
The Rest Of The Matter
How many of you have had the experience of taking a vacation and feeling the need right afterwards to take another vacation? You crammed your "rest" time so full of activity, trying to get as much done as you could, that you needed another rest after your rest.
Isn't it funny how we have that tendency as people? We have such a hard time just resting that we'll figure out a way to make our rest as much work as possible.
And it's not just modern people. Today, as we continue into Matthew chapter 12, the theme of rest looms large in our passage. The opening words "at that time" link this passage to what we heard about last week—the burdens of the Pharisees and the rest promised in Christ.
1. Context
And it's no coincidence that the next two episodes in Matthew, which we consider today, each happened on a Sabbath. The Sabbath was a day of rest, given to the people by God through Moses. Here's the command from Exodus chapter 20:
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:8–11).
And the Sabbath wasn't just one command among many. According to Exodus 31:12, the Sabbath was the sign of the Mosaic Covenant with Israel, marking them out as God's people. So important was the Sabbath that working on that day carried the death penalty (Exodus 31:14).
God wanted His people to remember, every week, that He was taking care of them, and all of their blessings came from His hand and not just from their hard work. Unlike other ancient religions which thought that the gods created people to do jobs for them, God commands His people to stop working and let Him provide for them.
And, of course, this was a command that Israel regularly chafed at, if not totally ignored, throughout their years of rebellion (Nehemiah 13:17–18). So it shouldn't surprise us that the Pharisees, all those years later, made it a point that they were never, ever going to mess up on the Sabbath. They were going to nail this. And we know how the Pharisees thought. They were so determined to never break one of God's laws, even accidentally, that they wrote very specific instructions so that they could be very certain about never doing any wrong.
I read some of these rabbinic regulations this week, which spelled out what was work and what was not work on the Sabbath. "Work" involved ripping a seam, tying two knots, writing two letters, or erasing two letters. Writing one big letter wasn't a sin, but erasing a large letter with the intent of writing two small letters made one liable for a sin-offering. [Michael L. Rodkinson, trans., The Babylonian Talmud: Original Text, Edited, Corrected, Formulated, and Translated into English, vol. 1 (Boston, MA: The Talmud Society, 1918), 140.]
The rabbis debated whether catching a slug and squeezing it so that it bled was a transgression that involved one sin-offering or two. One rabbi said it involved two sin offerings because squeezing was an act of threshing, whereas an other said that threshing only applies to the produce of the soil so catching and squeezing a slug only required one sin offering.
And the rules went on and on, mandating exactly how much chopped straw and food and water and rope and paper and ink you could carry on the Sabbath day and whether those amounts applied to the whole day or whether it was okay to carry that amount and set it down and then pick up that same amount later on.
Is anyone exhausted yet? And I haven't even gotten into the paragraphs that gave specific instructions related to using the bathroom on the Sabbath. No, I'm not making any of this up.
So you can see the idea here. All of these regulations were designed to take all of the guess work out of law-keeping. You didn't have to wonder "Am I breaking God's law here or not? Is this work or not?" All the decisions were made for you already, and all you had to do was be familiar with these pages and pages of regulations.
And the problem, as you can imagine, is that all of these Rabbinic rules totally destroyed the sabbath as an actual rest. Instead of taking a deep breath and enjoying God's gift of a day off, you're worried about whether the amount of food in your hand equals a full dry fig or only three quarters of a dried fig. You're living under the burden of having to memorize and obsess over all of these hyper-detailed rules.
2. Controversy (vv. 1-2)
And with all of that in the background, we are not surprised to read the first two verses of our chapter. “At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, ‘Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath’” (Matthew 12:1–2).
According to the Pharisees, the disciples were harvesting and threshing, which was work on the Sabbath. It's not just that they were breaking the Pharisee's rules—it's that, according to the Pharisee's rules, they were breaking the law of God.
And the very worried Pharisees, concerned to uphold the purity of the word of God, take the first step and go to Jesus and inform him that this disciples are doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath to do.
This is a big deal. They've invested their whole lives into making sure that Israel stays pure and blameless and doesn't go back to the law-breaking ways of their ancestors. If this new Rabbi lets his disciples work on the Sabbath, that's a challenge to their whole system, their whole lives, and maybe even their whole nation.
3. Counter (vv. 3-8)
So how does Jesus respond? Probably not how they expected him to. He points them to the Bible, and shows them how much they've missed the point. And He does this in four passes.
a. David & The Holy Bread (vv. 3-4)
First, in verses 3-4, He says this:
“He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests?’” (Matthew 12:3–4).
