century after Jesus in a document known as the Mishnah.
And in the Mishnah, uh, which kind of represents a formal version of what the Pharisees would have been teaching, um, we had thirty-nine, uh, categories, not laws, categories, chapters, if you will, in the Mishnah, all about extra Sabbath law keeping commandments, and they contain, uh... Let me just read a few of these categories for you. There are prohibitions against, and these are, remember, these are chapters, not laws, uh- carrying, burning, extinguishing, writing, erasing, cooking, washing, sowing, tearing, knotting, untying, plowing, planting, reaping, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, and that's just a few.
There's thirty-nine of those, and then underneath, there's all these other laws, and they're trying to fence the, the, the law of God with extra man-made laws to keep people from breaking them, right? So that, and this is so important, so that the Messiah would come, so that the King of Israel return, and so that Israel could be a blessing once again to the world. Like, they wanted a good thing, but they were going about it in the wrong way.
Amen. Okay. So there are these rabbis of sorts.
They're teaching people how to interpret and apply the law, and then Jesus comes, and He's a rabbi. He's teaching people how to interpret and apply the law, and He is doing it in a very different way because He doesn't seem like He's trying to fence the law, uh, try to, like, keep Israel as clean as possible, keep them at, at arm's length from anything that might seem sketchy or law-breaking. Instead, Jesus, in our last passage that Hayden preached through last week, Jesus is, like, going to the worst people, the people who probably the Pharisees think brought Israel's destruction on them, with the sinners and the tax collectors and the people of ill repute, and Jesus is eating with them and feasting with them, throwing gigantic parties.
Like the, the passage Hayden preached last time when Jesus was eating with tax collectors and sinners, it says that there were many tax collectors and sinners. This was a banquet for sinners, which means I would have gotten an invite to that party, and so would you. And [laughing]...
[audience laughing] A- and that's how this rabbi's coming. He's not coming with fences around the law. He's coming and throwing a party for sinners, and it's like, what is this difference between these two types of law keeping?
And that is what Jesus is going to show us in these three stories, so let's jump into them. [claps] First, the wine one, okay? And here we're gonna see that Jesus is the fulfillment of the law.
Jesus is the fulfillment of the law. Mark two, eighteen to twenty: "Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting, and people came to Him and said, 'Hey, uh, why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?' And Jesus said to them, 'Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast.'" So there's this thing happening here around fasting.
The Pharisees, uh, and the disciples of John the Baptist, uh, also, they were just very zealous for the Kingdom of God to come, and so not only were there extra rules around the, the laws, there were also extra rules about what to do with... Not, not just what to avoid, but what to, like, do and work at. And so some of those things were around, uh, like extra tithes, um, extra acts of asceticism, and extra fasts.
Now, the Law, the Torah, only commands one fast. It's a fast during the Day of Atonement described for us in Leviticus. Now, if you wanna stretch that out, in Zechariah, uh, it describes it, eight, eight, nineteen, yeah, if you wanna look it up, describes four more fasts, um, that Israel developed during exile.
And then Esther nine thirty-one, for the Feast of Purim, uh, celebrates another fast. So at most, we've got six fasts in the Old Testament commanded or a- at least insinuated that we might keep. However, throughout the Gospels, we see, and we can piece together through, like, Luke 18:12 and some other places, that the Pharisees were publicly keeping two weekly fasts.
So twice a week, they would fast, and it would be done in a very public way. This is why Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount would have to say, "Hey, when you fast, don't make a big deal about it, you know, like the Pharisees do." So these Pharisees are publicly fasting twice a week. Why?
They're doing it because they are trying to show their desperation to God for Him to come to them in their king, in their Messiah. They're doing it because they're just crying out for God to come. So are the disciples of John the Baptist.
They're all just wanting God to return as the Messiah, and so they're fasting. They're depriving themselves. They're crying out to God, "God, what do we have to do to get you to come?
How clean do we have to be? How much law do we have to keep?" And then Jesus comes, and He says, "I'm here. Stop fasting." Like, "The one you've been longing for is knocking at the door.
