Saturday of the Twenty-Second Week in Ordinary Time Yr 1 2025

Peter H. Davids

Ordinary Time • Sermon • Submitted 6 months ago • Presented 5 months ago

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While our first reading is hopeful in that Jesus is not finished with us yet but is in process and becoming a saint is not up to me, the gospel is fascinating. The disciples are doing something normal that met a need. The Pharisees “get in their heads” and engage in mind-reading and judge them, not knowing if they are even aware of the Pharisaic rule. Jesus counters, not with a rebuke but with a “how do you deal with” type of question: David breaking a clear Torah rule and yet neither the Deuteronomic historian nor the Pharisees attributed sinful motives to him. To their no answer Jesus adds: “The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.” We must become aware of our tendency to mind-read, especially when anxious, and to attribute negative motives to another person. That relieves our anxiety for we are in control and sit as judge. We need to remember that Jesus is lord of the sabbath and all other situations and rather be self-reflective about why we are anxious.

Notes

Transcript

Title

Where is your head?

Outline

Our first reading is so hopeful

Jesus took us from a hostile position outside of his community and is in the process of forming us into model citizens of his community to present us to his Father. All we have to do is hold fast to the faith and not let go of it. I love that, for it gives me hope: Jesus is not finished with me yet and becoming a saint is not up to me.

But the parable is fascinating

The disciples are walking along and feel hunger and unselfconsciously satisfy it by picking grain, threshing it, and eating it. Perfectly legal in Jewish law. In Luke Jesus is doing it with them.

The Pharisees, feeling anxious themselves, judge the action unlawful because it is the sabbath, which was a Pharisaic interpretation of the law, and get into the disciples’ heads attributing to them a knowing breaking of Pharisaic Torah. Rather that judge the Pharisees back, Jesus asks a question about an incident in the Former Prophets: David was hungry; he went into the shrine of God in Nob and, to make a longer story short, receives and eats the showbread that the written Torah says only priests could eat. Both Jesus and the Pharisees agreed David was the anointed king and was a righteous man. How do the Pharisees justify that action? How do they know what David’s motives were? And, if they knew the rest of the story, Were they not like Saul who attributed evil motives to the priests of Nob, who were innocent.

There is no answer and Jesus ends the conversation with a one line self-revelation: “The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.” He, not the Pharisaic tradition. He, not the Pharisaic judgment. But the Pharisees must have gone away wondering what that meant.

Now aren’t we often like the Pharisees?

I am often not that aware when I get anxious and why, but one coping mechanism is to get into someone else’s head and question their motives for what they are doing or assume what they might be thinking. I feel more secure because (1) they are the ones with a problem, (2) I am in control as judge, and (3) I am in the know, even if it be an imaginary knowing. I am also distracted from self-awareness.

Jesus reminds us that we do not know, that we do not understand, and that we are distracting ourselves from the real truth: he is Lord, whether of the sabbath or of our calendar or of any other rules and directives in life. And we are not.

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