Pentecost+2/Proper 4B (Deut 5:12-15; Ps 81:1-10; 2Cor 4:5-12; Mk 2:23-3:6)

Civil disobedience. Civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws. This is what Rosa Parks was arrested for. Not giving up her seat in the ‘colored section’ to a white passenger when the bus driver told her to do so. Her simple, yet courageous ‘No’ sparked the flame of the civil rights movements. But from our Christian perspective, this justice issue is not the only thing that matters to us. In her act of saying ‘No’ to injustice as well as the broken and distorted image of God in that person to whom she says ‘No,’ there’s healing and restoration which takes place. 

As she protests to be treated as a fellow human being, the eyes of those who discriminate and persecute her are given a chance to change, treat, and love those who are equally created in the image of God as themselves. As much as Rosa Parks desires to be human, her action of freedom makes others more human than ever. Here’s one of her famous sayings: “I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free so other people would be free.” Her civil disobedience sets free those who are chained by privileges, entitlements, prejudices, or stereotypes. It’s never meant to be personal, but always mutually and communally beneficial. 

Now we have another disobedience in today’s gospel lesson. It’s religious disobedience. That’s what Jesus is accused of. To be fair to Jesus, it is not him who violates the sabbath law, but his disciples. As they were going through the grain field, the disciples plucked heads of grain. We might think that why this act of plucking heads of grain out of hunger would be such a big deal, but for the Pharisees or any law abiding Jews, it is a big deal. No work should be done on the sabbath. This is not just a civil rule but is the fourth one of the Ten Commandments: Keep the sabbath day holy. A full stop from all work on this very day. No work but rest as God rested after creation.

This sabbath observance still continues among Orthodox Jewish people in particular. In the hospital where I work has a sabbath elevator which stops at every single floor so that Jewish people don’t have to make an effort to press a button. And most of the bathrooms are motion-sensitive. Imagine that Jesus and his disciples were expected to strictly follow this commandment. At the same time, the Pharisees are just waiting for Jesus to break any Jewish laws so that they can criticize, disregard, devalue his ministry, and eventually destroy him.

In the disciples’ action of plucking heads of grain, they clearly violate the law. Eating them isn’t an issue, but harvesting for crops. The Pharisees blames Jesus for his disciples breaking the law, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” No one can justify and defend Jesus’ disciples. And Jesus doesn’t deny it at all by saying that the disciples were actually looking closely at heads of grain or trying to smell their fragrance and stuff. Instead, he says something very odd and even irrelevant. He questions the Pharisees, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.” 

This is rather odd that Jesus talks about the story of David in the 1st Samuel 21. How is it really related to the disciples’ breaking the sabbath law and David’s eating of the bread of the Presence? What they have in common is that they are both hungry and they both violate the law. Does Jesus try to say that before hunger any law can be broken, that hunger out rules any commandments? He seems to think so. He continues to say to the Pharisees, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and humankind for the sabbath.” 

But there’s one more puzzling matter. Jesus adds one more crucial statement, which apparently enrages the Pharisees. He says, “...the Son of Man is Lord even of the sabbath.” Calling himself as the Lord of the sabbath is blasphemous and even sacrilegious in the eyes of the Pharisees. Jesus identifies himself with the Lord God. Why does he say such a problematic comment about himself? If he simply stops at the hunger part and the humankind part, the Pharisees would’ve stopped their plan to kill him in the future. 

Now, one thing that is clear to us is that this is beyond the message or lesson that hunger out rules any laws or human lives come before any laws. It’s really about who Jesus is and what Jesus does. It’s about his identity and work. In using the 1st Samuel passage, he reminds the Pharisees of the temple ritual on the sabbath. The priests are required to renew the bread of the presence with a burnt offering of two spotless lambs. If you actually think about the priests in the temple on the sabbath, they cannot but work. So there’s no sabbath in the sanctuary. So we see there’s a tension between two kinds of Judaism, the rabbinical Judaism of the Pharisees and the temple Judaism. 

In retelling David and Abiathar’s story, Jesus identifies himself as a high priest. He places himself in the position of a high priest, or the great high priest who often is called as ‘lord’ in the temple. As Abiathar, the priest in the story of David allows David and his companions to take the bread of the Presence, Jesus also permits his disciples to harvest grains. He lets them do it, not just as their teacher, but as their high priest in the temple, as their lord. 

Exercising his high priestly authority, both Abiathar and Jesus feed those who are hungry. Eating the harvested grains and eating the bread of the Presence is the result of the high priest’s action. Essentially, it is the high priest’s intention of feeding the famished on the sabbath. Standing in the place of the high priest in the temple, Jesus restores the hungry, the poor, and the sick. He heals the broken, shattered humanity. 

Then it is not a coincidence that Jesus heals the man with a withered hand. The man with a withered man does not approach Jesus. It is Jesus himself who tells the man, ‘Come forward.” He asks the Pharisees, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” This is the very statement of Jesus that he himself is the new sabbath. Doing good and saving life is for Jesus the way to observe the sabbath. If the sabbath was first set after the six days of God’s creation of the world to rest. What Jesus brings to this new sabbath in himself is that the work of restoring what’s broken in God’s creation. In the eyes of Jesus the high priest, God doesn’t rest when there are those who can’t rest.

So for us, how we Christians observe the new sabbath is quite simple. We’re first fed with the new bread of the Presence on this very day, the 8th Day. And we’re led by the spirit of the new sabbath to go out of our comfort zone. We step outside this comfort zone in which we are gracefully led, stretched, and expanded by the Spirit to the very presence of Jesus in those who suffer, those whose human dignity is ignored and violated. The new sabbath is in a way resisting what’s evil in the eyes of God. This is how we observe the sabbath day holy. In this light of the new sabbath, we also look at gun violence and resist it as Christians, mutually and communally setting free all of us in this country from the evil that gun violence creates.

I’ve been meaning to participate in our food pantry, which I haven’t yet and I feel quite awful about that. But I want to say this food pantry ministry is literally feeding the hungry. And as I mentioned earlier, this is not it. We want to build a relationship with those who come to our food pantry. We want to get to know them. We want to know their names. Getting out of our comfort zone, we want to tell them, “Come forward and stretch out your hand.” This is how we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord of the sabbath and do our work of the new sabbath. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.