I'm right here. What are you doing?" And so He tells this little parable about a wedding, and He says, like, "Hey, think about a wedding. Whenever you're at a wedding, and everyone's gathered at the reception, and you all have, like...
There's the cake tower, and the catering's ready, and everybody has their place settings, and, and, yeah, you might not eat yet. There's a little fast there before the bride and groom come in. But then when the bride and groom come in, comes in, and the, the DJ turns on the music, and they cut the cake, and they serve the food, what do you do?
You feast because the wedding is being consummated, and the groom and the bride are there, and so you party." And He's like: The reason why my disciples aren't fasting the way you guys are fasting is 'cause you're fasting-... for something in the future, that it might come. But my disciples know that that future thing is here, because I'm here! So they know the fasting is over, and the feasting is starting.
It's not a time for fasting, it's a time for feasting, because the groom is here. Jesus is saying that the law, and all the things it commanded us to do, were to prepare us for his coming. But when he comes, that for which the law prepared us is there, therefore, something has to change, and it's this change that Jesus illustrates in these two other mini parables about, uh, wine and about a garment.
So Jesus gives us two points to kind of drive it home. Mark 2:21-22: "No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.
And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins," which is a total bummer. "But the new wine is for fresh wineskins." So what's going on here?
Few, like, cultural things that we have to kind of rewind our brains back to for the first century. New wine, so wine that was freshly pressed from grapes, would go into new wine skins made from animal leather for the fermentation process. And if you know anything about the fermentation process, there's a lot of gases and bubbles and expanding that happens, and so those new wine skins would have the give in them, the elasticity in them, to grow and stretch and move as the new wine ferments.
And then after that fermentation happened, the, the, the skins would be stretched to their breaking point. They'd kind of dry out, and they are done being stretched. But the wine's ready to drink.
Okay, so now if you took new wine again and filled up that already ballooned wineskin, and it starts to ferment and bubble again, well, it's gonna overexpand. The, the, the leather's not elastic anymore, and it's going to burst. Your wine skins are ruined, your wine is ruined.
So that's what's... That's the, like, world Jesus is playing with. People would ferment wine in their homes all the time, so this was a very common thing for them to be like, "Oh, I get it.
Okay." Um, same kind of thing for the cloth. Uh, when, when a clow-- when a piece of clothing was prepared, it would be processed by someone known as a fuller, and they would clean it. They would remove all the natural oils and the gum that would be, um, in that material.
They would bleach it and make it ready for wearing, and this process radically shrunk the garment. And so if a tear occurred in the garment, you'd have to make sure that the patch you were putting on that piece already went through the fuller, that it was already bleached and removed the oils, and it already shrunk. So that way, when you put it on, and you, you know, you process it again, it's not going to have two different effects, one on the patch, one on the garment, because if you just took an unshrunk piece of cloth and put it on an already shrunk garment, when that one shrinks, it's gonna tear again.
So Jesus is saying the same thing here twice. He, he's saying that new things need new containers, uh, because if you try to force the new into the old, you may do damage to both. So these are the pictures he's using, but what does it all have to do with fasting and the old covenant, the law, and all their longing for the Messiah?
Well, Jesus is making the same point twice, and it's the same point he made in the wedding feast metaphor. He's saying that old wine and wineskins, the old wine and the wineskins of the law, were for preparation. They were to prepare us for the Messiah to come.
So, like, you can think about the law was waiting for fulfillment, and to continue operating under the law for the means of fulfillment i- is to ruin why the law was good in the first place. The law was good. The wine of the law was good.
I think sometimes we can think, like we pigeonhole the Pharisees, we can pigeonhole the law and think, "Oh, the law is, like, oppressive, and it's hard," and it's like, no, it's good. It was for the people's good. It was for their salvation.
It was a good thing. The wine was good, but it was pr- it was preparatory. It was getting them ready for the one who would ultimately fulfill it, and now that new wine of Jesus is here, and to put it back into skins of preparation would ruin the fact that Jesus was here and would ruin the purpose of the law.
