Why are you doing what is unlawful on the sabbath?
The priests of the temple could work on the Sabbath and remain blameless, and part of that service meant consuming the bread of offering so that they would have enough strength for their service. Jesus was himself the one greater than the temple. True, the service that he and his disciples were performing was not according to the duties of the Levitical priesthood. Yet David, who was not a Levite, was permitted to eat and share the bread with his companions because of his need. More to it, there was something about his kingly mission, because it was not of merely human origin, was also a priestly mission.
The vessels of the young men are holy even when it is an ordinary journey. How much more today will their vessels be holy?” (see First Samuel 21:5).
Jesus was explicitly stating that the Sabbath was never meant to make men go hungry. He made similar points by healing on the Sabbath. But by his allusion to David he hinted at something more. It was not just as ordinary hungry men that the disciples were justified in eating the grain, though that would have been enough. It was in the "priestly service of the Gospel of God" (see Romans 15:16) that they were free to eat. The Sabbath was no longer to be ordered primarily around temple worship. The Sabbath was to be correctly centered on Jesus himself.
Then he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”
This explains why one of the things that distinguished Christians from their Jewish forebears so early and so shockingly was the transference of the Sabbath obligation to Sunday, to the Lord's day. Jesus himself said he desired mercy, not sacrifice. The temple sacrifice therefore gave way to the mercy he poured out in his passion, death, and resurrection. The Sabbath of the Jews, commemorating the rest of God on the first Saturday of creation, was merely a foreshadowing of Holy Saturday, when Jesus himself would rest in the earth. In Jesus, then, the true fulfillment would be found on Sunday, on the eighth day of creation, which is the first day of the new creation, when the relationship between man and God was restored and mercy was made available to the whole world.
The Pharisees were not prepared to see Jesus as who he was. They did not want to recognize this man from Nazareth and his ragtag band of disciples as priests and royalty. Yet at every step, what Jesus said and did could only make sense to those who could see in him the fulfillment of all that had gone before. If Jesus was indeed the Lord of the Sabbath, God himself, then it made sense for all things to be ordered around him. It made sense for all of the work he and his disciples did to be holy work, if anything even more appropriate on the Sabbath than on other days. But to imagine that even the Sabbath, the sacred institution of the law, was awaiting a greater fulfillment was too great a challenge for those confident of their own understanding of things.
Why are you doing what is unlawful on the sabbath?
How confident are we of our own understanding of things? Does Jesus still have room within us to reveal his mercy and direct us toward his mission? Or have we rather become stale, stagnant, static, and entrenched in habits that may not as life-giving as they could be, as life-giving as we are indeed meant to be? Does legalism enter into our hearts, not out of concern for God's law, but to build up our own pride and to tear others down?
We need to be "firmly grounded, stable, and not shifting from the hope of the Gospel that you heard". But we need to be so in a way that is docile to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Without due caution we can begin with the Spirit and end with the flesh (see Galatians 3:3), reverting to the mere letter of the law. The letter itself is not enough. It brings only condemnation and death precisely because it is something we can twist to our own destruction, and because it itself is powerless to help us to obey or even to want to obey. But the Spirit is not powerless. He reveals Jesus to us. He allows us to take the risk of strengthening ourselves for priestly mission by receiving the holy bread, even when critics condemn us for indulging when, to them, other things seem more appropriate. The Spirit shows us the way to put the mission first.
Behold, God is my helper;
the Lord sustains my life.
Freely will I offer you sacrifice;
I will praise your name, O LORD, for its goodness.
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