Lord of the Sabbath

Tuesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time A-1

Entrance Antiphon Ps 66 (65):4 All the earth shall bow down before you, O God, and shall sing to you, shall sing to your name, O Most High!

Collect Almighty ever‑living God, who govern all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Scripture today: 1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 89:20, 21-22, 27-28; Mark 2:23-28

It happened that as the Lord walked through the corn fields on the Sabbath his disciples went ahead to pluck the ears of corn. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath day?” He said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and needed to eat? How he went into the house of God, under Abiathar the high priest, and ate the loaves of proposition which only the priests were allowed to do, and then gave to them who were with him?” And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Therefore the Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath also.” (Mark 2:23-28)

Lord of the Sabbath There is no getting away from it. In passage after passage of the Gospels Jesus makes extraordinary personal claims and in this he is like no other prophet. In the case of the prophets, their claims were far beyond the ordinary, but essentially their claims came down to having received a revelation from God. The prophets of the Old Testament up to John in the New claimed that God had spoken to them and had sent them to his people with a message. Generally the message was a call to repent or else either a great opportunity would be missed or a great punishment would be suffered. In the process of this warning the prophet would remind the people of what God had revealed about himself and his covenant and he might perhaps contribute to this revelation — such as in the prophecies of Daniel about the Son of Man or those of Isaiah about the Suffering Servant. But except for the fact that the prophets claimed to have received a particular revelation they did not direct the attention of their hearers to themselves. They themselves were not part of the revelation. The revelation was about Yahweh and they the prophets were merely his servants. But the case is very different with Jesus of Nazareth. He was accepted by the people as a prophet, and John the prophet before him had borne testimony to him. Now, John’s testimony pointed above all to the very person of Jesus. Elijah had passed on his mantle to Elisha who received, as it were, a double portion of his prophetic spirit. In this particular respect we could even see a likeness between those two prophets and John and Jesus. But again, the case is very different. Neither Elijah nor Elisha pointed to themselves. John pointed to Christ, and Christ pointed to himself. He pointed to himself as the only way to the Father. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one could come to the Father except through him. The prophetic process stopped with Christ. All pointed to him and he pointed to himself. He who sees me, he stated, sees the Father. Our Gospel passage today is one such instance of this (Mark 2:23-28).

One could say that a very great deal of the living of Jewish religion hinged around the observance of the Sabbath. It celebrated communally the very fact of the one and only God on whom the entire creation depended for its existence. At the end of his work of creation, we read in Genesis, God rested, and the Sabbath rest was given over to the acknowledgment of God’s reality and that all creation depended on him. The Sabbath bore witness to God’s lordship. It was sacred and great efforts were expended to preserve its sacredness in the life of the chosen people — in fact, as we read in the Gospels, these efforts ran aground with numerous abuses. The entire Sabbath was often smothered with man-made rules. Our Gospel passage today reports the Pharisees complaining to our Lord that his disciples were violating the Sabbath rest by picking ears of corn as they passed through the fields. Our Lord’s reply? They had forgotten to consider Scripture itself (as in David’s action) and how the Scriptures portray the observance of the Sabbath. God instituted the Sabbath to help man and not to oppress him, to help man to honour him and not to crush him. But more still, the Pharisees were to understand that he, the Son of Man (a title, surely, alluding to Daniel’s prophecies), that he was the Lord of the Sabbath. No one in all Judaism would have claimed to be the Lord of the Sabbath. No prophet ever claimed this, not even Moses who received the Ten Commandments from God, including the third which stipulated the observance of the Sabbath. Only Christ claimed to be the Lord of the Sabbath itself, and he claimed this with the effortless assurance that was characteristic of his many other claims. It was a claim unparalleled in the Old Testament, having no precedent, yet Christ made it with simple and sovereign serenity. He was the Sabbath’s Lord — and he was speaking here of the Jewish Sabbath. Of course, within the life of Christ’s Church the new Sabbath (Sunday) has Christ as its Lord and living Object, but here we are merely considering the person of Jesus in view of his claims.

At the end of the Gospel of St John the risen Jesus appears to the Eleven and turns to Thomas, who had not believed their testimony that he had risen from the dead. He shows Thomas his wounds, and Thomas adores him. He adores him as God, saying, “My Lord and my God!” Our Gospel passage today is one among the numerous striking indicators of his transcendent and unique status among the children of men. He is even the Lord of the Sabbath.

(E.J.Tyler)

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