Tuesday in the Second Week of Ordinary Time, January 16, 2024

Mark 2, 23-28

As Jesus was passing through a field of grain on the Sabbath, his disciples began to make a path while picking the heads of grain. At this the Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” He said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry? How he went into the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of offering that only the priests could lawfully eat, and shared it with his companions?” Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. That is why the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

Jesus declared, as it is written in Matthew 5, 17: “Do not think that I am come to destroy the Law, or the Prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.”  That is, the Law needed to be completed by the Lord Jesus.  It is as though the Lord were finishing the sentences the Law had begun.  The Law in the time before grace demanded only what people were capable of doing without grace.  Thus, “Moses by reason of the hardness of your heart permitted you to put away your wives” (Matthew 19, 8), but with the coming of grace, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matthew 19, 6).  

In the Gospel Reading for today’s Mass, the Lord Jesus completes the law of the Sabbath: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”  Originally, God “rested” on the seventh day of the week and so he commanded his people to rest and to be given rest on the seventh day.  God gave the Sabbath as a gift to his people so that they might find refreshment from their labors.  Many people preferred to work on this day however and so the Mosaic Law was made strict: “Six days you shall do work; the seventh day shall be holy unto you, the Sabbath and the rest of the Lord: he that shall do any work on it, shall be put to death” (Exodus 35, 2).  Thus, for those who lived in the time before grace.  But with his coming into the world, bringing grace, the Son of God relaxes the restrictions of the Sabbath: the man-made ones of the Pharisees, and of the Mosaic Law, such as, “You shall kindle no fire in any of your habitations on the Sabbath day” (Exodus 35, 3).  Grace enables us now to see and enjoy the Sabbaths of this world as a sign of the eternal Sabbath made possible for us by the labors of Jesus Christ.

“The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”  This is the first time in St. Mark’s Gospel that Jesus refers to himself as “the Son of Man”, the term used in the Book of the Prophet Daniel and the apocryphal work scholars call 1 Enoch for the One whom God will send to the earth at the end of the age.  He is described as standing before Almighty God and as possessing great power.  Jesus teaches that even the laws regarding the Sabbath are within the purview of the Son of Man, whom he identifies as himself.  We might have noticed that Jesus never comes out and says, in so many words, “I am the Son of Man.”  Rather, he speaks of himself as though it were evident to all, through his works, that he was and, as time goes on, he teaches more and more of what the title means and encompasses.  

One further note: “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry?”  We should consider the amazement of the Pharisees at the Lord’s readiness with a perfect response from the Sacred Scriptures.  They thought of him as an ignorant, unlettered working man from the nondescript Galilean town of Nazareth, and here he was explaining the Scriptures to them!  And it was as though he had this passage in his pocket, ready at hand.  He might as well have been a dog teaching mathematics in their own language, for the shock he gave them.