MARK 3 (PART 1)
Read Mark 2:23-3:12
Mark continues to give us little bite-sized episodes in the life of Jesus that show who he is and to give us some of his teaching.
First of all, there are two incidents concerning the Sabbath and Jesus’ attitude towards it, and how he was in conflict with the religious authorities about it. As the disciples were going through a field of corn on the Sabbath they plucked some ears of corn and ate them. Now by this time the Pharisees, the religious authorities, had decreed that there were certain activities that were not permitted on the Sabbath in order to keep to the law of Exodus 34:21, ‘Six days you shall labour, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the ploughing season and harvest you must rest’. The Pharisees considered that what they were doing constituted reaping and thus broke the law. Jesus’ reply was to cite the Old Testament precedent of David, who had taken consecrated bread on the Sabbath to feed his hungry soldiers (1 Samuel 21:1-6). The second incident involved Jesus himself healing somebody on the Sabbath, which the Pharisees again considered to be work, and so was not lawful.
The Pharisees were so keen to make sure that nobody broke God’s laws that they added many layers of man-made laws to the principles that God set out for them. The idea was to ‘make a fence for the Torah’, as rabbinic writings put it. If you didn’t break their man-made laws then you couldn’t possibly get near to breaking God’s laws. All well and good, but as Jesus pointed out, this can lead to unnecessary suffering and that the Pharisee had kind of missed the point of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was intended to be a blessing to mankind, not a burden. It was to be a benefit, an opportunity to have a day of rest and recovery and be refreshed for the following week. It was not a strict rule that entailed people going hungry or being in pain and distress when it could be avoided.
Hidden in these two little stories is a claim by Jesus as to who he is. In Chapter 2 we saw that he offended the religious authorities by saying that he forgave sin; something that only God himself can do. Here he is speaking with authority about what the Sabbath is and isn’t because he is the Lord, even of the Sabbath (2:28).
The opposition to Jesus was by now getting quite strong. The Pharisees and their allies started to plot as to how they might kill him (3:6). In contrast, his healings, exorcisms and teaching attracted vast crowds and he was popular among the people, and maybe that was partly why he was unpopular with the authorities. At the stage neither the crowds nor the authorities knew who Jesus really was, the Son of God. Interestingly, the evil spirits that he confronted knew exactly who he was, and said so (3:12).