The Challenge

Pastor Robarge’s Sermon
Sunday, February 19, 2012

Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

What does your Jesus look like? I know it sounds a little bit like a silly question, but we all have similar and different pictures in our heads when we think about who Jesus is to us, so what does your Jesus look like? You may laugh, but this is actually what my Jesus looks like. Exactly. He has nice hair. He’s dressed conservatively for the day. It’s not something that I would wear today, but it is definitely something I look at and say, “This is definitely Jesus.” He stands for everything that I stand for. He speaks just like I speak. This is the Jesus that’s for me.

What does your Jesus look like? Does He sound a lot like you? Does He think a lot like you? Does He believe everything that you believe? Often times, in Scripture, when we see Jesus and we hear Him speak and we listen to His words, sometimes there are some that jump out at us and we say, “Yeah, that goes a little bit too far, Jesus. I don’t know if I really like that part. I don’t know if I’m really going to highlight that part when I put together my vision of you.”

Often times, we take that vision and we try to put Jesus into this little box and we say, “This is who my Jesus is,” when we bring Him out to people. But what does your Jesus look like?

We’re going through the gospel of Mark and often times, in the gospel, we get to see Jesus speak His own words and let His own words allow Him to be able to tell us who He is, the reason why He has come. We go through the gospel of Mark with the intention of knowing who Christ is, not with the intention of trying to fit Jesus into the mold that we have for Him.

As we see today, there was a group of religious thinkers that were around in Jesus’ time. They had a mold for Jesus. They had a mold for the Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to act like this, to think like this, to be like this and Jesus did not fit the mold.

We spend time in the text today, looking at the Pharisees and looking at their interaction with Jesus. If you’d like to, I invite you to pull out your bibles because we are going to spend some time in the very section, the last part of Mark 2 and the beginning of Mark 3. We’re going to take all of our time here today in the message just to look at the Word, to let Jesus speak for Himself as we listen to Him.

I will also allow you to, if you have your phones on, your mobile devices, go ahead and pull those out, too, because I like to use it on there, too. Let’s listen to the text. You have the NIV, I have the ESV, a little bit of a difference but we’ll work through the differences.

It is here in Mark 2 starting with Verse 23, this is the account, “One Sabbath, He was going through the grain fields with His disciples and they made their way. They began to pluck the heads of grain and the Pharisees said to Him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?’” Look what they’re doing. These Pharisees have infiltrated Jesus’ group, only to a certain extent. What happened is the Pharisees heard about Jesus and they sent a couple of them to tag along, to hang back from Jesus’ group, to listen from a distance, not too close because they don’t want to get what He’s putting across but yet far enough away that they can hear what He’s doing, see what He’s doing and so they can make a judgment call on Jesus.

Here were these Pharisees walking far enough behind. They see the disciples and they start picking the heads of grain. The first thing we need to know here is this is not illegal. At first blush, we’d say, “Well, why is somebody picking something from somebody else’s field?” The Jewish law, according to them, says that’s completely lawful. It’s okay for people to go along the fields and to pick the head as long as they didn’t cut them down completely and try to take that with them. It was lawful for them to be walking along to the towns and villages to grab those pieces of kernels, to be able to eat along the way.

What the Pharisees are saying is unlawful is them doing it on the Sabbath. The Pharisees themselves by name mean “set apart ones” or “holy ones.” You can kind of see just by the name that there is a little bit of self righteousness there. There is a little bit of believing they are more holy than people around them. And so it was that they constructed from God’s original law when God said, “Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.” It was from there that, all of a sudden, the Pharisees, the law teachers, all the people, they decided they needed to add to the law. So they came up with thirty-nine different statutes just for the Sabbath Day, thirty-nine different ones on what they could do and what they could not do, what they could eat and what they couldn’t eat, how they could act and how they couldn’t act. There were all these things that were stacked up and the Pharisees finally see a reason to challenge Jesus.

It’s always funny, the reaction that Jesus has versus maybe the way that I would react. We go back to the text and we listen to the next part of that. How does Jesus respond to these Pharisees when they’re challenging Jesus and the disciples in this Sabbath breaking? This is what Jesus said, “He said to them, the Pharisees, ‘Have you never read?’” Now we have to stop there for a moment because it’s Jesus’ little way of kind of digging at them. These are the Pharisees. These are the guys who believe they are holier than thou. These are the people who said, “I know every word of the Torah. I know every word of Scripture and how dare you say, ‘Have I read?’ Of course I’ve read it.” But Jesus takes them back to a different understanding.

He says, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar, the High Priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for any but the High Priest to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?”

What is Jesus trying to tell these Pharisees? The Pharisees believe that Jesus is coming to introduce something new. They believe that He is some kind of new religious leader of the day. He’s trying to put together His own set of rules and regulations for people to follow. But in the very statement, what Jesus is doing is He’s saying, “Look what I’m doing. I’m going back to the Old Testament. I’m going back before you started to distort the laws, the very laws of what God intended, back before you started to have to hedge this law, to be able to figure out how you were going to keep it, how you were going to be able to find that you were going to be holier than everybody else.”

We have to understand a little bit about what Sabbath is. Jesus was trying to give them a new understanding, a new understanding that wasn’t really new. It was going back to the old. He said the Sabbath is this: The Sabbath, in its very understanding, comes from the Hebrew and it means deep rest. There’s another kind of secondary translation, I’m going to get to that in a moment here, but the Sabbath itself means deep rest.

When Jesus goes on to tell them a little bit about the Sabbath, this is what He says to them next, “And then He said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.’” We can stop there for a moment because when we look at that then, Jesus is saying that man was made for deep rest. That’s the intent. That’s the purpose.

But we have to understand then what is deep rest? What does it mean to rest deeply? When we look at it, the Pharisees themselves believed they were keeping the Sabbath to the nth degree. They didn’t break any of the thirty-nine different statutes that had been piled onto the law. To them, the Sabbath was about how they were going to follow every rule and every regulation and, once they kept that, then they believed they were holy. Do you see how tiring that can be, how completely exhausting it can be to be able to say, “Alright, well, what am I going to do today? I have to make sure I don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this and I have to make sure I do this, this and this and if you follow it you’re saying, ‘Alright, I’ve done it.’”

But what happens when you haven’t followed it? What happens when you just miss one or what happens when you miss two? All of a sudden, what happens in that very essence of the nature of trying to keep it, guilt builds up and, all of a sudden, everything just seems to be, “Well, now I’m completely horrible and now there’s nothing good in me and now there’s no reason why I can ever connect with God.” The nature of what Jesus is talking about, the Sabbath, He’s not talking about a day. He’s talking about rest.

How restful is it to be able to say, “These are all the rules and the laws and the regulations that I have to keep.” How restful is it to be able to say, “This is what I have to do every single Saturday for them.” Not very restful at all.

So when do you find your rest? Jesus continues. He points out for us that it’s not just man that was made for deep rest, but He also calls Himself the Lord of the Sabbath. In the very nature of His words, what Jesus is pointing out is in His very nature, pointing back to the beginning of time itself, He Himself is the Sabbath. He is the deep rest and we can’t take away from that.

When we go through this, we try to find out what Jesus is trying to get at. How are we supposed to understand the Sabbath, how can we hear Him in His own words so we’re not trying to distort Him to be able to put Him in a box? He’s saying, “The deep rest is found in me.”

Scientists have proven over time that the human body needs certain moments of time of rest, so there are those short moments in time that we talk about, we call them naps. And it says in these studies that the human body needs those small moments of rest, but it also shows the human body needs the long periods of rest. Both of them in combination allow the human body to function at its highest capacity.

But how often do we get by on just napping and not finding our deep rest? How often have we become like the Pharisees, to be able to look at the rules and the regulations and say, “I have to keep this one and this one and this one,” and that just tires us out. It leads us to more guilt and more guilt and more guilt. Jesus, in another gospel, said that His yoke is light compared to the yoke and the burden that the Pharisees have. Jesus says, “Come and rest in me. That’s where you’ll find the deep rest.” That’s the only place you can find the deep rest because that’s the place where God Himself is also rested.

We look back at that because Jesus draws us back to Creation. He draws us back to the time when God instituted this time of rest and in the six days of Creation, God went through and He looked at everything that He had created and He saw it and He said, “It’s perfect. It’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be.” And then it says, “On the seventh day, He rested.” We always look at it and say, “Why did God need rest?” God Himself is God. He’s all powerful, all knowing. Why did He need rest? That’s the second part of the understanding of the Sabbath. The Sabbath itself is a very deep rich meaning, meaning that deep rest, but also there’s a secondary understanding. When God looked at everything and it says that He rested, it also means fully content, having everything there.

When it says He rested, that means He was fully content with everything He had done and that’s when we can find our rest. That’s where we are able to say, “I can rest in the one who’s the Lord of the Sabbath, who is the very Sabbath Himself.”

We continue because sometimes we still miss the point. Even though we talked about the Sabbath, we know what the Sabbath is but sometimes we miss the point and we find in Scripture that people do also, because we turn to Chapter 3 in the text. Chapter 3 starts with another account of the Sabbath Day. Now I find in the text itself, it doesn’t have any reason to believe that these followed one after another. Chances are this was a separate Sabbath account, but Jesus Himself was trying to draw them or Mark when he was putting the gospel together, as he was trying to draw this together as an illustration for people to understand what Jesus is talking about when He mentions the Sabbath Day.

