The difference is Him

There’s a tee shirt available out there that says: “I was one way, and now I am completely different — and the thing that happened in between was Him.” That nugget pretty well sums up our message this morning about God’s relationship with His people, so hold that thought.

Today’s readings offer an interesting progression — a set of bookends if you will. In the Passover story we have a very prescriptive message. God is very specific to Moses about how the Jews must prepare the lamb, mark their homes, and thus be spared when the vengeance of the Lord is visited on the land of Egypt. This was the first - and thus the most important - feast for the Jewish people. And the Lord tells Moses that they must celebrate this feast in precisely this way each and every year, as devout Jews do even until today. The message of God given to Moses seems very clear — the rules I give you are important, and you must follow them to the letter.

Fast forward to Jewish tradition in the first century and Jesus and his disciples in our reading from Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus and his disciples are plucking a few grains of wheat as they pass through a field on the Sabbath. In other words, they are doing manual labor - they are working. The Pharisees are aghast and indignant that he and his disciples would dare to break the Sabbath. But rather than trying to mollify them and deconflict the situation, Jesus ups the ante. He voices a NEW TRUTH about who he is. First he tells them “I say to you, something greater than the temple is here.” For a first century Jew, the temple was the seat of all worship, the dwelling place of Yahweh on earth - the most sacred place imaginable. And Jesus goes on to call himself, “the Lord of the Sabbath.” To Pharisees and priests, that would be a breathtaking claim — truly only Yahweh Himself could claim such a title. With this small encounter, Jesus is affirming unambiguously that he truly IS divine — and the battle lines are drawn.

By His presence, Jesus changes the game. The old rules established to help us better align with God’s plan for His people are suddenly subordinate to the Truth of the Gospel now Incarnate in our midst. We were one way before, and now we are called to be completely different — and the thing that happened in between was Him. That’s the message for us. It’s not simply about the rules, the “thou shalls” and “thou shalt nots”. They’re not the point. It’s about embracing and living out the Truth manifested to us through Christ in our lives, each and every day.