Jesus and the Forbidding Pharisees – Part 2
Who Do You Think You’re Talking To?
Matthew 12:1-14
During the Victorian era, one how-to-do-it-right manual was Lady Gough’s Book of Etiquette. In this volume, putting books by male authors next to books by female authors was forbidden – unless the authors were married.
• Different parts of the United States, as well as other parts of the world, have some unique and eccentric laws of their own. In Alabama, putting salt on a railroad track may be punishable by death and keeping an ice cream cone in your back pocket at any time is a crime.
• A law in Fairbanks, Alaska does not allow moose to have sex on city streets. In Alaska, you may hunt a bear safely but it is illegal to wake a bear and take a picture for photo opportunities.
• In Arizona, US, donkeys cannot sleep in bathtubs and you may be imprisoned for 25 years for cutting down a cactus.
• In Arkansas, schoolteachers who bob their hair are not eligible for a raise and it is illegal to buy or sell blue light bulbs.
• In Baldwin Park, California, nobody is allowed to ride a bicycle in a swimming pool
• In Los Angeles, a man can legally beat his wife with a leather belt or strap, but the belt can’t be wider than 2 inches, unless he has his wife’s consent to beat her with a wider strap. Consent should be given prior to the event, as is carefully stipulated in the law.
• In the Philippines, cars whose license plates end with a 1 or 2 are not allowed on the roads on Monday, 3 or 4 on Tuesday, 5 or 6 on Wednesday, 7 or 8 on Thursday, and 9 or 0 on Friday from 7:00 AM onwards to keep roads free of traffic jams.
• In Singapore, it is illegal to come within 50 meters of a pedestrian crossing marker on any street.
• In South Korea, traffic policemen are required to report all bribes that they receive from motorists.
• In Switzerland, it is illegal to flush the toilet after 10 PM.
• In Thailand, it is illegal to leave your house without wearing underwear.
These are just a handful of the silly laws and regulations from around the world that made very good sense to somebody sometime – but they make little or no sense to us today.
In our text this afternoon, we run across a similar situation, but with a sinister twist. In our story today, the Forbidding Pharisees are back and do they ever have an attitude! They have a whole slew of legislated laws regarding the Sabbath that they expect everyone to keep with exacting detail, and they have made it their life’s work to ensure that no one violates their laws.
What I find most interesting is that the Pharisees took the Law of God and interpreted it loosely when it suited their purposes, and wrenched down on it when that suited their purposes.
Remember back in Matthew 5:27-28 when Jesus was speaking about adultery? The Pharisees had so loosened the Law that they allowed a man to divorce his wife if she displeased him for any reason! Jesus comes along and says, “Oh, no! God has ordained that one man is joined to one woman for a lifetime and even to look outside of that bond with desire is the same as having already committed adultery – which is a capitol offense.”
Their lustful and power-grubbing ways had caused them to loosen the Law to suit them. In our lesson today, we see the opposite situation unfold.
As we studied last time, the situation is this: Jesus and His disciples are walking through a grain field on the Sabbath (probably violation #1)… They haven’t had breakfast – in fact, they were good Jews and didn’t do any work at all on the Sabbath. The laws regarding the keeping of the Sabbath as given by God through Moses to the Children of Israel in the wilderness we somewhat specific.
We studied Matthew 12:1-8 last time, which gives one of the accounts of the incident where the Lord’s disciples picking the heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath. When the Pharisees saw it, they went to Jesus and accused them of Sabbath-breaking. The Lord’s response was to acquiesce regarding the charge ("yes, they did what you said"), but to turn to the greater issues at hand. Jesus cited David’s eating of consecrated bread (1 Samuel 21:1-9).
We saw that the common elements of these two events were these: David and Jesus both had followers who broke the Sabbath; food was eaten to alleviate hunger; and there were considerations that justified the Sabbath-breaking.
Thus, since David’s action was acceptable to the Judaism of the day, then the action of His disciples was also acceptable, or to put it another way, Sabbath-breaking was acceptable for the right reasons. Since David was the future king, it was acceptable for his followers to eat the consecrated bread and, likewise, it was acceptable for the disciples to break the Sabbath-rules because of Who Jesus was!
My favorite Abraham Kuyper quotation comes from a speech that he once gave before a university audience in Amsterdam. He was arguing that scholarship is an important form of Christian discipleship. Since scholarship deals with God’s world, it has to be done in such a way that it honors Christ. Kuyper concluded with this ringing proclamation: “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’”
Matthew 12:9-14, follows up immediately with a second incident between Jesus and the Pharisees regarding the Sabbath. Going into their synagogue for worship, and knowing that Jesus would heal a man with a withered hand, the Pharisees asked Jesus if it were lawful to do good on the Sabbath.
