breaking the law

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

(Mark 2:23-28)

What's going on here? Jesus' disciples upset some Pharisees by picking heads of grain on the Sabbath. So this is a sabbath-controversy, right? Yes - and no. Look how Jesus handles it: he refers to an incident from the OT where David and his companions ate some bread that wasn't theirs. What was the problem with that? Was it on a sabbath? No. The problem is that the bread was reserved for the priests.

Jesus answers a sabbath controversy by using an argument that effectively relativises the whole law.

And in doing so, he elevates the importance of a genuine concern for people's needs - seen in David and his men having their hunger met and seen in the feeding of his disciples. The law was never meant to be upheld in such a way as to deny or exacerbate human need: the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. As Paul would say in Galatians 5:23, "the law is not against such things!"

If that is true of the law, how much more so with our church traditions! The key questions to ask ourselves ought to centre upon whether those traditions, rules or whatever, contribute to the alleviating of need, to the expressing of genuine love and care, to the liberating into service of God's people, or do they not.

Because love is the fulfilment of the law, the great end to which it pointed and, finally, expressed and met in the Son of Man, the Messiah.