I like it that, in our Gospel today, Jesus refers to King David to justify his own actions and his disciples’ behavior because once again, it shows us that it’s really hard to understand Jesus if we don’t understand the Old Testament. To understand Jesus, we actually need to understand the OT twice: As Jewish scripture (understand the cultural background and the religious teaching) and then, as Christians (interpret the OT as a series of prophecies about Christ). Here for example, we know that Jesus is often presented as a new David, the new King of Israel. We could also easily see a parallel between Jesus and Samuel (our first reading), and actually the Gospel invites us to do so. You may remember the story of Samuel’s mother, Hannah. She had been praying for a child for a long time and when she finally gives birth to her son she gives glory to God in a famous song that will be used as a pattern for Mary’s song of praise when she shares the news of her pregnancy with Elizabeth (Luke 1). Both women, the mother of Samuel and the mother of Jesus, sing about God’s justice, and we can interpret that as what God has done for them, but more deeply it is a foretelling of what Samuel and Jesus will be about. They will speak God’s justice, incarnate God’s justice. And we see in our passage today that it starts very early for Samuel. He is probably 7 or 8 years old when God calls him to prophetize. We like to think that we need to minister to children, but sometimes children minister to us as well, and that’s a good point for Eli, who although he was a priest and also the judge of Israel, encouraged Samuel and was ready to listen to his message.
Now what is the message about? Well, again, if you remember Hannah’s story, you may recall that, as an act of thanksgiving, she consecrates the child to God. As soon as the child is weaned, she takes him to the Temple so he can serve God and leads a holy life. At least that was the idea. The readers of the book of Samuel may realize that in reality things were a bit different. As a famous preacher notices, not only it must have been quite dreadful for the young Samuel to sleep where the cattle was sacrificed, but on top of having to participate in the daily slaughter which was certainly quite harrowing for a child that age, Samuel also witnessed a lot of bad behavior around the altar. Eli had two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, who were also priests of the Temple and we learn that they were abusing their power, using their privileges to keep for themselves the best parts of the sacrificed animals to feast on, and they also assaulted the women who were helping them. In short, they were glutton and adulterers, cheating God and disrespecting the people they were supposed to serve. And God was going to punish them by bringing them down, actualizing Hannah’s song in an unexpected way (see 1 Samuel 2). Of course Hannah had no idea. Actually, I can only imagine what she would have thought if she had known what was going on. She must have thought that leaving Samuel in the Temple, he would be well educated to live the holy life…as it turns out, he would have to become the one who needed to model the holy life, bring back the Temple to God, and succeed to Eli as a better judge for Israel.
I guess this is there also that we can see the connection between Samuel and Jesus. I think most of us assume that God sent Jesus in the world to be nice to nice people, but we have to realize that Jesus was also carrying a message of judgment. We often see Jesus’s ministry as a succession of miracles, healing and teachings about God’s love and we assume that his confrontations with the Pharisees and other religious authorities were mostly accidental, yet we have to realize that actually Mark puts some of those confrontations at the heart for the Gospel, as he does today (two successive confrontations about the observance of the Sabbath) because it was central to Jesus’s ministry. We need to understand that the Pharisees weren’t just a nuisance for Jesus who couldn’t wait to get rid of them so he could (finally) do his real work, rather Jesus’s work was also about ministering and prophetizing to the Pharisees, not to condemn them, but because he wanted them to change. Today we read that He was grieved at their hardness of heart. And it’s quite clear in our story that Jesus heals the man with a withered hand to make a point, not only to justify himself, but to teach the Pharisees something about the Sabbath and about God: in a nutshell, if the Sabbath is about worshiping God they need to remember that the real worship is not so much to apply the letter of the law, rather it is about doing good/ saving lives (souls) / helping others. Like Samuel, Jesus was placed among “ungodly” godly people to bring them back to God. Sometimes we assume that Jesus criticized religious people’s behavior because he didn’t care for their religion, well probably that’s the other way around: Jesus criticized because he cared so much about their religion. He didn’t ask the religious leaders to stop being religious, he didn’t ask Pharisees to stop being Pharisees, he certainly didn’t come in the world so the Jews would stop to be Jews, but he asked everybody to question their practices, their assumptions and to understand the heart of what they were doing. If you pay attention you’ll realize that in our two stories Jesus does not break the Sabbath, he actually does not pluck the wheat and he does not touch the man to heal him (both were considered as work and therefore that would have broken the Sabbath’s rest). In our passage, Jesus does not say the Sabbath doesn’t matter, rather it matters in a deeper way than what the Pharisees assumed. Jesus was not a revolutionary, an iconoclast but he provoked people so they would examine their prejudices and their behavior and, from there, hopefully, grow spiritually..
