Sermon for Pentecost 2, June 2, 2024
Mercy and peace to you
all, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people.” Amen.
Mark 2:23-3:6 23Once on a Sabbath day, Jesus
was passing through the grain fields, and his disciples began to pick heads of
grain as they walked along. 24The
Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the
Sabbath day?” 25He replied to
them, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and hungry (he
and his companions)? 26He
entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest and ate the
Bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for anyone to eat, except for the
priests. He also gave some to his
companions.” 27Then Jesus
said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. 28So the Son of Man is the Lord
even of the Sabbath.” 3 Jesus
entered the synagogue again, and a man was there with a withered hand. 2They were watching Jesus closely
to see if he would heal the man on the Sabbath day, so that they could accuse
him. 3He said to the man with
the withered hand, “Step forward!” 4Then
he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good or to do evil, to
save life or to kill?” But they were
silent. 5Then he looked
around at them with anger, deeply grieved at the hardness of their hearts. He said to the man, “Stretch out your
hand.” The man stretched it out, and his
hand was restored. 6The
Pharisees left and immediately began to conspire against Jesus with the
Herodians, plotting how they might kill him. (EHV)
The
Lord of the Sabbath came to serve and to heal.
Dear friends in Christ,
Are we
saved by works of law, or by the mercy of God?
The answer to that question is illustrated in our text this
morning. The Pharisees were full-bore
committed to the idea that salvation comes through obedience of the
law—apparently not realizing how poorly they kept God’s laws as given through
Moses.
Here, the question is focused on obedience to
the law of the Sabbath, the day of rest.
Yet, having come face to face with the Lord who is our rest—our true
Sabbath—they rejected Him and indeed planned to kill Jesus as soon as they
could find the means. So much for their
obedience of God’s law. On the other
hand, Christ’s message for us is that The Lord of the Sabbath came to serve
and to heal.
As Jesus and His disciples made their way
through the countryside on their way to Jerusalem to worship in the synagogue,
the Pharisees were quick to find fault with Jesus’ disciples. Now, they couldn’t find any way to directly
accuse Jesus of breaking the law, so they insinuated His guilt when they
assumed He should have kept His followers from what, in their minds, was a grievous
crime; the disciples had “worked” on the Sabbath day by picking a few heads of
grain as they walked, and husking them in their hands, ate the grain to ease the hunger gnawing at their
bellies.
There was no accusation of stealing the grain for
it was legal according to Mosaic law to do exactly as the disciples were doing
on this journey. However, the Pharisees
had great concern about the Sabbath laws because they and their forerunners had
established very detailed regulations about what constituted work on the
Sabbath. The primary fault of the
accused was that they rolled those grains in their hands to remove the husks
before eating.
In response to the Pharisees’ accusations,
Jesus reminded them of what David had done as he fled from an angry and
vengeful King Saul. The showbread of the
tabernacle was to be eaten by only the priests, but David had taken it, with
the high priest’s permission, in order to facilitate his escape from Saul’s
wicked pursuit. David and his men needed
the meal to have the energy to keep going.
Jesus’ main point in His response was that “The
Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is the Lord even
of the Sabbath.”
Now, this in no way teaches that Jesus was
unconcerned about the law. Neither did
He place Himself above the law, for indeed, Jesus came to fulfill all law for
all of us. Jesus pointed out the fault
of their interpretation of law in that the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament
were not there so that people could earn God’s favor or His verdict of not
guilty. In fact, all those laws were
given by God to show the people that they needed a Savior more than anything
else. That was Jesus’ point when He said
the “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” God gave the command to rest on the Sabbath
to ensure that every person would have a day of rest, and so that every person
in Israel’s camp would be pointed toward the Savior who was to come, who would
give us rest in the war against God.
When you think about the sin that troubles all
people, what you really have is our collaboration with the devil’s rebellion
against God. It is a seemingly
never-ending war with every sin being another in the barrage of attacks against
God’s love and against those whom God loves.
