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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
The operator of a restaurant whom I know recently said that he soon is probably going to be open for business on Sundays, and, admittedly, there is business to be had, as people like us leave church and do not want to go home to cook for ourselves, but I lamented for him and for his staff the loss of the usual opportunity to come to church to be fed. In today’s Gospel Reading, which we do not always get to hear in our three-year cycle of Readings, one Sabbath day (confer Matthew 12:9; compare Luke 6:6), Jesus’s hungry disciples (Matthew 12:1) ate what God provided in a grain‑field and Jesus healed a man with a withered hand. This morning we consider that Gospel Reading under the theme, “On our ‘Sabbath’ days, God feeds and heals us”.
First, we do well to remember that, when God finished creating the heavens and the earth, He Himself rested on the seventh day, what we know as Saturday, and God blessed that day and made it holy because on it He rested from all His work that He had done in creation (Genesis 2:1-3). So, according to its Hebrew root, the term “Sabbath” day has to do with rest, and God’s own use of the day brings in the ideas of holiness and devotion to God (confer Luther, ad loc Genesis 2:3, 1:79). Later, for all the reasons we sang of in our Hymn of the Day (Lutheran Service Book 906) the first or eighth day, what we know as Sunday, was used as the holy day, sometimes contracted as “holiday”. Although non-Christians may take Sundays and other religious “holidays” off of work, they—and even some Christians—do not sanctify the day (or “make it holy”) if they do not let God on those days work in them through His Word and Sacraments (Large Catechism, I:79, 90).
In today’s Gospel Reading, some Jewish officials of the Pharisees—who oddly seem almost to be stalking Jesus’s disciples and Jesus—essentially think that both Jesus’s disciples and Jesus Himself are doing wrong on the Sabbath: Jesus’s disciples by “harvesting” grain—one of the 39 tasks forbidden on the Sabbath by the Pharisees (Lohse, TDNT 7:21 n.166)—and Jesus by healing the man with the withered hand. The Pharisees had turned God’s gracious Gospel gift of a day of rest for Him to work in people into a legalistic law of what people were supposed to do for God. However, as the Divinely‑inspired St. Mark uniquely reports, Jesus corrects them with the statement that, “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”. And, without advocating “situational ethics” or an “end justifies the means” philosophy, Jesus demonstrated that the Pharisees’ own laws must yield to God’s greater purposes of feeding and healing (confer John 15:17). To that end, Jesus cited the example of hungry David’s—perhaps even on a Sabbath day—eating sacred bread that otherwise would have been forbidden Him (1 Samuel 21:1-7).
This morning’s Old Testament Reading is an elaboration of what we know as the Third Commandment, to remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy (Deuteronomy 5:12-15). And, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism explains that Commandment as meaning that, “We should fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.” We may be resting, but we are not keeping our day of rest holy when we sleep in on Sunday morning and do not come to Sunday School, Adult Bible Class, and the Divine Service. But, you all are here, so how else do we despise preaching and God’s Word? Do we perhaps despise God’s Word in its sacramental forms—Holy Baptism, individual Absolution, and the Lord’s Supper—by not using them regularly or perhaps by not using them at all? The man in the Gospel Reading’s withered hand is a good reminder of sin and its effects in the world. On account of our sins against the Third Commandment and on account of our sins against all of the other Commandments, we deserve far worse than withered hands: we deserve death now in time and torment in hell for eternity.
Today’s Gospel Reading gives us rare insight into Jesus’s inner state (Marcus, ad loc Mark 3:5-6, p.253), as Jesus looked at the Pharisees with righteous anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, arguably at their refusal to repent of their sin. God certainly wanted them to repent, as God calls and enables us to repent: to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust God to forgive our sin, and to want to do better than to keep on sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives our sins. God forgives our sins against the Third Commandment and our sins against all of the other Commandments. God forgives all our sins, whatever our sins may be. God forgives our sins for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ.
Son of God and Son of man, Jesus is Lord even of the Sabbath, but He does not indiscriminately overturn God’s unchanging moral law, but He interprets and applies it correctly (confer Matthew 12:6). Jesus was born under the law in order to redeem those who were under the law (Galatians 4:4)—you and me. Jesus perfectly kept all of God’s moral law that we fail to keep, and Jesus went to the cross for our failures to keep the law. Even so near the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel account the end is already in sight (Marcus, ad loc Mark 3:1-6, p.254), as St. Mark reports Jesus’s disciples making His way through the grain-fields ultimately to the cross. The Pharisees were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus of something warranting death, such as failing to keep the Sabbath, and, after Jesus miraculously restored the man’s withered hand, the Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians about how to destroy Jesus (truly, as the saying goes, politics makes strange bedfellows). On that Sabbath, Jesus was doing good, saving life, but the Pharisees were doing harm, trying to kill Him (Marcus, ad loc Mark 3:3, p.248), and, yet, God ultimately worked even that death on the cross for our good. In Christ crucified and resurrected for us, we who repent and believe have our true Sabbath rest, as, “On our ‘Sabbath’ days, God feeds and heals us”.
Strictly interpreting the Sabbath law as the Pharisees did, Old Testament priests who carried out their duties on the Sabbath day would have profaned (or “made unholy”) the Sabbath day, but God regarded them as guiltless (Matthew 12:5). In today’s Epistle Reading (2 Corinthians 4:5‑12), St. Paul describes some of the “other” afflictions he and his coworkers suffered for the sake of proclaiming the Gospel, as jars of clay, showing forth the life of Jesus. The apostles and their successors, pastors today, “work” on what is otherwise a day of rest so that through them God may feed and heal us, as He does in the Sacrament of the Altar. To that Sacrament the grain of today’s Gospel Reading and the wine in the verses before it point (Mark 2:22). Even the Old Testament’s bread of the Presence that David ate, which represented the presence of God among His people, prophetically points forward to the bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Altar that actually is the presence of God among His people: the Body and Blood of Christ, given and shed for you and for me, for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. No longer despising God’s Word in all of its forms, but, in good practice, all of the baptized, who are regularly instructed and examined as part of private confession and then individually absolved, regularly receive this Sacrament of the Altar, whereby, “On our ‘Sabbath’ days, God feeds and heals us”.
The operator of a restaurant whom I know and his staff certainly can be fed by God and so healed at other times and on other days, though whether or not they do so is another matter. In the Gospel Reading, Jesus and His disciples’ entering a Synagogue is contrasted to the Pharisees’ going out of it, and the contrast is striking. For, as we set apart this day for God to work in us, especially in the Divine Service, God feeds and heals us. God makes the celestial Sabbath rest a terrestrial reality, by extending His reign from heaven to earth (Marcus, ad loc Mark 3:1-6, p.247). As God feeds and heals us now, we wait patiently and joyfully for His greatest healing, the resurrection and glorification of our bodies, on the last day.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +