Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Good morning and welcome to Dishman Baptist Church.

As always it is a pleasure to have you here with us this morning - whether you are physically present or virtually present through our online stream we are blessed to be able to serve our Lord and to worship with you this morning.

Please take your Bibles and open them with me to Mark 2, Mark 2. Thank you Chuck for doing such a great job leading us into God’s Word last week and I think I speak for everyone when I say thank you for being back at the helm of our musical worship endeavors today instead of me.

This morning we’re going to finish our time in Mark 2 by looking at another instance of conflict in the life and ministry of Christ.

It would seem that after such a grand beginning to his Gospel, Mark has sought to frame for us the reality of Christ’s ministry.

It started off so well in Capernaum’s synagogue with the healing of a man with an unclean spirit and extraordinarily authoritative teaching.

That was followed by a fruitful evening of ministry and then a speaking tour throughout Galilee.

But then Christ returns to Capernaum and you would think that His ministry would continue to flourish but Mark demonstrates that there is a significant difference between our expectations for Christ’s ministry and the reality.

It is not always easy.

There will be conflicts and sometimes the worst of the conflicts will come from those who think they are inside the camp.

None of these issues that Christ has faced over the last few weeks came from external sources but instead they were brought by those who should have known better but instead had surrendered the truth to their own agendas or ideals.

The first challenge came when Christ had the audacity to pronounce a man’s sins forgiven.

In doing so He placed Himself on equal standing with God.

This is really the fundamental issue that underlies every other issue in the church - there are really only two.

The first is found here - is Christ who He says He is?

And the second is that if He is who He says He is could He have produced a perfect and inerrant Word that would reveal Himself to us and what His desires are for us.

As the Son of God and the Creator of the Universe it is within His purview to determine who is worth being saved - not on anyone’s personal or inherent merit but instead on His sovereign choosing, love and kindness.

The next kerfuffle we see in chapter 2 addresses this as those who thought they were saved by their good works were upset by Jesus’ choice in dinner companions.

An important note to make here is that while Jesus came to save the sick, He didn’t leave them identifying with their sin.

There were no tax collecting Christians or woman at the well Christians.

They were simply Christians.

And then last week Chuck did an excellent job of framing the conflict as one of the incompatibility of the New Covenant that Jesus was bringing in with the Old Covenant ways of the Pharisees and scribes.

This week’s passage is going to present the same dilemma from a different perspective.

This morning we’re going to be looking at Mark 2:23-28.

The Predicament

Mark 2:23-24

I am old enough to remember when the malls closed at 5 on Sundays.

I had to call my mom and check but I did have Sunday clothes and other clothes.

But I do remember one thing about those Sunday clothes - it was in your life’s interest not to get them dirty before church.

I am not old enough to remember but have been told by my mother that when she was in high school she wouldn’t even go to movies because her parents didn’t want it to be reported in the newspaper that she’d been at a movie if she died in a car accident on the way home.

That’s a bit of an extreme example.

There may be some of you who think that the first two illustrations were good and that we would do well as a society to return to those days again.

But the reason I mention them here is not to evoke some sort of nostalgic response or a desire for the brand of Christianity that permeated our nation from the close of World War 2 until sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s.

The reason I mention them is they were indicators not of a person’s salvific standing before Christ but instead of their adherence to external regulations that had become a part of Christianity.

The Jewish religion in the first century and particularly the observation of the Sabbath had fallen prey to just this sort of practice.

The Sabbath had been established at Creation when God rested on the seventh day after His creative work was finished.

And then when delivering the law to Moses, God chose to codify the standards of Sabbath rest for His people the Jews

Under the leadership of the priests and the kings throughout the histories of the Old Testament, the Sabbatarian practice had been perverted and minimized to the point that the prophet Amos would admonish the people of the northern kingdom of Israel

They still practiced the Sabbath but the importance of the standards in their lives had become minimal because of their greed and avarice.

After the return from Babylon with the repair of the Temple came the rekindling of the importance of religion in the lives of the Jews.

As I have mentioned the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes developed as religious parties during this time and the Pharisees in particular took a deep interest in the practice of the fourth commandment and keeping the Sabbath day holy.

So much so that they had developed 39 specific activities that could not be practiced on the Sabbath.

People were limited to 1,999 paces or a travel distance of about 3,000 yards on the Sabbath - needless to say not too many people were meeting their step goals.

The most weight that you could carry on the Sabbath day was the weight of a dried fig - now I found out that 1 cup of dried figs amounts to about 10 figs and that one cup is roughly equal to 1/3 of a pound.

Now parents of little ones don’t worry you could have carried you child - even if they had a stone in their hand that surpassed the weight of a dried fig.

