What Jesus has to Say to Pharisees
Eric Durso
The Gospel of Mark • Sermon • Submitted
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How would you like to be Raul and Olivia De Freitas? Less than two months ago, they went on their honeymoon to a beautiful 5-Star Resort in the Maldives (MOLL-Deevs). After they arrived, the whole place locked down, and though everyone else was able to get out, Raul and Olivia were the last couple left.
Because of resort policy, the entire staff remained on the job, and since they were the only ones at the resort, they focused all their attention on the newlyweds. Their “room boy” checks on them five times a day. The dining crew, with no one else to serve, created an elaborate candlelit dinner for them to enjoy on the beach. They rest, every day, reading, taking walks on the beach, and being served by an attentive crew of resort staff.
You’re thinking: Wow! I wonder how many of us would love to trade places with Raul and Olivia?
Well, maybe not. To quote Olivia: “Everyone says they want to be stuck on a tropical island, until you're actually stuck. It only sounds good because you know you can leave.”
Perhaps this is an illustration: put us in a tropical paradise, get everyone serving me, and see if that brings rest to the soul. It won’t. That’s not a knock on Raul and Olivia. That’s simply pointing to a profound human reality: no external circumstances can ever bring inward rest, peace.
God knows this. This is why he baked into his creation a Sabbath rest. Genesis 2:2 says “God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”
God didn’t rest because he was wiped out. As we’ll see, God rested to provide a pattern for his people. Exodus 16, which is prior to the giving of the law, speaks of refraining from work on the Sabbath, the seventh day. When God gives the 10 Commandments in Exodus 20:8 “Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God…For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh.”
This day was to order the life of God’s people. Essentially, here it is: work 6 days, and then for one day instead of working, pause and think: my God created the world in six days. And then get back to work for 6 days. And then pause for a day and ponder: “my God created the WHOLE WORLD in 6 days.” And then get back to work. And then stop for a day and think: “My God created everything, all of it, in 6 days!”
It has a way of putting things into perspective. It has a way of humbling us. It has a way of reminding us about where all our provision comes from.
Now, it wasn’t simply physical rest that was meant to be achieved - a rest for the body. It was to be a inward rest. Hebrews 4:3 makes it clear: “For we who have believed enter that rest,” and verse 9 “So then there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.”
It’s like God set us an example. I will rest from my creative work. Now you rest from your works, one day a week, and remember that I am God, I am creator, I am provider, I am Father. That rest is ours through faith, and it’s an inward rest.
God’s way is inner rest. True faith produces peace and rest and freedom. Jesus said, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).
A true grasp of who God is - that he is creator, that he is love, that he is holy, that he is good, that he is gracious, that he is merciful, that he is kind - will bring the soul to rest.
Unrest, chronic anxiety, nagging unsettledness, discontent is often because of our refusal to rest in God’s grace.
Last week: man’s propensity to drift toward self-righteousness and legalism. We turn love in law, relationship into religion, and freedom in slavery. We are impressed with externals and forms. We are pressured to conform to meet standards. We set up rules for ourselves - and the more we do that, we are drifting from the gospel.
Now turn to Mark 2. The Pharisees had done this with the Sabbath. The Sabbath day, which was invented by God to provide rest for his people, had been turned into a taskmaster.
According to the Talmud, there are 39 activities forbidden on the Sabbath. Each one of the activities has further divisions and sub-applications. To be a faithful Jew, you had to pay fastidious attention to these laws. Here are some of my favorite examples:
There’s no planting on the Sabbath. This includes dragging chair legs in soft soil thereby unintentionally making furrows. If one has a handful of peanuts, in their paper-thin brown skins, and one blows on the mixture of peanuts and skins, dispersing the unwanted skins from the peanuts, this would be an act of Winnowing, and would be forbidden. If there’s a bowl of raisins and peanuts, and you only want the raisins, you cannot remove the peanuts from the bowl, but you can remove the ones you want to eat.
