A Sabbath walk through the fields

Continuing with Fouard's Life of Christ:

II: A Sabbath walk through the fields

Luke vi. 1-5; Mark ii. 23-28; Matt. 1-8.

Pharisees spying on the Disciples.J-J Tissot.

As we proceed hereafter, we shall find the hatred of the princes of Israel evermore pursuing and annoying the Saviour.  Everywhere, along the roads, in the fields, and in the wilderness, even when He seemed to be alone with His disciples, He was shadowed by spies who were stirring up the crowd against Him.  From the first day, we find traces of this persecution.  The Lord, as He was returning to Galilee, on the Sabbath which followed the Passover, happened to be walking through a corn-land, now ripe for the harvest.  The disciples, moved by hunger, broke off some ears of wheat; rubbing it in their hands and blowing away the chaff, they began to eat the grain.  In this there was nothing which was not lawful and Moses had permitted it in definite terms; and from age to age in the Orient the custom has always been cherished of never refusing the wanderer this charity, which costs so little.  But although the Law allowed one to take a few ears, it forbade all reaping and gathering and threshing of the harvest on the Sabbath Day; but the Scribes had decided that to pluck an ear, and to bruise the grain between your palms, was the same as " to reap, to gather in, and to thresh the crops."

Some Pharisees who were following the little band had no mind to let such an infraction of their Rules pass unnoticed.  They approached the Saviour, and said to Him:

"Look!  Your disciples are doing that which is not allowed upon the Sabbath day."

Jesus walking before His disciples, had taken no heed of their action, nor participated in it; but far from disowning the responsibility, He covered the innocent indulgence with the mantle of His benign approval.  To these Councillors who reproached Him with having broken one of the Precepts, He quoted the Law as opposed to them, and with something of irony confessed His surprise that men so deeply versed in the Scriptures should be ignorant of their teaching on this point.

"Have you never read, then," he said, "that which David did when he was compelled by necessity and urged on by hunger, and those who were with him?  How he entered the House of God, in the time of the High-Priest Abiathar, and ate the Loaves of Proposition,1 which it is not permitted to anyone to eat accept the priests, and gave to those who were with him?"

If David, in his extreme need, might lay hands upon the Sacred Bread, and so transgress the precepts of the Law, how could they hold it criminal for His hungry disciples to have pulled a few handfuls of wheat, that they too might sustain their strength?  Furthermore, the Pharisees themselves acknowledged that the Sabbatical observances must have their exceptions; for this maxim was generally received among them: "In the Temple there is Sabbath." Even on this Day of Rest, the Priests might cut the wood, kindle the altar-fires, replace the Loaves of Proposition, and sacrifice a double holocaust; the sanctity of the Temple itself kept them blameless.

Jesus pleaded with them for this generous reading of a law which His adversaries insisted upon as being so inflexible, and He admonished them that their exceptions applied to Him as much as to the Temple.  Indeed, had He not just now proclaimed before the Sanhedrin that he was the Son of God made man, and hence rightly to be revered as a Sanctuary of Jehovah?  These lawyers who were hounding His steps must certainly have known this; but once more He recalled it to their mind in these words:

"But I say to you, there is here are a greater than the Temple."

The Master longed to gain his persecutors to the Truth, much more than He desired to confound them.  Therefore He sought to enlighten their minds by showing that "the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath." The Sabbath instituted by the God to lighten the burden of man's labours, the offspring of his sin, in the divine order, for the pledge of having never-ending rest and peace.  During this day of mercy, to forbid the hungry from gathering a few grains of wheat were to change our heavenly Father into a Tyrant, and to turn His loving commands into hateful restrictions.  Jesus mourned over these blind and stolid interpreters of the Law.

"If you but knew," He concluded, "what is the meaning of those words: I love mercy better than sacrifice, you would never have condemned the innocent."

This response scarcely touched these men, stubbornly clinging to their mistaken views; and though at this moment as they did not venture to move against the Divine Master, they decided to scrutinise His actions more narrowly than ever.

Totus tuus ego sum 

Et omnia mea tua sunt;

Tecum semper tutus sum:
Ad Jesum per Mariam