Lord of the Sabbath

Luke 6:1 – 11

 

The freedom of adulthood brings with it inherent responsibilities. I tell you, as kids, we were always in a hurry to grow up, not realizing how good we had it when mom and dad paid the bills and put food on the table, even if they had rules that we had to follow. You know, some of the things my wife and I say to each other when faced with seemingly difficult or ridiculous situations are “Who made us adults?”

 

Becoming a parent myself has taught me a lot. It has shown me how much I took for granted as a kid, and it has shown me how fortunate kids can be to have boundaries set in place, even when they kick against them.

 

Boundaries were designed to be a fence around our lives to protect us, not to restrict us. But boundaries can be and have been misapplied and abused many times on many levels. Boundaries can start out with good intentions and devolve into walls to control people.

 

So often, when looking at boundaries, it’s important to look at who put them in place and ask, under whose authority and with what intent. As we continue in Luke, we see more conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees, and as has been par for the course it centers on authority. Let’s read God’s Word together, Luke 6:1 – 11.

 

To this point in the Gospel of Luke, Luke has been concerned with one main, overarching pillar of the Christian faith: the identity of Jesus of Christ. Everything has truly centered upon Jesus as the Son of God.

 

 

Everything from His divine conception and birth, to boy Jesus in the temple, to his baptism and testing in the wilderness, to his authority to drive out fevers, to drive out demons, to heal the sick, the lame, the blind, the paralyzed, to calling sinners to follow Him, eating and drinking with them, and to forgiving sin points to one singular truth about Jesus.

 

That He has divine authority that no one else on earth could possibly have, that He is indeed God incarnate. So the issue here in our passage today has very little to do with Sabbath law interpretation, which is great because I really don’t want to stand here and expound on Pharisaic Sabbath laws, I don’t think you want me to expound on them (unless you actually want to take a nap), and clearly as we will see in our passage, Jesus didn’t want to either.

 

The issue here is not “let’s debate what counts as work” or “let’s refine Sabbath ethics.” The issue is about who has authority to define what obedience is, it is about who has authority over the Law itself.

 

The issue is the same issue that Luke has been very diligent about pointing to. The issue is Christological. It is all about who Jesus Christ truly is, and the authority that He has to do what He does, on whatever day of the week it is. Everything in the passage points to that.

 

So let’s begin by looking at the first particular Sabbath day in our Scripture today. On a Sabbath, while Jesus and His disciples were walking through a grainfield, His disciples plucked some heads of grain and ate them, by first rubbing them in their hands.

 

There weren’t very many Roman roads out their way, so they were likely on a walking path that had grainfields on both sides of it, so as they’re walking along, they just reached out their hand and ran it along the stalks to pluck the heads of grain.

 

I’ve done it a hundred times as a kid playing with the wheat and oats we’d grow. Though I didn’t eat it, it was for cows after all. I just liked the feel of it in my hand. I didn’t know you could eat grain like that.

 

What the disciples were doing is more in line with what many people do in the produce section of the grocery store. It’s like plucking that single grape of the bunch in the store while passing through the produce section.

And at first glance, you might be appalled thinking the disciples are stealing here. Well let me just put your mind at ease about that. If the fact that they’re with Jesus and He doesn’t rebuke them doesn’t help you be ok with their actions, then knowing that what they were doing was perfectly legal according to the Law should.

 

Deuteronomy 23:25, “If you go into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle to your neighbor’s standing grain.” What they were doing was perfectly legal according to the Law of God as written down by Moses.

 

But some Pharisees called them out, saying to the group, Jesus included, why are you doing what is unlawful to do on the Sabbath? You see, the issue wasn’t about legality of the act in their eyes, rather they took issue with timing. This was a Sabbath where no work is to be done.

 

The Law laid down that Jews were not to do any work on the Sabbath; it was a day of rest set aside for the Lord. Six days shall you work, and the seventh you shall rest. The idea was you give to God your productivity on the 7^th day to recognize that He gives you all of your productivity. That day of rest was to teach people to be dependent on God.

 

 The Pharisees however, added 39 categories of what constituted work, with many sub-categories to each category. Stuff that was never spelled out the Law of God.

 

Those categories included harvesting/reaping, threshing, and winnowing. All real work, when done as a farmer, or even tending your own garden for your own needs. Yet somehow, in one of those sub-categories, the Pharisees had declared that picking a head of grain was work.

 

They viewed plucking as harvesting, rubbing the heads of grain in their hands to separate the chaff from the grain as threshing, and though its not stated, they would’ve blown into their hands to blow away the chaff, and they saw that as winnowing. So in the Pharisees religion, Jesus’ disciples were clearly violating the Law.