Now I think there are two things that are important for us to notice today that could also help us grow spiritually:
– First, about the holy life. In the same way that Samuel was part of the religious system of the Temple and Jesus was a Jew of his time practicing the Sabbath, we also belong to a church and if God has placed us here it’s not only to give us a refuge but also to open our eyes on what’s dysfunctional about it, so we can bring some changes. I guess we often assume that leading the holy life would be to find the perfect place, the perfect community, and be finally at peace to do all the good we want to do, and some people spend their lives looking for the right church. Well, maybe it’s a good idea to leave a church where you’re really wasting your time, but we also need to be aware that challenge and confrontation are part of the holy life. We will struggle, disagree, question, we will make mistakes but it’s part of the spiritual growth. Jesus wasn’t inviting people to obey religion so they could feel safe, he was inviting them to set their religious priorities and to take responsibility for their actions. Jesus does not invite us to be part of a church so we can bask in our own perfection or good will, as did some of the Pharisees, rather Jesus invites us to bring growth and change where we are. We hear so often that The world is bad but at least we have the church, or we hear Some churches are bad, but at least we are Episcopalians, or I don’t know about other Episcopal churches but in our parish everything is good…Well, certainly God wants us to be thankful for what is good, but our main job is not to congratulate ourselves on our good practices, as the Pharisees who thought they were the only ones who “got it”. Our job is to see what’s wrong – not so much what’s wrong out there but what’s wrong where we are, in our churches and in us – and then strive to make it better – not by condemning but by embodying another way, like Samuel and Jesus embodied another way of being holy than the official, corrupted religious leaders.
– Lastly, I think we need to say a word about the Sabbath (after all, it’s the object of today’s teaching). You know, it’s kind of odd to read this passage about the Pharisees caring so much for the Sabbath, when today we care so little for Sunday’s rest, I mean, most businesses are open, and it’s not a priority to worship anymore. So maybe the Pharisees were right, after all, to make a big deal about it? Well, again, Jesus didn’t break the Sabbath, so Jesus also certainly thought it was a good idea to have a sacred day dedicated to God, at least once a week. The thing is we often pit weekly busyness against Sunday’s rest and I think this is this idea that Jesus challenges. Maybe Sabbaths are not just about being passive: not feeding, not healing, not working. The Pharisees made it sound as if the only purpose of the Sabbath was to do nothing. But again, Jesus invites us to think about it. Maybe it’s not so much about resting and more about finding another way of being busy. The reference Jesus makes to David is alluding to this episode where David is on a campaign with his army. It’s not innocent. Jesus is talking about how he and his disciples are in this urgency to proclaim the kingdom of God: they don‘t have time time to sit and have lunch, in the same way Jesus does not have time to wait for the end of the Sabbath to proclaim God’s kingdom by healing the disabled man. In all of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is moved by a sense of urgency, not for the things of this world, but for God and the salvation of the people. What about us? Instead of being busy with things that leave us empty and exhausted physically and spiritually we could find ways to be busy that would instead fill our hearts and the hearts of others. For us, instead of thinking of Sunday as a day where people should go to church or sit together with their family, not working, what would it look like if we thought about Sunday as a day to enable God’s work, sharing the Gospel or inviting a stranger to have lunch with us? In which ways can we become creative for God, reinventing ways of celebrating the Sabbath?