"Have you not read?" Jesus points them to the Scripture. He points them back to the Scripture and shows them how their traditions have totally ignored the intent of the word of God.
"Have you not read" would be an offensive question to someone who had spent their entire life devoted to the Scriptures. If anybody had read anything in the Bible, it was them! But that's the point of His question. For all of their reading, they hadn't read a lot of things properly. They had ignored the point of the Bible again and again and again and had missed God's intention again and again and again.
So, Jesus points them to this event which takes place in 1 Samuel 21. David is escaping from Saul, and he comes to the tabernacle, and he needs food. And Ahimilech the priest says that he only has the holy bread on hand.
Leviticus 24:9 explicitly says that this bread "shall be for Aaron and his sons, and they shall eat it in a holy place, since it is for him a most holy portion of of the Lord's food offerings." Sounds pretty clear. This is priest's food.
But David needs to eat. What is Ahimilech going to say? "Sorry, you can starve because only priests are allowed to eat this food"? No. Showing mercy to a hungry man is the more important priority at that point. And very likely, there's also the fact that David is an important man who, according to his own story, is on urgent business for the king.
Both David's hunger and David's identity probably made the decision we read about in 1 Samuel 21:6: “So the priest gave him the holy bread, for there was no bread there but the bread of the Presence, which is removed from before the Lord, to be replaced by hot bread on the day it is taken away.”
The priest understands that there times when some parts of the law need to be prioritized above others. Taking care of David is a higher priority than keeping the bread for the priests. And the Scriptures do not condemn him. He did the right thing.
Now it's interesting how Jesus applies that to his current situation. The issue is not that Jesus' disciples were starving to death, because they weren't. Otherwise they wouldn't be out for a walk.
What Jesus is doing, by pointing to this passage from 1 Samuel, is critiquing the Pharisees' whole approach to the law. See, the law is not what the Pharisees thought it was. The law was about how to love God and love people. And if you were in a situation where genuinely doing good to someone required you to break a less-important law, you did that. If you have to choose between honouring bread and honouring people, you pick people.
Which means that the law was not so inflexible as people thought. God was not in heaven obsessing over whether the people were carrying enough ink for writing two letters or three letters. Surely if the priest was allowed to give holy bread to David, there's nothing wrong with Jesus' hungry disciples enjoying a snack on a Saturday afternoon walk.
Now, perhaps one might respond that the priest was allowed to give the bread because, after all, it was David and his companions on an important mission. Surely no ordinary Israelite would dare to say, "David did it, so I can," because nobody was near that special or important. But Jesus has no problem saying "David did this for his companions, and so my companions aren't doing anything wrong."
The suggestion, just below the surface, is that Jesus is at least as special as David, and the mission that He is on is at least as important as what David was doing that day.
b. Priests in the Temple (vv. 5-6)
And the following verses are going to flesh that idea out in more detail as Jesus presses the offensive with another pointed question to the priests: “Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless?” (Matthew 12:5).
Here's another case where the law seemed to contradict itself. Everybody was supposed to rest on the Sabbath. Everybody included the priests, right? But repeatedly the law gives instructions on the kinds of sacrifices the priests were supposed to offer on the Sabbath. So what's it going to be? Are they going to obey the law about Sabbaths and take a day off, or obey the law about offering sacrifices even though it means working through the Sabbath?
Every priest since Aaron recognized that the laws about offering sacrifices on the Sabbath were a higher priority than the law about them taking a day off. What could be more important than atoning for sin and keeping the people in fellowship with their God?
So they worked right through the Sabbath, and not once does the law suggest this is sin.
This is something that any Pharisee should have recognized. The Sabbath laws were not absolute. The Sabbath laws gave way to the greater good and the higher priority of keeping the temple running.
But, you could imagine the Pharisees retorting, "That only works because of how great and important the temple is. Your disciples having a grumble in their stomach is barely on that level." And they would be so wrong. Because, as Jesus says in verse 6, “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here” (Matthew 12:6).
What an astounding claim. I doubt we can feel just how massive this would have been for the people first listening to Jesus. To the Jews, what was more important than the temple? It was the centre of their universe. It was their everything. What could be greater than the temple?
