Tuesday, December 3, 2019

LORD OF THE SABBATH

Reading through the Gospel of Luke, I ran into something really interesting. It's a series of Jesus doing things that "violated the Sabbath."

In 4:31-41 He spent probably 6-8 hours, beginning in the synagogue then going to Peter's house to continue until sunset, healing people. The Sabbath goes from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, so He must have had a point to make by apparently stopping at the end of the Sabbath.

In 6:1-5 Jesus was accused of breaking the Sabbath because His hungry disciples went thru the fields harvesting the grain so that they could eat it.

In 6:6-11 Jesus healed a man with a withered hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath. When the leaders saw that they were enraged at him.

In 13:10-17 He was again in the synagogue on the Sabbath and healed a woman who wasn't able to stand up. He said that she had been bound by Satan. One of the leaders responded that she should have come be healed on one of the other 6 days of the week.

In 14:1-6 Jesus had a meal at the house of one of the leaders of the Pharisees (right in the belly of the beast). A man was there with extreme swelling in his hand & Jesus healed him. I don't know if the man was a plant, if he just showed up, or if he came there with Jesus. But it was the Sabbath day, in the home of a leader of those who criticized Jesus for breaking the Sabbath, that Jesus healed him.

Jesus gave a number of responses to His critics. But the one that really got them was in 6:5 - “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” 

Why would this bring out the greatest anger in them?

Because He was saying that He takes precedence over the Sabbath. He created it. He gets to say what is appropriate on the Sabbath. This was a claim to Deity. Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath. He is the God who created & ordained it.

Since He is your Lord & mine, that means that He calls the shots. He says what is right in our lives. We can get mad like the leaders did, or we can rejoice like Jesus' hearers did.

Whatever our response, He is still Lord. Of the Sabbath & of us.

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