Good Morning Friends,
“At that time Jesus went through the
grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some
heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him,
‘Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.’ … If you had
known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not
have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
(Matthew 12:1-2, 7-8)
People are more important to God than ritual. That’s
the point Jesus was making in this part of Matthew 12. The disciples of Jesus
were hungry and as they walked through a field on the Sabbath they took some
grain and ate it. That was an unlawful act, it constituted work on the Sabbath,
preparing a meal. But there was no other choice for the disciples. They had no
way to prepare a meal for the Sabbath before it started like the normal Jewish
family did. They were traveling.
The Pharisees were more concerned with ritual
than with people. It didn’t matter to them that the disciples were truly
hungry, they broke the Law and that was the issue. There were no exceptions for
the Pharisees. There were no extenuating circumstances that would allow them to
overlook the breaking of the Law in favor of meeting the needs of people.
It’s not that the Law was unimportant to Jesus,
but that there was a principle more important than the Law -- the needs of
people.
Are you more like Jesus, or more like the
Pharisees? Which is more important -- people or ritual? Compassion or
rule-keeping?
His, by Grace, Steve
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