 

Yeah, it is about as ridiculous as it sounds. But my first question isn’t about hermeneutics, the interpretation of Scripture, or in their case the law.

My first question is this: Jesus and His disciples are outside of the city, what are the Pharisees even doing there? Shouldn’t they be ruling?

 

You know they’re not following Jesus around to learn from Him. They’re not there hanging with Jesus. No, they’re there to watch Him and catch Him doing something wrong, violating the Law in some way, because they believe they know better than Jesus, they believe that they are the prime example of righteousness, not this teacher from Galilee.

 

You know, one thing I tell my boys a lot when they start to get on each other’s cases about something, or come and tell mom and I about something the other did, is for them to stay in their respective lanes. That Jesus performed signs and healings on the Sabbath was already known, and the Pharisees had no desire whatsoever to stay in their own lanes.

 

They themselves should’ve been resting, keeping holy the Sabbath, not walking more than they needed to. They should’ve been at the synagogue worshipping God, not tailing Jesus to catch Him breaking their Law.

 

And so they think they have something to call Jesus out for, and they challenge Him. Because that’s what man-made religion does, it causes fights because man-made religion insists on its own way. You can see it right here.

 

The Pharisees are the ones who said that eating the grain is unlawful, not God. Their challenge to Jesus isn’t from Scripture but rather from their own categories of made up stuff. They took their own law, not God’s law, and accused someone else of breaking it.

 

Now, let’s give the Pharisees who crafted these regulations the benefit of the doubt for just a moment. Remember what I said about boundaries for our kids? The Pharisees came into existence and power after Israel’s return from exile.

 

They and their immediate ancestors lived through God’s punishment of His people for NOT keeping the law. So, in their most human instincts, they figure we have to be extra strict about not breaking God’s Law. They put up these boundaries, city walls as high Jericho’s if you will, to keep people from accidentally violating the Sabbath.

 

They figured that if they could account for every possible way that the Sabbath could be violated, and then regulate it, that the people then wouldn’t be at risk of violating the real law. That’s what the Pharisees ended up doing.

 

And by Jesus’ day, the Pharisees fully trusted in the system they created, in their own self-righteousness, and they fully believed they had the right and authority to impose their regulations, to force everyone to build the same walls they had, rather than God’s walls.

 

But look at Jesus’ response. Neither Jesus, nor Luke in writing this, had any interest in engaging the Pharisees about Sabbath laws and whether or not their interpretation is correct. Instead, the focus is on Jesus’ authority, not their interpretation of the Law.

 

Jesus demonstrates this by reminding the religious elites, who should know their Scripture well enough, about a story from 1 Samuel about David and his men eating the consecrated bread of the presence from the tabernacle.

 

According to the Law of God given through Moses, that bread that was on a table in the tabernacle (this is before the temple was built by Solomon), as an offering to God changed out once a week. When it was changed out, only the priests were allowed by God’s Law to eat it.

 

And yet, David asked the priest on duty to give him the bread because he and his men were hungry, they had great need of it. Understand that at this point in David’s life, he was already anointed to be king by Samuel.

 

He wasn’t king yet; Saul was still on the throne and trying to hunt David down to kill him. But David, was already God’s anointed king of Israel.

 

David and his men ate the bread, and yet they were not condemned by Scripture, by God, for breaking the Law. So that begs the question of how? Does God’s Law bend? Does it give way to human need?

 

You see, David wasn’t condemned by the Law for breaking the Law because David was God’s anointed king. And as king, he had the authority to judge how the law is to be applied in that moment.

So Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, “Look, if David could act with that kind of interpretive authority over the law, then how much more can I, the Son of Man, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Lord of the Sabbath act with even greater authority to interpret and apply the Law?”

 

He is pretty much telling the Pharisees that they are wrong about the law. They’re wrong in their understanding of it and they’re wrong in their application of it. Jesus isn’t adjusting their rules, He’s claiming authority over their rules and the interpretation of the Law itself.

 

This isn’t about authority over a day, it’s about authority over how humanity relates to God. But the Pharisees didn’t see that, and this is something you really need to pay attention to. You don’t approach God through a man-made system; you approach God through Christ.

 

Jesus didn’t come to abolish the Law; He came to reveal its fulfillment in Him and its true intent. The Sabbath was always about rest, restoration, and life under God, dependent on Him. It was never about restriction for restriction’s sake. The Sabbath finds its meaning in Jesus.