Well, Jesus is. That's what He's claiming. He's claiming that He Himself is greater and more important than the temple. We're going to see what that means in chapter 27 when Jesus died and the curtain of the temple is torn in two. Jesus has replaced the temple. He is what the temple had been pointing to all along. His death for our sins is the better and final sacrifice that actually deals with sin, and it's now through Jesus, and not just a building, that we draw near to God.
And so the Sabbath laws gladly give way to the mission of Jesus' disciples even more so than the priests at the temple.
c. Mercy and Sacrifice (v. 7)
Jesus presses his third critique in verse 7: “And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.”
Again, He's quoting from the Old Testament Scripture and showing the Pharisees that they haven't really understood it. This verse comes from Hosea 6:6, where God is condemning the way the people kept the law on the outside but inside had hearts far away from Him. “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6).
This is one of many verses in the Old Testament that makes clear that God is not impressed with religious performance. He doesn't care about rule keeping if it doesn't come from a heart that loves Him and the people He's made.
This is not the first time Jesus has used this verse; He first quoted it back in 9:13. It describes the situation of the Pharisees so well, doesn't it? All concerned about rule keeping, but no heart for God or people. And if the Pharisees had read that verse in Hosea and understood what it meant, they would have understood all of their rules without love were a giant adventure in missing the point, and they would have repented, and they wouldn't have condemned people like the disciples who hadn't done anything wrong.
Jesus is on the offensive here. Without any apologies, he's making clear that if there's a problem here, it's the Pharisees' problem.
d. The Sabbath and It's Lord (v. 8)
But He's not anywhere near done. In verse 8 He makes an astounding claim that caps off this series of rebuttals to the Pharisees: "For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath."
Jesus here is providing the basis for all of the previous statements He's made. And in so doing, he's taking things way further than he's gone before. By making this claim, Jesus is showing that everything He's said up until this point He has not said just as one rabbi talking to other rabbis.
Yes, Jesus has been using the Bible, but behind that has been the assumption that He is someone special. He is greater than David. He is greater than the temple. He, and not the Pharisees, has properly understood the meaning of Scripture. He, and nobody else, gets to decide how the law applies to His disciples.
And that's because, as he proclaims in verse 8, He is the Son of Man. The Son of Man from Daniel 7 who is given power and authority from the Ancient of Days. The one who has been handed all things by His Father, like He said in 11:27.
He is the Son of Man, and that means that He is Lord of the Sabbath. Again, try and understand just what a title this is. The Sabbath was such a big deal to the Jewish people. They were all under the Sabbath, living by it's rhythms. And Jesus here claims to be the One who stands over it. As God's promised king, He is Lord over everything, including the Sabbath.
4. Compassion & Conspiracy(vv. 9-14)
Now, if you were a political advisor or a strategist giving advice to Jesus, what might you say to him after the events of that day? "Maybe let things cool down a little? You just said a lot of controversial things; let this little storm calm down before you provoke these Pharisees too much."
But Jesus doesn't do that. He keeps forcing the issue. Verse 9 moves the action from the field to a synagogue that Jesus enters on a Sabbath. There is a man there with a withered or paralyzed or otherwise unusable hand, and the Pharisees know that Jesus is going to want to heal him. And they are ready to spring a trap for him. Pick up half way through verse 10: "And they asked him, 'Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath"—so that they might accuse him."
The Pharisees, not surprisingly, had rules for whether it was ok to help someone sick on the Sabbath. And they had decided that it was only okay if someone's life was in danger. But if someone wasn't going to die, then the command to rest took a higher priority, and the sick person could suck it up until the day was over. "Sorry, Jimmy, that broken arm looks awfully painful, but it's the sabbath, so just sit there and don't move for a few hours."
And so the Pharisees want Jesus to say something wrong so that they have legal grounds, with witnesses, to accuse him of wrongdoing. He is already such a problem to them that they're already trying to get him in trouble.
But Jesus turns the tables on them, showing how wrong they are about all of this. “He said to them, ‘Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out?’” (Matthew 12:11).
Of course they would! That sheep is important. You wouldn't let it sit there, vulnerable and frightened, for a whole day. You'd pull it out, Sabbath or not.
And here's the punchline in verse 12: "Of how much more value is a man than a sheep!" Jesus is using logic here, arguing from the lesser to the greater, to show how wrong the Pharisees were for treating their animals better than people.
If it's okay to pull a sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath, of course it's lawful to help people. Anyone who thought about this for just a few seconds would realize how clear this is.