For more of the folly that is man-made religion, consider the eruv. These Sabbath laws restricted travel from one’s house. A house was any building without all the various rooms. But eventually, it came to mean any building that is united with another building, which led to the belief that if you tied a string from one building to another, both could be considered your “house” and you could travel between the two places.
This loophole grew and eventually gave way to the eruv system. The eruv system worked like this. If I put a string around a community of houses, I can freely travel during the Sabbath without violating it - it’s all counted as my house. Now get this: Probably the biggest eruv in the world is right in our own backyard, covering over 40 square miles, the Los Angeles eruv. The eruv - no longer string but now Kevlar Cable - runs through the median of the 10, the 101, and the 405 freeways, creating the biggest “house” where Jews feel free to move about freely without violating the Sabbath.
What happens when a semi-truck slams into the 405 median and breaks the kevlar cable? Thanks to the Rabbis in the Sky program (I’m not joking), there are rabbis that check the eruv every Friday from helicopter to ensure that it is, in fact, intact. And you can even follow @laeruv on Twitter for live updates.
Doesn’t it seem obvious that the entire system is built to violate the principle of the Sabbath?
That’s what’s happening here. Verse 23. It’s the Sabbath. Jesus is aware of all their crazy rules. And he purposefully takes his disciples through grainfields and plucks grain.
1st point: Jesus to Pharisees: Your Religious Rules Don’t Need to be Followed.
Jesus does not demand our conformity to others religious expectations.
We are called to follow Jesus. It is tempting to feel that we need to conform to religious expectations of people around us. We do not. Friends, be disciplined, yet. Go hard after Christ, yes, with all your might. But we must be diligent and careful not to take our disciplines, heighten them to the standard of divine law, and then expect others to follow them.
One couple trick-or-treats on Halloween, another couple replays Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 theses. One family watches Disney, the other family thinks Disney is from Satan. One man likes playing video games as a hobby, the other man likes reading books. A family homeschools, another family puts their kids in public school.
Here’s what Paul has to say bout this idea: “One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honor to the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself…(verse 10) “Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.”
Here’s the big idea. Most of our lives are lived in grey areas. What should I eat today? What should I wear today? Who should I talk to today? The Bible doesn’t tell you any specifics about that. And so we’re all going to choose different things to eat, different clothes to wear, different activities to prioritize, different things to abstain from. And unless we see someone in direct violation of a clear command, we are not to assume they’re doing wrong. It’s not our place. At the end of the day - or our lives - we will give an account to God.
Listen - Jesus shows us that we do not need to feel the crushing expectations to conform to other people’s religious expectations. We do have the right - and obligation - to help one another conform our lives and hearts and attitudes and actions to what God has given us in his Word, but we have no right to judge others according to that which is not written down.
Let’s see what happens after they accuse Jesus of violating their law:
“And he said to them, ‘Have you never read’” - ouch - the Pharisees spent their entire lives studying the law. “What David did, when he was indeed and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?”
Let’s get a little context. This scene comes from 1 Samuel 21. David has been anointed king of Israel, but he’s fleeing from Saul who wants to kill him. He’s hungry and comes to the tabernacle. And he lies. He essentially tells the priest “I’m on a top secret mission from the king, let me in.” He wasn’t. He’s hungry, and the only bread available was a ceremonial bread called the Bread of the Presence, which was 12 smalls prepared fresh every Sabbath, I think as a reminder of God’s provision to Israel. It was only supposed to be eaten by the priests, according to Levitcus 24:9.
David, not a priest, comes in, lies about what he’s doing, convinces the priest to let him eat the bread. And if you remember the rest of the story, the bad guy Doeg sees the whole thing, tells Saul, who in a rage orders all the priests at Nob to be killed. David lied, took the bread that wasn’t for him, and it resulted in the slaughter of 85 priests.
Now why in the world does Jesus bring this up? We’ve got to remember that the Pharisees loved David. They adored David. David is a hero. David is a model. David was the greatest king of Israel. They longed for another David, and they were even aware that the coming Messiah would be from David’s line.
