Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:23-28)

There is a legend about the Taj Mahal that reminds me of how the Sabbath was treated during the time of Jesus. The Taj Mahal is one of the most beautiful and costly tombs ever built. In 1629, when the favorite wife of Indian ruler Shah Javan died, he had a magnificent tomb built as a memorial to her. The temple was constructed with her coffin in the center of the building. As time went on, Shah Javan’s grief was overshadowed by his passion for the building project. Legend has it that one day when he was surveying the grandeur of the building he stumbled over a wooden box, and had some workers throw it out. The wooden box turned out to be his wife’s casket. At some point in his passion for the project he’d lost sight of the purpose for the project.

God had given the Sabbath as a gift to His people. It was an invitation to enter into His rest. And what is rest? The gift of rest was an invitation to know God in a more complete way. To enter into God’s rest was to celebrate God’s fullness. The Sabbath was a day to cease striving and open your eyes to the gifts of God that surround you. God’s rest was an invitation to stop trying to hold on to control and so that you can experience the joy of being held by the Almighty God.

How hard is it for man to let go of control and enter into God’s rest? I think some of the laws that were instituted during Jesus’ time might help illustrate. *The Jewish leaders had established 39 Sabbath clarifications, with each having multiple subdivisions, making for over 1500 prohibitions. Here are some of them.
•It was unlawful to kill a flea that lands on your arm because that would make you guilty of hunting on the Sabbath.
•You could dip your radish in salt but if you left it there too long you were pickling it, and thus working. The Pharisees actually had discussions on how long it took to pickle a radish.
•It was okay to spit on a rock on the Sabbath, but you couldn’t spit on the ground, because that made mud, and mud was mortar, and that was work.*

The Pharisees had managed to take the Sabbath and change it from a day of rest and make it into an impossible struggle. The complicated labyrinth of regulations that they prescribed for keeping the Sabbath holy had made the Sabbath seem more like a curse than a gift. The final irony came when they took their prohibitions concerning the Sabbath and used them to condemn Jesus.

Jesus explained that, “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Jesus used the Sabbath to illustrate what it looked like to live under the shelter of the Most High and find rest in the shadow of the Almighty. He did this by the compassionate way He treated those who were hungry on the Sabbath. The compassion of Christ was met with the condemnation of the Pharisees. In their zeal to follow the rules they had made, they failed to see the Lord of the Sabbath who stood before them with outstretched arms.

*Brian Bill