Jesus's Saturday Stroll

          Last Friday’s Gospel was an occasion in which Jesus asserts His divinity.  To recap: porters bring him a paralyzed man for healing.  Jesus tells the man “your sins are forgiven.”  That statement elicits opposition among the Pharisees, who rightly insist only God can forgive sins.  Jesus then heals the paralyzed man physically as proof of His authority to forgive sins. 

          Something similar happens in today's Gospel.  Jesus and His disciples are going somewhere on a Saturday and, being hungry, snap off some crops in the field through which they were passing and eat them. 

          But the Pharisees had a very intricately developed system of activities allowable and unallowable on the Sabbath, a day of rest on which “work” was forbidden.  Under that system, the disciples plucking random grain to eat constituted “reaping,” an activity forbidden on the Sabbath. 

          Jesus cuts through the interpretive dispute – is pulling a few cereal grains off a plant “reaping” – to the core issues.  The Sabbath is part of creation.  It is presented as the day God rested.  It is the day of worship.

          That frames the day’s perspective: an interruption of daily work to consecrate time and attention to God.  Genesis can be anthropomorphic: God doesn’t need rest.  He doesn’t get tired, even after creating a cosmos ex nihilo.  But, as an example to those made in His image and likeness, He rests. 

          The disciples did not go out to do normal harvesting.  They are simple guys who are simply hungry – and grab some food in front of them.  That hardly dishonors God.

          But the important point is: Jesus declares what they did to be allowed, framing it in an interpretive perspective on understanding the seventh day: “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”   The next line—the final line of today’s Gospel—is, however, critical from the perspective of whom Jesus is, of Christology: “That is why the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

           Rule of the Sabbath – a divinely established institution part of the very fabric of creation – is a prerogative of God alone.  For Jesus to claim the power to speak authoritatively (“and not like the Pharisees”) about the Sabbath is an implicit claim to being God. It is either that, or He’s insane.

          Comparing today’s and last Friday’s Gospels, we see Jesus claiming two powers that any Jew in His times would have recognized were powers belonging to God and only to God: to forgive sins and to govern the Sabbath.  These are Christological claims.  They are His claims to being divine.

          And that becomes the question of faith: “who do you say I AM?”  The Apostles answer one way.  The Pharisees answer another.  It’s why John stays with Jesus all the way to Calvary and why 10 of the 11 who fled return to Him.  It’s why Caiaphas rends his garments and, together with the Pharisees of the Sanhedrin, condemn Jesus to death as a crazy blasphemer.   This same theme -- what is permitted on the Sabbath -- will surface in tomorrow's Gospel, where Jesus's healing of a man on the Sabbath becomes an event for the Pharisees not to believe in Him but to plot for His death (not unlike how His raising Lazarus seals His fate).

         One thing for certain: today’s Gospel is not just a story about a Saturday stroll.