David was clearly a flawed man, but the Pharisees were willing to overlook these failures because of the need of the moment. He was the king, after all, he was in need after all. The Pharisees would have said, “Of course David did that. And it was appropriate for him to do so, because he’s the king.
Now here, you have Jesus, the true king, the greater David. He’s not illegally taking bread, he’s doing exactly what was permissible, taking heads of grain. And the same Pharisees who excuse David accuse Jesus.
Jesus is exposing their inconsistency and hypocrisy. Here’s our 2nd point: Jesus to Pharisees:
Your Religious Rules are Hypocritical
You’re lenient when it’s David, the king you love and admire. You’re strict when it’s me, the king you refuse and reject.
Jesus railed on hypocrisy like nothing else. The harshest invectives were reserved for hypocrites. You can always tell hypocrisy because it’s inconsistent in its application of standards. It is happy to apply certain standards to some, while excusing themselves from the same standards.
How often do we set up standards and hold others to them while excusing ourselves from them. It’s a terrible crime when someone crosses the double-yellow on the freeway. But sometimes, you just have to do it.
If a parent wants to crush a child, create a standard, hold him to it, and then blow it off yourself.
Teach how important it is to submit to authority. And then defy the authorities in your life.
Teach them the values of honesty and truth-telling. And then tell white lies to cover less than flattering details about your life.
Talk about kindness, generosity, and sharing, and then then be irritable and stingy.
Tell them to give the benefit of the doubt, and then assume they’re always up to trouble.
Jesus exposes this: you’ve created a standard that you yourselves don’t hold to! If you did, you’d condemn David like you’re condemning me, but you’re not.
Now after calling their attention to their own hypocrisy, he says: Verse 27: “And he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
What does he mean? The Sabbath was designed by God for joy, refreshment, and rest. But the Pharisees had turned it into a slavemaster. There’s an entire biblical theology here of God, creation, man, and salvation.
But he continues: “So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”
Bombshell. Jesus is saying, “I am the lord of the Sabbath, I am the sovereign over the Sabbath, It’s my sabbath, I made it up, I instituted it. It was created by me. And I created it for you to worship me.
The Pharisees would not have misunderstood Jesus for one second. To claim to be the Lord of the Sabbath is to claim to be the one who created in 6 days and rested on the seventh. To claim that he was there in Genesis 1 speaking the world into existence. To claim to be the Lord of the Sabbath is to claim to be Creator God. Jesus is saying, “I created you, I created these grainfields, I created the universe, I created the sabbath, I created it all - and you don’t think I’m allowed to walk through these grainfields and eat them?
Jesus word to Pharisees:
Your Religious Rules are a Distraction.
Jesus is essentially saying, “I am lord of the Sabbath. I created the Sabbath for your rest, refreshment, and joy. But your rules have utterly distracted you. You’ve missed the point. The Sabbath, and every law, was for you to lead you to me!”
Christianity is Christ. We don’t need to conform to religious rules. Religious rules just create hypocrites and distract us from the point. We need Christ, a Savior, every hour.
This is the gospel. There is a goodness that needs to be forsaken, and it’s the manufactured goodness that makes us think we don’t need God’s grace. Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.
Jesus died to pay the penalty for our sins. Jesus lives today to save everyone who forsakes their false goodness and trusts in him. And now, Christians, we walk in the freedom of grace.
It is possible that our religious rules lead us away from following Jesus. Because when rules become primary, Jesus isn’t. Remember, a relationship of love can’t mix with a religion of rules.
Donald Barnhouse once asked the question: What would it look like for the devil to take over a city? If Satan took over Philadelphia, all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.
In other words, it seems like the enemies favorite recipe for ruining souls is not leading them into outward evil, but causing them to actually believe in their own goodness. Self-righteousness, the belief that we are naturally good, is far more dangerous than open sin.
Live near the cross, where you see the cost of your sin and the love of your savior. Embrace the reality of your spiritual poverty: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Face reality. Confess sin. And then rejoice - you stand in the wonderful, matchless, breath-taking, never-ending, always flowing grace of God.