Friday in the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 15, 2022

Matthew 12, 1-8

Jesus was going through a field of grain on the sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “See, your disciples are doing what is unlawful to do on the sabbath.” He said to the them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry, how he went into the house of God and ate the bread of offering, which neither he nor his companions but only the priests could lawfully eat? Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests serving in the temple violate the sabbath and are innocent? I say to you, something greater than the temple is here. If you knew what this meant, I desire mercy, not sacrifice, you would not have condemned these innocent men. For the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.”

Today’s Gospel reading should be seen in the context of the previous Reading, Matthew 11, 28-30, in which the Lord promised deliverance from the harsh and pointless misinterpretations of the Law by the Pharisees, which he would replace with the life of grace that would lead to heaven.

“Jesus was going through a field of grain on the sabbath.”  We might wonder why Jesus was going through a planted field.  Perhaps a farmer might allow one person to go through it for a good reason, but he could hardly be expected to maintain his patience if a small crowd was doing so — some of whom were eating from his crop.  Yet this was not uncommon in ancient times when roads were few and paths through fields the most convenient way to go from one place to another.  Local laws and customs also allowed for eating from that which one passed through, as in Deuteronomy 23, 25: “When you go into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle to your neighbor’s standing grain.”  Implied here, of course, is the right to go into and through the field.  The restriction imposed in this particular law prevented a person from harvesting his neighbor’s grain for himself and taking it away to sell elsewhere.  Thus, Jesus and his Apostles are doing nothing wrong on traversing the field, and the Apostles are not breaking any laws by eating from the grain along the way, per se.  However, the Pharisees who are accompanying Jesus and his Apostles fault the latter for plucking the grain-heads on the Sabbath as though it were work, and so breaking the Law.  

The Lord’s answer to this, reminding the Pharisees of how David fed his troops with the bread reserved on the altar of God, informs us that the Lord had intended to feed, as it were, his Apostles by leading them down this path in the field.  Certainly he was aware that they were eating the heads off the standing grain, and he made no move to stop them.  His bringing up the story of David and his men tells us also of the hungry the Apostles must have suffered at that time, for David and his band were fleeing from King Saul, who sought to put him to death.  It may have been days since they had been able to sit down and eat.  And eating the bread from the altar would have been a last recourse.  In the Gospel, the Apostles are constantly moving about, following the Lord on his relentless mission to preach repentance.  They hardly had time to sleep or to eat.  Even at night, the Lord sometimes had them rowing across the Sea of Galilee, to continue preaching in the morning.  They must have resembled refugees, refugees from the world and traveling in haste to the kingdom of God.

The fact was that the Apostles broke no tenet of the Law in eating the grain anymore than if they had sat down at dinner to eat in a house.  The law of the Sabbath did not prevent people from eating or even from the work of feeding their livestock.  In his defense of his Apostles, capped by his quoting, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Hosea 6, 6), the Lord wrests the interpretation of the Law from the unfit Pharisees.  He reveals himself as the sole interpreter of the Law, further revealing that he had created the Law (for only its creator could interpret it legitimately), saying, “The Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.”  That is, he is the creator of the Sabbath and so the Lord of the law of the Sabbath.  He takes from the Apostles and the Jewish people the heavy yoke of the Pharisaic interpretation of the Law and sets on them instead the true Law of love, in which, indeed, it is clear that God made Sabbath as a mercy for us, and not us as victims of the Law.  God’s glory is shown by his mercy, not by bitter punishments.

In our dealings with our neighbors, we ought to show them the mercy of God and not hold them to standards that we ourselves cannot reach so that they should earn our mercy.