The Law - Part 1

23^rd May 2013

Immediately after Jesus's promise that His yoke - His teaching - is easy and His burden is light, Matthew records this:

Matthew 12v1-2
At that time Jesus went through the cornfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some ears of corn and eat them.
When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, "Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath."

Jesus spent the next 6 verses telling the Pharisees not to be so silly and judgmental. We'll look at His answer next time but, this week, let's take a moment to think about the Pharisees.

Whenever anybody says anything, there's a reason why they say it. So why did the Pharisees make such a big deal about the disciples picking a few handfuls of grain on the Sabbath? What harm did they think the disciples were doing? To understand that, we need to think about why the Pharisees were Pharisees. That is, why they believed what they believed.

The origin of the Pharisees is uncertain but it seems likely that they emerged after the Jewish return from exile in the 5th and 6th centuries B.C. and I think it's likely that they came together around their distinctive teaching because of the story they told about their nation - the history of the Israelites.

For a Jew, perhaps the most important story in the Old Testament is the story of the Exodus - when God saved His people out of slavery in Egypt, delivered them through a series of miracles, and brought them to Mount Sinai, where he gave them the Law, encapsulated in the Ten Commandments. At that time, God assured the Israelites that, if they would obey the Law, then He would be their God and they would be His people, and He would protect them and provide for them.

Of course, the Israelites failed to keep the Law (as we all do) so, later, God sent His prophets to remind His people of the Law and to call them back to obedience to it. The prophets warned of severe judgment if the people didn't obey. Eventually, the judgment came; the temple was destroyed and they were deported to Babylon and other countries for seventy years.

When they returned from exile, and began to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple, in the time of Ezra, they would have been very conscious of the punishment God had inflicted on them and would have returned to an emphasis on obedience to the Law of the Most High God.

A group of people, sooner or later designated "Pharisees", took this idea so seriously that they carried out an analysis of the first five books of the Bible (some call these books the "Books of Moses", and some call them the "Pentateuch", but Jews call them the "Torah"). They found 613 laws in the Torah and determined to obey all of them (of course, no-one obeys all of these laws all of the time - we're all sinners). They then took this analysis a step further; they did their best to work out - and write down - exactly what it would mean to obey each of the 613 laws. This resulted in a huge number of what we might call secondary laws - laws that aren't in the Bible, but which reflect the analysis the Pharisees had carried out. The example we have in Matthew 12 is a case in point:

The Pharisees had no problem with the disciples picking a few grains of corn to eat. They knew this was lawful:

Deuteronomy 23:25
If you enter your neighbour's cornfield, you may pick the ears with your hands, but you must not put a sickle to his standing corn.

But the Pharisees were incensed because someone had broken one of their religious regulations that's not in the Bible - one of these secondary laws - that said you shouldn't pick any grain on the Sabbath. This secondary law was the result of their analysis of the fourth commandment:

Exodus 20:9-11
Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

In their analysis, they reasoned firstly that harvesting is work, and secondly that picking grain is harvesting. And so they concluded that picking grain - even a few handfuls - is work, and doing so on the Sabbath is illegal.

In the light of their understanding of their own history, when they suffered greatly because of their disobedience of the Law, we can understand how they came to this sort of conclusion. They were determined to do all they could to keep the Law, and to persuade all their fellow Jews to keep it. And, since observance of the Law had become central to their religious beliefs, we can understand why they had a legalistic approach to doing so.

But they'd got it quite wrong. They'd given their secondary laws the same weight as God's laws. And, as a result they'd neglected the call to mercy and love that is not only in the law, but is the basis of it.

Many churches, and many Christians, do the same.

So two questions arise:

• When we tell our story, does it lead us into a false understanding of ourselves, of God or of His Law?
• Have we, or our church, or our denomination, created rules and regulations that God doesn't want? Even if our motives are good, are we harming ourselves or others by saying that God requires some things that, actually, He doesn't require?

If so, aren't we Pharisees, too?

More next week.