Jesus came into this world to end that conflict. He came to end our disobedience, not with
more laws and commandments for us to obey, but with His own perfect obedience
to God’s will, The Lord of the Sabbath came to serve and to heal.
Jesus came to obey all of God’s law and will
for the world, so that the Lord could declare peace between God and mankind. This is why His enemies couldn’t find any
fault to accuse Jesus. He was perfectly
obedient to God, His parents, and the authorities of the land. Jesus further served by bringing His message
of peace to the people. Jesus then gave
up His life on the cross as the full payment that bought a truce between God
and mankind. For every sin you and I
have committed, and God knew there were many, Jesus paid the price of death
that the law required. So that you and I
would be bought back from the kidnapper known as the Devil, God accepted Jesus’
offering of His holy, precious body and blood as the ransom price for you and
me and all people.
In the second half of our Gospel text, Jesus
showed that He came on a mission of mercy.
According to the Mosaic law, it was perfectly acceptable to do acts of
mercy on the Sabbath. The Pharisees were
so focused on obeying their own unkind deceptions that they didn’t care about
the needs of other people. This also
shows us that The Lord of the Sabbath came to serve and to heal.
Most likely, the Pharisees had planted the man
with the withered hand at the synagogue hoping to catch Jesus in what they
imagined was sin. Would He break their
petty rules in order to help this man who was clearly afflicted? Would our Savior be so soft-hearted as to go
against their will? The answer is “Yes!” Jesus had the interests of all of us at
heart.
Now, that doesn’t mean that Jesus came into
this world to make everything about our lives perfect and pleasant. This world will remain under the curse of sin
until He returns in glory. However, the
healing of this man in the face of the Pharisees’ challenge shows us that there
was nothing that would stop Jesus from healing our wretched condition as
sinners in a world of sin.
This instance is one of the few times in the
Bible that shows Jesus being angry. In
all cases, His anger was caused by those who would withhold God’s grace from
someone who needed it. Here, it was the
man with the withered hand, who gladly came to Jesus for His healing
touch. Another time, it was the
disciples keeping little children away from Jesus, while Jesus wants all people
to come to Him for forgiveness and life.
Finally, Jesus was righteously angry with those who turned His Father’s
house into a market—transforming that place of forgiveness, comfort, and peace
into a marketplace offering no hope to those caught in the deceptions of
profiteers.
Dear friends, in all those instances, Jesus
showed His love for precious souls, and that is what we are today. We are precious in God’s eyes. So precious to our Creator that He gave His
Son into our midst to bear our flesh so that He could live in our shoes so to
speak, yet to do so without any sin, in order that God could count each person
who believes in Jesus as righteous and holy because of what Jesus has done for
us.
Jesus came, not with the main purpose of
healing hurting bodies. Rather, those
miracles assure us that He is the Son of God who was sent to bring us
everlasting healing from the curse and malady of sin. As easily as Jesus could say “Stretch out
your hand,” and the hand was fully restored, so He says to each of us in
Baptism, in the absolution after our confession, and as we come to partake of
His body and blood in the Supper, “Your sins are forgiven,” and your sins are
forgiven in heaven and on earth. As far
as east is from the west, so far has Jesus removed the guilt, sins, and the
sinful stain that would have caused our eternal death separated from our loving
God.
The Lord of the Sabbath came to serve
and to heal. Jesus came walking among our friends and
neighbors of that time almost two thousand years ago, so that He could live for
us, die on our behalf, and rise again in total victory over Satan, sin, death,
and the grave—all so that you and I would have eternal life in heaven, where we
will never again suffer any malady connected with sin. No more sorrow, no more tears, no more
deception, deceit, or lying, no more pain, illness, or death.
By winning the war that the serpent began
against God and mankind in the Garden of Eden, Jesus has restored to us a home
in Paradise where He will once again walk among us, daily, in peace and harmony
with all those who have believed in Him.
Glory be to our Redeemer, Savior, and Friend. Amen.
The peace of
God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds
in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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