Friday, 17th July 2020

Collect

God of mercy, by your Holy Spirit you nourish us with life: plant us now in good soil, that we may bear the fruit of justice and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever Amen.

Eucharist Readings:

Isaiah 38:1-6,21        Psalm 6      Matthew 12:1-8

This passage deals with the rigid attitude to the Sabbath which set out in elaborate detail what people must not do on it, even picking heads of grain to eat because they were hungry. When the Pharisees saw that Jesus was breaking their man- made law, they criticized him. Jesus referred them to the example of David who went into the temple and gave the consecrated bread to his men to eat because they were hungry and also the priests who were obliged to do in fulfilling their duties.  David was not breaking the Law and Jesus was not justifying his action as a precedent for doing so, but he is rather showing that the Old Testament itself does not teach the kind of strict legalism which the Pharisees had developed.  The story also focuses on Jesus’ failure to observe these specific regulations and there is no suggestion that he is opposed to the sabbath principle as such. The issue was how it should be interpreted and who had the right to interpret it. The Sabbath day was made for people, and therefore the Son of Man is its Lord. This influential dismissal of the traditions of the Pharisees is in line with Hosea’s principle that God is concerned with love before ritual. God condemns the rigid and inhumane attitudes of the Pharisees of his day. He accuses them of a lack of mercy towards people and knowledge of the will of God. Hosea 6:6 ‘For I desire mercy not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.

If we continue reading and look at verse 10 where there was a man with a wrinkled hand in the synagogue  and some of the commentaries will describe it as if the man was ‘planted’ there so that the pharisees could accused Jesus of healing the man on the sabbath day, because according to them it was unlawful, but once again Jesus showed them that he was the Lord of the sabbath, he healed the man and we can refer back to verse 6 ‘I tell you something greater than the temple is here… ‘.

The Pharisees were so rigid and set in their ways that it made them inhumane. They had no compassion and would rather see someone suffer and abide by their man-made rules instead of helping the person. Maybe it was also a matter of status or their image which they had to uphold.

Maybe this sound familiar to us,

• Are we not maybe sometimes to obsessed with man-made rules that we also loose the compassion for people?
• Are we also to rigid and set in our ways that we think we are bigger than the sabbath?
• Are we also not sometimes under the impression that our Christianity should be live out between four walls?
• Is it also a matter of our status, image which we need to uphold?

This pandemic, COVID 19, is teaching us so many lessons. It is taking us out of our comfort zones, dealing with things differently in comparison to our normal situations, doing services differently, we are having different experiences in our personal lives, in the church, community, reaching out to people, addressing the human needs, taking us beyond the four walls etc. Jesus insisted that the greatest ritual service is the service of human need, it is involvement in all the tragedies and problems and demands of the human situation. Like one priest would always say after the dismissal ‘remember the worship has ended but the service begins’.

Let us pray,

Go before us, Lord, in all our doings with your most gracious favour and encourage us with your continual help that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in you , we may glorify your holy Name and finally, by your mercy obtain the fulness of eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen