Tuesday, Second Week in Ordinary Time
Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Second Week in Ordinary Time
Memorial of Saint Agnes, Virgin and Martyr
Heb 6:10-20/Mk 2:23-28 (Lectionary #312)
For the second time Jesus is questioned about the behavior of his disciples. In response he gives a teaching about law and again says something about himself.
Jesus’ disciples were pulling heads of grain off the stalks and eating them as they walked through a field on the Sabbath. Some Pharisees said, “Look, they are working on the Sabbath! Jesus answered by reminding them that when in need David fed his hungry troops with the Temple bread “which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat.” Then he taught them how God thinks about his own laws: “The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath!”
Phariseeism is defined as a religion whose focus and goal is law observance. Jesus teaches that laws are always just a means to an end, and we cannot keep any law as God desires unless we first ask what its purpose is. He goes further and teaches that the purpose of all laws is to help people. If we lose sight of this, we have lost contact with God’s mind and will. And that means we are misunderstanding God!
This is an important principle. We must always interpret laws in the light of what God reveals of himself. If we reverse the direction and form our idea of God from the way his laws are interpreted by people in our time and place, we can get a very distorted notion of God. Some have stopped believing in God because of this. And some have left the Church because they judged the Church by the blind way some Catholics, even priests, interpret her laws. God did not create people to keep his laws. He made laws to help people live “life to the full” (John 10:10). If we have a problem with some particular law of God, either we don’t understand the law or we don’t know God.
Jesus concluded from this, “so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” Since Jesus was sent by God as Messiah and Savior of the human race, everything God created for human beings — including the Sabbath observance — is subject to him. Jesus is not just a limited human savior with a limited mission and authority. Paul will say later that “in him all things in heaven and on earth were created… all things have been created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:16). The bottom line is that anything Jesus says, God backs. This may sound obvious to us who know that Jesus is God. But it is still “Good News” — especially when we feel crushed by laws that are taught as if they were ends in themselves.
Initiative: Always ask what the goal of a law is so you will understand how to apply it to particular situations.
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