If you were carrying your dried fig in your hand and you threw it up in the air and you caught it with a different hand you were in violation of the law.

There were 24 chapters in the Jerusalem Talmud that dealt with regulations on the Sabbath.

So here are Jesus and His disciples.

The text says

They were in deep trouble.

In one sentence Mark describes the disciples as having broken at least 4 Sabbath commands.

The first is that they were clearly beyond their 1,999 pace limit.

But they were also guilty of picking or harvesting grain, sifting and threshing the grain as they would roll it between their hands to separate the wheat and chaff, winnowing as they would throw away the chaff and eating the grain.

None of these were permitted on the Sabbath.

The Pharisees were right there to challenge Jesus.

It is interesting to note the progression that has taken place throughout these incidents.

When Jesus called Levi it was the disciples that the Pharisees confronted.

When the disciples were not fasting and now here when they are picking grains it is Jesus who they accost.

And we need to understand that the issue here is not that they were picking some one else’s wheat and eating it.

This was provided for in the ancient Israelite culture.

While there were many roads that connected towns, much of the travel in first century Israel was effected by the use of well worn trails that traversed through fields.

God made a provision for this reality in Deuteronomy

So the disciples are not breaking any real law here by plucking grains and eating - except for the self-imposed standards of the Pharisees.

It is also important to note that the Pharisees were also in violation of the Sabbath restrictions.

In order to be close enough to witness the disciple’s grain picking activities the Pharisees would also have to have been outside their 1,999 pace limit.

But as is so often the case they choose to ignore their violations and instead question Jesus about the behavior of His disciples - in effect implicating Him as well in their sin.

One important note to make before we move on to Jesus response - Jesus was not in sin by either His violation of the Sabbath or by the implication that the Pharisees were making that His disciples were in violation and so He was as well.

I want to make that clear to anyone who is here or who may be watching this online who may not come from a church background.

As we looked at when we studied Jesus temptations, Jesus as both truly God and truly man was incapable of sin.

If you want to review that message it is available on our website entitled “Peaks and Valleys Pt. 1”.

But I want to make it very clear before I move on that Jesus never sinned and so even His perceived violation of the Sabbath principles here is for a greater purpose.

Even by walking through the grain fields He was not in sin as the only principles He and His disciples were violating in truth were the man-made principles set in place by the Pharisees.

As we just looked at even the fourth commandment is very scant in its prescriptive standards with respect to the Sabbath.

Even one of the rabbis writing on the multitude of restrictions with respect to what Scripture actually wrote in the Mishnah Hagiga “The rules about the sabbath, festal offerings, and sacrilege are as mountains hanging by a hair, for Scripture is scanty and the rules are many.”

Even they knew their rules were founded on scanty information.

So I just wanted to make sure that was clear before we move on to look at Jesus response to the Pharisee’s charge.

The Precedent

Mark 2:25-26

Jesus response to the Pharisees is remarkable.

Unlike most legal discussions of both His own day and ours, He doesn’t seek to make a legal defense from the laws of Israel.

In our modern context that would sound something like a lawyer who sites previous case law (in the case of plaintiff a vs. defendant b this precedent was set) but instead He pulls from an anecdote to make His case.

This usually isn’t a very effective method of argumentation - it’s much like a younger sibling calling on the actions of an older sibling to defend his own actions.

That usually doesn’t make the case that he was in the right but rather invokes the age old maxim “two wrongs do not make a right”.

Anyone who likes to paint Jesus simply as this nice, meek and mild “Clark Kent” figure has never really read the New Testament.

His initial words to the Pharisees would have immediately goaded them into a visceral response.

Look at what He says

He challenges them “Have you never read”?

These were the most learned men in Israel.

They knew the Torah, the Histories and the Writings by heart.

They lived, ate and breathed Scripture.

And yet He has the temerity to question them?

The issue wasn’t really that they had never read - it was more that what they had read hadn’t impacted their hearts.

Jesus knew that they had read the Scriptures, that they in fact prided themselves on their knowledge of the Scriptures.

He also knew that they hadn’t allowed what they had read to become more than simple head knowledge.

In a sense He asks them two questions in one - not only as Dr. MacArthur says in his commentary on this passage “If you are such fastidious students of Scripture, why don’t you know what it says?”

but also “If you are such fastidious students of Scripture, why don’t you do what it says?”

While He may not appeal to a legal precedent for support, Jesus could hardly have picked a more credible subject than David for His example.

David, the second king of Israel, the man after God’s own heart, the greatest king in Israel’s history but also the one from who’s line the Pharisees as well as the rest of the nation of Israel were anticipating the Messiah to come.

Jesus will make a clear statement later in our text that will place Him on the same plane as God.