It was to prepare. And so Jesus is saying, "You're fasting and trying to, to get the Messiah here, but the Messiah's come, and you're staying in preparation mode. You're in the old wineskins, and you're missing the fact that I'm already here." And so the old wineskins of preparation are making them overshoot the fact that the Messiah has come, and the, the same thing can be said about the garment.
There was a hole in the garment of the law. It was waiting for fulfillment. Same word in the Bible is used for completion.
It, it, it was missing a piece, right? It was missing a piece, and Jesus is the patch, right? Jesus fixes what was broken, and they were missing that because they were still wearing the garments of preparation, drinking the wine of preparation, and Jesus is like, "Guys, preparation is over.
The one you've been preparing for is here. It's me. I'm the fulfillment of the law.
I'm the groom of the bride."
Crowd: Amen!
David: That's a huge statement for Jesus to make because, in the Old Testament, Jesus regularly... or, sorry, God regularly refers to himself as Israel's groom, as Israel's husband. Just one passage here, although we could have picked a bunch, Isaiah 54:5 and 6: "For your Maker," capital M Maker, this is God speaking, "For your Maker is your husband. The Lord of hosts is his name.
For the Lord has called you like a wife, deserted and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she's cast off, says your God." So Israel's like this deserted, tired, runaway bride, and God is like, "I'm your husband."... and I'm gonna run after you and pursue you. And the, the, the wife's not doing anything for that pursuit. It's not because she fasted a whole bunch and kept a whole bunch of laws that God pursued her like a husband.
God pursued her like a husband because He deeply loved her and loves her, and that's why Jesus came. He's the groom who comes, not because of all the fasting, but because He wants to feast with us. And so the groom is here.
Jesus is the fulfillment of the law. Okay, that was wine, now let's go to wheat. [audience chuckling] Okay, yep, that one's wearing off on us.
Okay, good. [audience laughing] All right, the story tells us how Jesus has authority over the law. So we have Jesus as the fulfillment of the law.
He's the one we've been waiting for. The second story is that Jesus has authority over the law. Amen!
Okay, so here we go. Mount- Mark 2:23-24: "So one Sabbath..." Very important for the setting of these two stories, that it happens on the Sabbath. "One Sabbath, He was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way, His disciples began to pluck heads of grain.
And the Pharisees were saying to Him, 'Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?'" Okay, so we have a really interesting story here because it seems that law-obeying is leading to law-breaking. So there's a real strange irony here, and there's gonna be the same irony in the next story. So, uh, the, the disciples, as they're going through the wheat fields, are keeping a law.
They're doing something that the law provided for, called gleaning, and this, this law prohibited farmers from harvesting all the way up to the edges of their field. It also prohibited any grain that accidentally falls to the ground on its own, they had to leave it there. So the grain that just fell naturally, and the grain all the way to the edges of the field, or grapes or whatever you're harvesting, had to be left alone.
Why? So that the poor and the sojourners could be provided for. Amen.
So as they're walking along the road, they could grab some food and have a great little to-go snack, right? It was for the good of the people, which is interesting. Jesus is gonna say, "The Sabbath is for your good," like the, like the Sabbath was for man, not man for the Sabbath.
Here, gleaning is for the m- is for man, not man for gleaning. Like, [chuckles] that wouldn't make sense. And so they're obeying this law.
They're benefiting from the goodness of the law. Jesus and His disciples are eating something that the law provided for, this gleaning thing. Okay, but the Pharisees are gonna come along, and they're gonna say, "You're not law-keeping, you're law-breaking because you're harvesting on the Sabbath." Okay, I, I'm not an agriculturalist or a farmer, but I'm pretty sure that's not harvesting.
Um- Amen. And so... But under the Mishnah, under the oral tradition of the Pharisees, this was one of the guardrails they had put around Sabbath in terms of harvesting.
Under harvesting, it actually says that gleaning, like, doing the thing that the law says you can do, gleaning was unlawful to do on the Sabbath day, that that was an act of harvesting, and therefore it was Sabbath-breaking. And so for them, and the way they saw it, they were breaking the man-made rule, which meant they were breaking God's rule, which that's always dangerous when we do those... We conflate those two things.
