Lord of Sabbath
Notes
Transcript
What do Christians mean when we say Jesus is Lord?
Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.
A lord does whatever he pleases.
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way,
the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’ ”
The Lord was coming to do whatever he pleased.
One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain.
And the Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?”
The Pharisees are protecting the old norms. The disciples of Jesus are making a new path.
And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him:
how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?”
The lords of the past had not been particularly careful about religious norms.
And 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.”
First, we were not created to protect norms. Norms exist to protect us.
Second, our Lord is lord of our religious norms and sacred cows, “even of the Sabbath.”
Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand.
And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him.
And he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.”
And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent.
Jesus goes out of his way to force religious people to recognize his lordship in all the places and ways they’d rather not.
And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.
"anger” normally translated as “wrath”
Jesus glares with the furious rage of the Lord’s wrath and then performs a divine act no one could do anything about.
The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.
Post Script: The Pharisees preferred the status quo of the Herodians to the authority of the Lord.
When Christians say that Jesus is Lord, we have to mean that he is Lord of us first.
