Bible, Bread and Yoke: How Jesus Read the Scriptures

At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. ² When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath.” ³ He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? ⁴ He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests. ⁵ Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests in the temple break the sabbath and yet are guiltless? ⁶ I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. ⁷ But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. ⁸ For the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.” ~ Matthew 12:1-8

In one episode of the t.v. show Friends, Phoebe decides to take a literature class at a local community college so that she can learn about some of the literary classics she missed by being a homeless youth. Her friend Rachel decides to come with her, but doesn't bother to read the books. After Rachel steals Phoebe’s ideas in the first class about Wuthering Heights, winning Rachel praise from the teacher, she shows up to the second class, on Jane Eyre, once again having failed to read and wanting Phoebe to tell her about it.  Phoebe, frustrated by Rachel’s failure to read the book, decides to feed her misinformation. When the teacher enters, Phoebe announces that Rachel has some very interesting insights about the book. This is what follows:

The Teacher: Well, go ahead Rachel.

Rachel: Uh, thank you Phoebe. Umm, well, what struck me most when reading Jane Eyre was uh, how the book was so ahead of its time.

The Teacher: If you're talking about feminism, I think you're right.

Rachel: Yeah, well, feminism yes, but also the robots.

“What’s this book about?,” Rachel asks Phoebe. And we’ve seen that this question was clearly the question of Jesus himself and his greatest challenge with the Pharisees (And, nope, it's not about robots either). How should we read the Old Testament? What does it mean? How should it be applied? These questions are at the very heart of the gospel witness. And there is probably no single instance of interpretation more important or controversial than the biblical discussion of the Sabbath. The Biblical scholar N.T. Wright notes that, “In the Old Testament, the Sabbath command is solid, fierce, mandatory. It is rooted in the two greatest narratives which shaped ancient Israel: Creation and Exodus.” At the time of Jesus, Sabbath keeping was the most distinctive mark of Judaism, to the point where one of the few things the average pagan knew about their strange Jewish neighbors was that they had a lazy day once a week. In our passage, the Pharisees understand the conduct of the disciples as a violation of the Scriptures' clear command not to work on the Sabbath (Deut. 5:12-15; Exodus 20:8-11) – “plucking grain” was technically harvesting, a form of work clearly forbidden – connecting to one of thirty-nine classes of work prohibited in Exodus chs. 34 & 35. 

So, how does Jesus’ challenge to the Pharisees understanding of the Sabbath help us become better readers of the Old Testament and the whole of Scripture?

1.     Jesus instructs us to read carefully

Jesus repeatedly confronts his opponents here with a recurring question that should challenge us as well, “Haven’t you read . . . ?”  More than merely a defense for his actions, it seems that Jesus is offering a well thought out Biblical platform for why he does what he does. Do you have a biblical platform or is it more like a biblical postage stamp? Are you well-read enough to know and act out the scriptures in your own life? One of my seminary professors who worked on one of the translations of the Bible was asked, “What is the best translation of the Bible?” The class was surprised when he responded, “The one you read.” Do you read? ponder? study the Bible. Those Swedish pietists who formed our denomination were originally called “readers” and the question that they would often ask one another in church was, “Where is it written?” And Jesus here is not simply proof-texting his actions but offering a thoughtful, careful analysis on why he is violating the Sabbath based on scripture.

So Jesus’ remarks suggest more than a mere Sunday sermon relationship with the Scriptures but they’re deep pondering. Let’s take a closer look at the three texts he uses:

First, he quotes a story from 1 Samuel 21:1-6, that does not concern the Sabbath at all, about David and his men eating bread from the temple that Levitical law (24:5-9) expressly forbids them to eat. The bread was specified by God as only being for the priests yet David and his men violated this direct commandment of God when they ate the bread of Presence, which was a thank offering placed fresh every Sabbath in the temple. Of course, David had already violated the law by entering this part of the temple not to mention that David lied to Ahimelech that he was on a secret mission commissioned by Saul. By stressing David’s hunger, Jesus appears to place human need before the stipulations of the law and makes no mention of David’s deceit. Yet, Jesus’ interpretation is not itself far off from the Pharisees’ own interpretation that David did this to save the lives of himself and his men.

The second argument from Numbers 28:9-10 is more directly relevant yet a more obscure reference which concerns the desecration of the Sabbath by the priests. Technically, the priests perform “work” on the Sabbath which violates the law but are considered innocent. So Jesus is using the idea implicit within that text that temple service, the work of God, takes precedence over the Sabbath. So Jesus and his followers, like the priest, represent a special group who are not bound by the Sabbath because they too are about the work of God.

Third, Jesus quotes from the prophet Hosea 6:1-6 (a favorite quote of his that he also uses to justify his associations with tax collectors and sinners, c.f. Matt. 9:13) where God declares in the OT that the stringency of law observance and the sacrificial system must give way to the priority of God’s new work. Because of this, Jesus claims, they are as innocent as the priests who perform God’s work on the Sabbath (compare 12:5 & 12:7). 

The point here is that Jesus considers the scriptures indispensable for his own understanding of what God is doing. He has read thoughtfully and carefully and formed a position that engages texts from the  Law, the Prophets, and biblical history.