Amen. Uh, yeah. [chuckles] And, and so, so, um, there's this tension that's happening here, and, and, and they're asking Jesus: "What gives you the right," basically, "to let your disciples harvest on the Sabbath?" And then Jesus tells them a story about King David to answer.
Kinda strange. He tells them a story. He says, um, in Mark 2:25-28, "Have you never read..." Which I always love when Jesus does that.
It's like, "Hey, Pharisees, don't you know your Bible?" [audience laughing] I've never said that to anybody. Um, [chuckles] "Have you never read what David did..." This is King David. "Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he was hungry, he and those who were with him?
He entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest and ate the bread of the Presence," like, He's heightening the stakes in a huge way here, because that's not lawful for anyone but the priest to eat, "and then he also gave it to those who were with him?" And then Jesus said, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, so the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath." Amen. So Jesus is recounting this story, and it's a story told, if you wanna read it later today, in 1 Samuel 21. And in this time, uh, a few chapters earlier, David had already been anointed as the true king of Israel, and he is now on the run from the kind of pretender to the crown, King Saul.
And Saul is getting super jealous of David because of all the fame he's won for killing Goliath a- and so he starts to pursue David and tries to kill him in his court. David flees, gets a small band of loyal soldiers, and they are on the run, trying to escape Saul and somehow wait on God to put David on the throne. And, uh, they come to a city called Nob, and at, at this point in Israel's history, that's where the tabernacle was, and that's where the sacrifices were offered, that's where the priests operated.
And so David comes there, and he comes to the priest. He's like: "We are out of food, we've been traveling, and we're s- and we're super hungry." And so the high priest says, "Man, all I have for you is the holiest bread on the planet. Uh, literally, if you ate this, you would, you would have to be killed.
Uh, this is only, not even just for the priest to eat." Whenever the bread of the Presence was given in Exodus, it was only for Aaron's sons to eat, so, like, the high priest of high priests. This is very exclusive bread, um, and, and no one's allowed to eat it. And so David makes up a story, actually, in 1 Samuel 21, and, and he says, "Oh, yeah, so I'm on a mission from King Saul." Uh, and I love it.
It's hilarious. He's like, "He told me to go and do such and such and not to tell anybody." Literally, it says "such and such." [chuckles] Like, he, uh, he just doesn't even tell him the details of his plan. I just think that's so funny.
And so the priest is like, "Oh, the king has a need? We can break the law." And so he gives David the bread of the Presence.... But I also think he's also doing that because he knows who David is.
He knows he's the actual anointed king. He knows of his fame from killing Goliath. He actually, uh, well, we won't go into that.
[chuckles] But, I, I think he's, he's saying, "You, you are the anointed king of Israel, and so w- we can break the law for that as well." Why? How does this make sense? What's the point Jesus is trying to prove here?
He's saying, "Kings have authority over laws." Like, who makes laws? Kings do, right? So kings have authority over the law, and who would have the ultimate authority over God's law?
Well, God Himself, the King of Kings. And so when Jesus answers the question of the Pharisees, "What gives you the right to let your, your, your disciples break the Sabbath?" He says, "Well, I'm the real Son of David, the King of Israel, who has authority over the law. I can eat any bread I want to.
I'm the Lord of the Sabbath." He's saying, "I'm the king who has authority over the law." Now, He could have just answered with, uh, this rabbi statement that He makes: "Hey, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. You're just interpreting the law poorly," right? [chuckles] He could've just said, like, "Be better rabbis."
Crowd: Amen!
David: But He didn't. [chuckles] [laughing] He said, "I'm God, [chuckles] and I have the authority over the law. Also, the Sabbath is really good, and you should keep it and stop trying to just earn favor and everything through it." But that's, you know, more of His minor point.
So we've seen in the first story of wine, Jesus is the fulfillment of the law. He's the groom we've been waiting for, God coming to pursue His bride, and when He comes, we feast with Him. In the second story of wheat, we see that Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath.