In reply, Jesus exposed the hypocrisy of the Pharisees with the simple question of which one of them would fail to rescue their lamb if it were trapped on the Sabbath Day. They knew immediately that they were outdone by this answer, and both the words of Jesus and His action in healing the man showed that Sabbath-breaking, in order to do good, was completely acceptable to God.
The two parallel accounts of this are in Mark 3:1-12, and Luke 6:6-11. In all three accounts, Jesus is the one Who puts the Pharisees to the test – again. In Matthew’s account we have Jesus asking the Pharisees, "What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out?” In Mark’s and Luke’s accounts, Jesus also says to them, "I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to destroy it?"
Last time we saw that Jesus made it clear to all that the well-being of a person was more important to God than the observance of rules – that the rest of the Sabbath was made for man, not the other way around.
There is a little word in Matthew’s account that I find very interesting, and that is the word “their” in verse 9. Who is the “their” referring to? I believe the “their” is the Pharisees to whom He is speaking. Jesus entered their synagogue that Sabbath day.
Matthew shows us that this whole incident was a set-up on the part of the Pharisees “And they questioned Jesus, asking, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?’ – so that they might accuse Him.”
In John 5:1-18, there is another story of Jesus performing a healing on a Sabbath. Not only did Jesus do a work of healing on the Sabbath, He commanded the healed man to pick up his pallet and to walk (both technical violations of the Sabbath rules). Later, when Jesus encountered the healed man again and admonished him further, the Pharisees attacked Jesus yet again. The one sentence answer given by Jesus was one of His most profound on this issue: "My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working."
Notice that with this statement, Jesus claimed that the Father is no longer resting, but is at work, even on the Sabbath. Thus, not only did Jesus make Himself out to be one with the Father, but He pointed out He and His Father were Sabbath-breakers as well! Under the law, to imitate God meant to rest. Under the new covenant being worked out by Jesus, to imitate God meant to work!
For this cause, and for the cause that He violated what they held to be sacred, the Pharisees sought to kill Jesus. They sought to kill the Lord of the Sabbath.
John 7:21-24 gives the impressive response of Jesus when He pointed out that the Pharisees practiced circumcision on the Sabbath and did not regard this work as unlawful. These religious leaders understood that some parts of the law overshadowed other parts, in this case the rule to circumcise on the 8th day even if it were the Sabbath.
If they could see this, then they needed to see the good in His healing a man and making him whole even if that occurred on the Sabbath. He told them "not to judge by appearance, but to judge with righteous judgment." On the surface, something may look like an infraction of the law, but in reality that event might actually conform to the spirit of the law.
Jesus entered into conflict with the Pharisees over the issue of the Sabbath primarily as a way to reveal His identity as God. The early miracles of Jesus which occurred on the Sabbath (Mark 1:21-28 for instance) did not generate any opposition.
It was not until later, when Jesus was making the claim to be God, that the Pharisees attempted to discredit Him with the charge of law-breaker (if Jesus broke the Sabbath law, then He was a sinner, and obviously not God). As God, Jesus could do work on the Sabbath and offer a true rest from the labors of the people to please God with their rituals and rules (we saw when we studied Matthew 11:28-30, the offer of "rest" to men weary of burdens).
Also, as a result of His ministry and teaching on the Sabbath, we see that the intent of the Law of God was more important than the minute keeping of the letter of the law. There were exceptions to the Sabbath rules because the Lord of the Sabbath did not invent it in order to be a burden on the people.
The rest of the New Testament deals with the church and God’s law in view of the work of Jesus on the cross to provide salvation to all men. Remember, God’s law acts as a mirror to point out sin, and if used as a vehicle for salvation, it must be kept perfectly.
Even one violation of the law, no matter how small, makes one a lawbreaker, and thus guilty before God and deserving of punishment. If someone "under the law," like the Jews in Israel, wanted to go to heaven based upon their own righteous deeds and works, the Law would pronounce them guilty, hence the preoccupation of the Pharisees with minute over-regulations concerning the Sabbath day observances.
They weren’t concerned about holiness for God’s sake, but rather for their own self-interest. It was all about. “Look at how holy I am making myself, how righteous I am before God because I keep all these little details of the Law.”
What they completely missed was what we saw last time that Jesus kept nailing them with the fact that, in their mechanical, ritualistic attempt at Sabbath-keeping, the Pharisees had missed the essence of the Law, which was mercy and compassion, just as Hosea had spoken, "I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice." This is the second time Jesus has reprimanded them with this quote from Hosea 6:6.
The whole point of this section of this passage is that man is more important than rules – God expects mercy and compassion for the well-being of others to be the overriding factor in our attempts to live in obedience to the Law.
What I mean here is that, when you have to make a choice about whether to come for worship on Sunday afternoon or go and help a coworker who doesn’t know the Lord move into their new home, you’d better be absent from here that day. That’s what Jesus would do, and that’s what He expects of us.
Now, that is not to say that we should start looking for reasons to not come for corporate worship and study of the Word. What I am saying is that it is a matter of our heart.
