For the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath
Reading 1
Is 38:1-6, 21-22, 7-8
When Hezekiah was mortally ill,
the prophet Isaiah, son of Amoz, came and said to him:
“Thus says the LORD: Put your house in order,
for you are about to die; you shall not recover.”
Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the LORD:
“O LORD, remember how faithfully and wholeheartedly
I conducted myself in your presence,
doing what was pleasing to you!”
And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
Then the word of the LORD came to Isaiah: “Go, tell Hezekiah:
Thus says the LORD, the God of your father David:
I have heard your prayer and seen your tears.
I will heal you: in three days you shall go up to the LORD’s temple;
I will add fifteen years to your life.
I will rescue you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria;
I will be a shield to this city.”
Isaiah then ordered a poultice of figs to be taken
and applied to the boil, that he might recover.
Then Hezekiah asked,
“What is the sign that I shall go up to the temple of the LORD?”
Isaiah answered:
“This will be the sign for you from the LORD
that he will do what he has promised:
See, I will make the shadow cast by the sun
on the stairway to the terrace of Ahaz
go back the ten steps it has advanced.”
So the sun came back the ten steps it had advanced.
Responsorial Psalm
Isaiah 38:10, 11, 12abcd, 16
R. (see 17b) You saved my life, O Lord; I shall not die.
Once I said,
“In the noontime of life I must depart!
To the gates of the nether world I shall be consigned
for the rest of my years.”
R. You saved my life, O Lord; I shall not die.
I said, “I shall see the LORD no more
in the land of the living.
No longer shall I behold my fellow men
among those who dwell in the world.”
R. You saved my life, O Lord; I shall not die.
My dwelling, like a shepherd’s tent,
is struck down and borne away from me;
You have folded up my life, like a weaver
who severs the last thread.
R. You saved my life, O Lord; I shall not die.
Those live whom the LORD protects;
yours is the life of my spirit.
You have given me health and life.
R. You saved my life, O Lord; I shall not die.
Gospel
Mt 12:1-8
Jesus was going through a field of grain on the sabbath.
His disciples were hungry
and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them.
When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him,
“See, your disciples are doing what is unlawful to do on the sabbath.”
He said to the them, “Have you not read what David did
when he and his companions were hungry,
how he went into the house of God and ate the bread of offering,
which neither he nor his companions
but only the priests could lawfully eat?
Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath
the priests serving in the temple violate the sabbath
and are innocent?
I say to you, something greater than the temple is here.
If you knew what this meant, I desire mercy, not sacrifice,
you would not have condemned these innocent men.
For the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.”
Lectionary for Mass for Use in the Dioceses of the United States, second typical edition, Copyright © 2001, 1998, 1997, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine; Psalm refrain © 1968, 1981, 1997, International Committee on English in the Liturgy, Inc. All rights reserved.
Commentary:
Ironically the Pharisees managed to turn the sabbath law of rest, which forbade the bearing of burdens, into a burden. What was their thinking? They felt that the Law was so holy that (as they put it) they needed to “build a hedge (or fence) around it,” so that no one would inadvertently break the Law. This “hedge” was the “traditions of the elders,” a body of oral law later written down by rabbis in the 2nd century, comprising thousands of rules, and later to form the Talmud. The idea was that if you kept the oral law, you couldn’t help but keep the actual Mosaic Law.
What Jesus and his disciples did on that day was quite lawful. The Law said, “If you enter your neighbour’s grain-field, you may pick kernels with your hands, but you must not put a sickle to his standing grain” (Deuteronomy 23:25). The Pharisees could not object to that. What they objected to was that it was done on the sabbath. They saw it as ‘work’. The Talmud lists some rules about this. “If someone rolls wheat to remove the husks, it is considered as sifting; if he rubs the heads of wheat, it is considered threshing; if he cleans off the side-adherences, it is sifting out fruit; if he bruises the ears, it is grinding; if he throws them up in his hand, it is winnowing.” The ‘fence around the law’ had been breached in five places! With a little ingenuity you could keep counting: it was also “bearing a burden,” and “preparing a meal”!
When religion becomes a matter of obeying rules, the danger is that the true religious spirit fades from the picture; one’s own righteousness becomes the main focus. Because it is so rational and manageable, law is always in danger of becoming an end in itself. This is what Jesus charged against the Pharisees. “You have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Mt 23:23), thereby “making void the word of God through your traditions” (Mk 7:13).
This seems to be true everywhere. I once heard a lawyer defending a manifestly unjust decision by a judge: “It’s a court of law,” he said, “not a court of justice.” What is the law for if it is not for justice? What is religious law for if it is not for “justice, mercy, faith?”
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