He is the King who has authority over His law. And then now, in the third story, we are going to see that Jesus brings about the purpose of the law. Jesus brings about the purpose of the law.
Mark 3:1-6: "Again, He entered the synagogue." So this again is cueing us into the fact that this is probably the same synagogue in Capernaum, where the man who was demonized was set free, also, I believe, on the Sabbath. Uh, and so you have this people there, and they saw Jesus maybe break the Sabbath last time with that, so they're coming back to see, will He do it again? And so: Again, He entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand.
And they watched Jesus to see whether He would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him. So they're like, "We've set a trap." And Jesus said to the man with the withered hand, "Come here." And He said to them... So He has the man with the withered hand next to him, addresses everybody in the crowd, knowing their hearts, and He says, "Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or harm, to save life or to kill?" But they were silent.
And He looked around on them with anger, grieved at their hardness of hearts, and said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." And the man stretched out his withered hand, and it was restored.
Crowd: Amen.
David: And the Pharisees went out immediately, probably to get away from what they saw as unclean Sabbath-breaking. They went out immediately and held counsel with the Herodians, the political powers, against Him, to know- to figure out how to destroy Him. Okay, so here's our last story.
Jesus knows the hearts of the people who have gathered there in the synagogue. He knows that they want to find a way to accuse Him for Sabbath-breaking so that they might put Him to death. He knows exactly what He was doing, and so He, He brings up this man with a withered hand.
We don't quite know what that ailment was. Mark uses the word 'withered' to mean things like, uh, stiff, dried up, shriveled. Uh, people have speculated at what this is.
It doesn't really matter. What matters is that Jesus heals it. Um, and so, uh, but why would this be Sabbath-breaking?
Okay, again, Jesus is pinpointing the oral traditions of the Pharisees, 'cause under the Mishnah, there is, uh, a whole section on basically first aid. And while, um, Michael, you might have to help me with this when it comes to first aid, but I, uh, but while, while it was hel- while you were allowed to save a life, if it was, like, leading to death, and someone was, like, bleeding out, you could suture it. Um, but if somebody had, like, a non-life-threatening ailment or a dis- a d- a deformity, you couldn't work to bring restoration on the Sabbath.
And so Jesus picked an ailment on purpose that was going to break the Mishnah, the oral tradition of the Pharisees, the extra laws, but not break the actual Sabbath, and Jesus is toeing that line to poke at the Pharisees and what's happening here. And so Jesus asked them a question. He says, "Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or harm?"
Crowd: Amen.
David: Okay, those are some categories I think that make some sense here. He, he could, he could do good by healing this man, and maybe by leaving him alone, that would be harming him. But then He ratchets it up, kind of to an unexpected place, and He says, "To give life or to kill." Whoa, how did you get there, Jesus?
This man's life isn't in danger. Maybe he's had this withered hand for decades. Uh, how...
He's not gonna die. That's not what He's talking about. He's talking about the unspoken, secret conversation of everyone's heart there in the synagogue that day, and how they were looking for a reason to put Him to death.
They were planning and scheming and working on the Sabbath for a way to kill Jesus.
Crowd: Amen.
David: They were Sabbath-breaking. [chuckles] They were plotting on how to kill. Jesus was plotting on how to give life....
And so what Jesus is doing here is he's actually, and it, and it, it so lines up with that this is the big climax of how to interpret the law with the Pharisees, because he, he's, he's quoting, he's making an allusion to the end of the Torah in Deuteronomy. He's making an allusion there, because after all the law is given, Moses comes to the people with the law, and he says, "Okay, I now set before you right and wrong, life and death." Amen. "Now choose life so that you might live." So how we interpret and apply the Torah for the people of Israel, especially for the Pharisees, would all lead to whether we live or die.
If we break God's law, we, we die. If we keep God's law, we live. But now Jesus is in this synagogue, and he's saying, "I now put before you life and death." And what he's saying is, "If you in your heart [chuckles] can't accept me and the good I'm trying to do, yes, on the Sabbath, but through my entire existence here, if you can't accept me, you've chosen death.