 

And at the end of the day these Pharisees had been completely blinded by their religion. They were so blinded by their love for their old religion that they couldn’t see the true King right in front of them. Don’t let religion blind you to Jesus.

 

Our passage then gives another Sabbath day, and Jesus was there teaching. At the same time there was a man there with a withered right hand. Now don’t miss Dr. Luke’s attention to detail here. It was the man’s right hand that was withered. That was everyone’s dominant hand because the left was considered evil and the right was good.

 

So that means this man didn’t just have a withered right hand, he had a withered life. His right hand had no functionality. He couldn’t work, he had no livelihood because of his withered, either atrophied or paralyzed, right hand. And what do the Pharisees do? They watch Jesus to see what He does about it.

 

Instead of doing something themselves to help this poor guy, giving him alms or food or something, they watch Jesus to see what He does. They already know He’s going to heal the man because that’s what Jesus has been doing this whole time.

And make no mistake, they’re not wondering if Jesus can heal this guy, they know He can. They’re not looking for ways to honor God, rather they’re looking for something to accuse Jesus of and charge Him with. But Jesus knows their thoughts, He knows what the Pharisees are thinking so He calls them man up.

 

And when the man with the withered hand came up and stood before them, Jesus asked the Pharisees, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” See, this isn’t just about the Sabbath. Sin is not just doing the wrong thing.

 

It is also refusing to do the right thing when you can. James 4:17. The Pharisees “obedience” to their rules was actually a moral failure by them, it was sin. They let their religion blind them not only to Jesus, but to the needs of the people they were charged to care for. Don’t let religion blind you to people.

 

They had God’s actual Law, not just their religion, they knew the good they ought to do, and they refused to do it. And that is sin. And worse, they refused to do it in the name of being obedient to God. That’s hypocrisy, and it’s sin.

 

The Pharisees remain silent. They don’t answer because they know that any answer they might give would condemn themselves instead of Jesus. And just like He did when He healed the paralyzed man after forgiving his sins, He restores this man’s hand as a demonstration of His divine authority to interpret and apply the Law.

 

But the Pharisees also prove something about themselves, they prove their own self-righteous hypocrisy. Jesus did good on the Sabbath, He restored the man’s hand, He restored the man’s life on this Sabbath.

 

Meanwhile, the Pharisees weren’t just mad, but they were filled with madness. They begin plotting to destroy Jesus, how they can destroy life itself. In their fury and anger they begin to plot evil on the Sabbath. They let their trust in their man-made rules and laws, the source of their authority, lead them to reject the truth, to reject Jesus.

 

They don’t reject Jesus because of lack of evidence of who He is. They reject Jesus because He threatens their authority and He dismantles their religion. This is not an intellectual problem; it’s a heart problem.

Because Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath, you must submit to Christ’s definition of obedience, not your own.

 

Jesus Christ, the Son of Man—God the Son—is Lord of the Sabbath, with the authority to interpret and fulfill God’s Law. Jesus doesn’t violate the Sabbath, like He’s being accused of. He reveals its true purpose.

 

And look what Jesus did in our passage. He asserted His authority over interpreting and applying God’s law, and He demonstrated His authority by restoring the man’s withered hand. The Sabbath has always pointed to restoration, wholeness, and a life fully dependent upon God.

 

The Sabbath is not ultimately about restriction—it’s about the kind of restoration only Jesus can bring. Obedience is not defined by following a set of man-made, religious rules. Obedience is defined by Jesus Christ. So, if Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath, this what submitting to Him looks like.

 

First, I want you to identify one area of your life where you’re trusting your own version of obedience instead of submitting to Jesus. Where have you become so focused on your religion—your service, your spiritual practices, what others do or don’t do—that you’ve stopped letting Jesus define what faithful obedience looks like? Ask God to show you.

 

Second, let Jesus define what faithfulness looks like. It’s fine to set boundaries—but don’t confuse your walls with God’s Word. Before you look at anyone else, ask: “Am I submitting to Jesus here, or just following what I’ve decided is faithful?” Ask Him to show you where you’ve elevated your standards above His.

 

And lastly, I want you to intentionally do one act of costly good this week that you’ve been avoiding. Something that you may have been putting off because it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable or costly. Check on someone you’ve been meaning to reach out to. Step into a need you’ve been ignoring. Serve someone even when it disrupts your schedule—we all hate that, don’t we?

 

Jesus isn’t asking you to refine your system of obedience, to make it better, He’s calling you to submit to Him as Lord. Because the Lord of the Sabbath doesn’t follow your lead, you are called to follow His.