When we look at the next part again, it says, “Again, He entered into the synagogue and a man was there with a withered hand and they watched Jesus to see whether He would heal him on the Sabbath so they might accuse Him.” So these are the same Pharisees, the same teachers who were following Him around before. These are the same ones who are kind of just sitting back waiting for Him to do something wrong. So what do they see? They see this man with the withered hand. Is Jesus going to heal him or is He going to let him continue to suffer?

We know what Jesus is going to do, but He actually turns this into a very physical lesson for the people to get. He turns to the attention of this man with the withered hand and He says, “Come here. Stand up in front of the whole crowd.” He said, “This is what the Pharisees wanted to do in secret but I want to do out in the open. Come and stand up so everybody can see.”

So what does He say to him? He doesn’t address the man with the withered hand but instead He addresses the Pharisees. He says then, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm? Is it lawful to save a life or to kill it?” Part of the Sabbath law regulations said if you had a gash in your skin somewhere and you believed it was going to lead to death, you were allowed to clean it up. You were allowed to bind your wounds and allowed to get all healed. But if you thought you had a gash and it wasn’t going to kill you, then you weren’t allowed to touch it. You weren’t even allowed to wipe the blood that would be dripping from your arm or leg or feet or whatever. You had to let it bleed.

So then when it comes to this, what Jesus is pointing out is that the very nature of the Sabbath is one of healing, is one of resting, is one of restoration and He looks to the man with the withered hand and He says, “So is it lawful for me to heal this man? Is it lawful for me to do good to this man or to let Him suffer? Is it lawful for me to see him or is it lawful to just let him die?”

We have to know a little bit more about the man with the withered hand. In the Greek itself, the withered hand doesn’t say it’s from the original, so he didn’t always have a withered hand. He wasn’t born with it. It came about later in time. There are some extra biblical studies of this story, and it’s found out that this man was actually a stone mason. He used to build brick houses and all kinds of stuff with his hands. But there was one point in time that, all of a sudden, his hand stopped working. They don’t know if it was the tendons and, all of a sudden, his hand kind of itself just closed and he wasn’t able to open it. So he couldn’t use his hand anymore. What did that mean? It meant he couldn’t work anymore. And what did that mean? It meant he couldn’t eat anymore because he couldn’t make a living.

Jesus, as He points out to the Pharisees, says this is a life and death issue, the very nature of the Sabbath itself Jesus is trying to point out to them. He’s saying, “I am saving this man’s life, even if you think it’s just another rule breaking.” Because we look at the Sabbath Day and again, it’s about restoration. He’s brought restoration to this man’s hand. He’s brought wholeness to his life once again. He can go back out to work for a living, to put his hands to work.

Jesus is showing the original intent of the Sabbath Day, not the rules and regulations that are placed on it, but the very nature of what it’s about, restoration. The Pharisees don’t get it, though. What I find in our concluding verse of this section is what I call the theme for the rest of the gospel. If you look at it, Chapter 3:6, it’s the theme for the rest of the gospel. Go to your bibles. Go ahead and circle it because you’ll find this is the theme for everything else that we see. It says the Pharisees went out and immediately held council with the Herodians against Him, how to destroy Jesus.

The Pharisees and the Herodians dislike each other. That’s probably even putting it lightly. The Herodians themselves were only loyal to King Herod. Now for the Jews and the Pharisees, the real Jews didn’t look at Herod as the real king. They said, “He’s only part Jew. He can’t be the king of the Jews because he’s not really Jewish.” And so they hated the Herodians, those who were loyal to Herod. But now, they have a common enemy.

They find out that Jesus isn’t going to fit their mold. They find out Jesus, in His very nature and His very words, is not going to be what they think He’s going to be. They take His words and they dismiss them because they don’t fit what they have for the Messiah.

How often do we want to do that? We can construct a nice picture of Jesus that everybody’s going to like. We can take all of the good things, the nice things, “I’m a friend of God” and we can say, “Oh, here’s a good picture of Jesus. This is the one that I like.” Or we can let Jesus speak for Himself. This is the challenge. The challenge for us today is to be able to do that, to be able to read through the rest of this gospel, to be able to say, “Let’s let Jesus speak for Himself.”

And every time we get those notions, that feeling deep inside of us that says, “I want to box Jesus up. I want to take Him and I want to mold Him and I’m going to make Him part of my story,” and instead of doing that, let’s let Jesus speak for Himself and see how we fit into His story. Amen.