       2.     Jesus reads the Scriptures with a human face.

Despite Jesus’ jabbing question, “Haven’t you read? . . .,” the Pharisees remain quite sophisticated Bible readers – they are careful, thoughtful, and, as we have just heard, sometimes quite close to Jesus’ own reading of the text. So why do they come to such different conclusions? Why do often sincere Bible readers disagree? Why do the Pharisees keep me up at night?

To further understand the problem, the evangelical Church historian Mark Noll reminds us that reading the Bible is always difficult - contingent on a range of social and cultural forces. He points out that during the Civil War, the biblical arguments made for keeping slavery were much more convincing than the arguments for abolition. After all, he points out, slavery enjoys a consistent witness in Old and New Testaments with plenty of specific passages allowing it and requiring slaves to obey their masters. Christian abolitionists appealed to broader biblical principles of love and freedom, but according to Noll, the idea that an anti-slavery spirit of the law could trump a pro-slavery letter of the law “was not only a minority position; it was also widely perceived as a theologically dangerous position.” So much so that Moses Stuart, perhaps the most respected American biblical scholar of his day, said abolitionists “must give up the New Testament authority, or abandon the fiery course which they are pursuing.” 

Immediately after this confrontation over plucking the heads of grain, Jesus will encounter a man with a withered hand, and the Pharisees will watch him carefully to see what he will do — will Jesus break the Sabbath again!? Jesus responds with a question, “Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep!”

I believe that Jesus’ argument clues us into the significant difference between how he reads the Scriptures versus how the Pharisees read them. See, the Pharisees’ theology works from the abstract: Is Sabbath work forbidden in Scripture? Yes. Is plucking grain work? Yes. Is healing work? Yes. Then we have our conclusion—plucking grain and healing on the Sabbath are forbidden.

Jesus’ reading of the Bible, however, also involves the value of the person: Here is a hungry group or a hurting person in front of me. What do they need? How can I help? Ah, but it’s the Sabbath. Let me now take this person’s unique situation to the Scriptures—and when we do that, we can see even more clearly that the Scriptures themselves address real human faces (e.g. the story of David). They accommodate and address actual human need. Moreover, Jesus will forcefully argue that the Sabbath itself aims to serve people and NOT the other way around (in Mark and Luke Jesus will say this strongly, “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath!)

It’s interesting that the next passage after these two Sabbath encounters describes Jesus reflecting on the controversy with his disciples and, funny enough, quoting again from the Old Testament, Isaiah 42:1-4, which details the work of God’s anointed. It says, “He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick . . .”

The Pharisees, however, see no human face when they read the scriptures – for the sake of the text they are quite willing to break reeds and snuff out lives. Is it any wonder then why they missed the Word of God with a human face in their midst? Though he heals a man yet does not read the Scriptures like they do, vs. 14 says, they wanted to “destroy” him. That might be the biggest red flag of all for their type of Bible reading.

       3.     Jesus reminds us that the Old Testament reads itself and points in a certain direction.

Finally, to understand how Jesus reads the Old Testament, we must recognize that the Old Testament itself is not some static witness or series of commands but a journey of God with God’s people. Jesus reminds us that there is no such thing as a simple OT witness. That is to say, the OT does not present a single, flat, monolithic position  - that’s revealed by OT texts which show David breaking the commandment and the prophet Hosea challenging the sacrificial system. Instead, the OT presents an extended narrative journey, in which the destination is more important—more authoritative and normative—than the beginning or the middle of that experience. It presents a God who seeks to form a people and who faithfully travels with those people through all experiences, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, without any qualifications. 

Yet, later in the story, the OT reveals that same God wanting to fashion a new even broader community, leaving the old behind, and showing a new way for all. That new land, that destination for the journey, is proclaimed especially in a group of passages in Isaiah and by other prophets, which Jesus loved to quote. In other words, a major portion of the OT witness presents a sustained show-and-tell lesson on where not to go and what not to do, or at least on what is no longer the first choice, because it has not worked. It then goes on to describe the new way which is expected of the people of God instead. It is precisely that new way, Jesus says, which constitutes the normative Old Testament witness for us, the people of God today. So Jesus is not reading the OT in a brand new way but reminding us that there is internal critique, conflict and clarification of the Old Testament within the OT itself that comes from traveling with God on a journey. Hosea, in other words, reads Leviticus.

But Jesus is also reminding us that the OT is also pointing somewhere. That it speaks of a fresh work, a coming “day of the Lord,” an anointed one who will gather a new people – which is why Jesus will use the Old Testament to speak about his own identity and work. Just prior to our passage this morning, Matt. 11:28-30, Jesus makes an implicit but incredible remark – he claims to be Sabbath rest and liberation for us. Not just that, but in our passage he claims that his work is “something greater” than even the temple. He is the one that the OT speaks of who will usher in the Day of the Lord. He is Lord of the Sabbath. He is the one to whom the Sabbath points and to whom loyalty should be given.  He is that “something greater” - He is Sabbath, and temple, and Word – he is Lord.

So, as the band comes forwards, what should you do? Look at our altarpiece for this week

– which thing does your spiritual life need: the Bible itself – more of it, discipline, Adult Ed., Life Group; the grain – an acknowledgement of human need, relationships with the broken, the hurting, the different; the yoke – a recognition of the Lordship of Jesus as the one who gives rest and liberation, the one whom the Scriptures point to as our Sabbath, The Word!