Not only my death, to put me to death, but you've chosen your own death. That I am the fulfillment of the law, therefore, to deny me is to choose death." Amen. But he also puts before them life.
He's like, "Hey, I'm here. The groom you've been waiting for is present. The king who has authority over the law is in your midst, and I'm here, and I know that your arm is withered.
I know your hearts are broken. I know your world is diseased. I know your country is being oppressed, but I'm here to heal and bring life, and if you just believe in me, then you've fulfilled all the law, and you've chosen life." So Jesus is saying that he is the choice to make.
He is the one that, that shows whether you're choosing life or death. And it's this, and he heals the, the man, which they interpret as Sabbath-breaking, so they go out and decide that, "Okay, we have enough witnesses here to bring charges against Jesus to put him to death." Uh, and just to wrap up, I think there's one other thing happening here that I, I find super interesting, and just give me some grace here. This is just me kind of meditating on, on this, um, but I think something really cool is happening, too.
That why is Jesus healing on the Sabbath? I think it's not just to poke at the Pharisees. I think it's to show him who he came to be and what he came to do.
Amen. So if you remember the Sabbath, it, it, it, it came out of Genesis and the creation story. God worked to create the world in six days, and on the seventh day, he rested.
And then throughout the biblical narrative, when works of new creation, when works of restoration, when works of pushing back the darkness and trying to create light, when works of trying to get us back into the Garden of Eden, when those kinds of works are done, they often happen on seven days or the seventh month or the seven-times seventh year. So you can think about every week, you're supposed to have a S- a Sabbath, and that's a day when you stop working from all the toil of the curse, and you rest. Well, that's getting back to Eden, right?
Whenever, uh, it's the seventh month, that's when, like, the Day of Atonement and all these feasts happen. Why? Well, God's trying to get us back into his presence by getting rid of our sin and getting us into Eden again.
It's this act of recreation and restoration. Uh, on the seventh year, it was the Sabbath year, and all fields and all vineyards had to lie fallow, so everybody could take a gigantic break from work, and that would feel Edenic. And then on the seventh-times seventh year, the year of Jubilee, all debts were erased, all land returned to its original owners, um, all slaves were freed, and it was like Eden was coming to earth.
Heaven was coming to earth. It was invading. And so when God does acts of restoration and healing on a seventh day or month, he's showing that, "I'm going to be the God who recreates the world into Eden." And so when Jesus, on a seventh day, [chuckles] like, with a man with a withered hand, which is not Edenic, that's not what it's supposed to be...
Our bodies are not meant to be withered and stiff. They're meant to be glorious and made new. And so Jesus comes as the God of creation and restores his arm.
He's saying, "Behold, I'm gonna make all things new. Will you join me in my new creation project?" Amen. "Choose life, like, life for the whole world." And, like, Jesus is trying to show that he is the God who brings new creation.
So that's what I think, in a sense, these three stories are really just trying to show us, is: Who is Jesus? He is the fulfillment of the law. He's the king who has authority over the law.
He is the one who brings the law's purpose, 'cause the law's purpose was to bring life, and Jesus is like, "I'm the one bringing life," and he's the God of new creation. And so this king has come, and it is okay to fast. I just wanted to say that real quick.
It's still okay to fast. Jesus says that. I was like, "I knew I'm gonna skip that part," but he's like, "Hey, when I leave, you will fast." And when we fast, though, what are we fasting from?
We're f- we're, we're fasting because of our deep hunger for God to return. Like, we know he's coming back. We know our fasting is not gonna bring us- bring him back, but, like, our fasting embodies our longing for him to come back.
But right now is not a time to fast. So if you're fasting, I have a feast for you that you're allowed to take, okay? Everyone in the room is allowed to feast at this table because Jesus is here with us right now at his table.
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Outro: Thank you for listening to the Spoken Gospel podcast. Spoken Gospel creates short films, devotionals, and podcasts like this one. Everything we make is free because of generous supporters like you. To see our resources, visit spokengospel.com or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks for listening. See you next time. [upbeat music]