And then, in a wonderful display of power and mercy, as well as defiance to the Pharisees, He uses His words to heal this man. "He said to the man, 'Stretch out your hand.' And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other."
And the Pharisees, seeing the power of Jesus, repented of their sin and trusted in their Messiah. I wish. But no. So deep was their blindness, so great was their love for their rules and control, that, verse 14, they saw this miracle and yet "went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him."
The controversy with the Pharisees has reached a boiling point, and it now bubbles over with the first mention of their intention to kill Him. Jesus' claims of authority are too much for them. His challenge to their system and their power over people was too dangerous for them to tolerate. The Kingdom of God is at hand, and the Pharisees are plotting how to kill the king.
5. Considerations
So what can we learn from this passage as we step back and consider it all together? I want to consider this by asking two questions. First, what can we learn about ourselves in this passage? Second, and most importantly, what can we learn about Jesus?
a. What do we learn about ourselves?
There's a fair bit we can learn about ourselves in this passage, in that the Pharisees are a warning to us about some of the dangers that we could still experience all of these years later.
1) First, this passage shows us the danger of a surface knowledge of Scripture.
The Pharisees knew the Bible really well—or so they thought. They read it a lot, but according to Jesus they hadn't actually understood it very well.
What would it have taken for the Pharisees to slow down and read the account of David with the holy bread, or the priests in the temple, or the quotation from Hosea, and think "what is this actually saying? What are the implications of this for my whole system of thought?"
It would have taken careful, thoughtful, slow reading in submission to the God who inspired His word, seeking His will from His mouth with no agenda but to understand what He's said.
You and I need to do that today. It's all too possible for us to read the Bible in a surface way, highlighting our favourite verses and plugging them into our pre-existing systems of thought, and never reading it slowly or carefully enough to actually consider what specific verses mean and let them shape our thinking.
For many of us, thoughtful reading probably means slow reading. More than once I've read the Bible all the way through in a year or so, and it was helpful to get the big picture, but I'm going to go on record here by saying that I do not believe reading the Bible in a year, every year, is a very good way to actually understand what the Bible is saying. Apart from the fact that it's all to easy to just check the boxes every day, 3 or 4 or 5 chapters is just way too much for the average person to process in a day.
Unless you have hours of time available, reading multiple chapters a day gives you little time to actually stop and think thoughts like, "David eats the holy bread. What does that say about the use of the law in the Old Covenant?"
Now, again, there's exceptions here. There's seasons in our spiritual growth where reading big chunks of Scripture is really important. And some parts of the Bible need to be read this way. But however we read the Bible, we need to leave ourselves space to prayerfully think about what we've just read.
So that's the first danger our passage warns us about: a surface knowledge of Scripture.
2) Second, our passage warns us about the danger of trying to be more godly than God.
Here's what I mean by that: all God said to Israel was not to work on the Sabbath. And the Pharisees took it way further than God ever intended. Doing that kind of thing might make someone feel good and holy, but God is not impressed. If He's given us a standard in His word, we're not helping Him out by coming up with an even stricter standard ourselves.
As Evangelical Christians, are there places where we act like Pharisees, drawing hard lines in places where God has not drawn them?
I think so. Sometimes this shows up as hyper-spirituality, where we deny normal human realities in an attempt to be more spiritual than God ever told us to be. I know of Christians who would look at the disciples and say, "Brothers, if you feel hungry, don't rush to eat a snack, but stop and let your soul be satisfied in the Lord." I mean, great idea, but Jesus doesn't think there's any problem with hungry, hard-working people eating a healthy snack when they're hungry. Even on the Sabbath. And even if that snack had gluten in it.
Sometimes Phariseeism shows up when some Christians try to enforce their personal standards on other Christians. Take alcohol as an example. Some Christians are really bothered by alcohol. They've seen the damage it's caused in some people's lives, they hate the stuff, and they can't imagine that any Christian would ever come near it.
If that's where your conscience lines up, then act in accordance with your conscience. But because the Bible itself doesn't tell Christians to never touch alcohol, we can't make that a rule that other Christians need to follow.
I don't drink alcohol in any amount, for a variety of reasons, some of them very practical. But what if I did? What if you found out that, once or twice a week, in the privacy of my own home, I enjoyed a small glass of wine with my supper? Would you be okay with that? Would you be okay knowing that your pastor drank wine?
I hope so, because you already have a Lord and Saviour who drank wine. “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard'" (Matthew 11:19).
Now don't get me wrong. There are good reasons to abstain from alcohol. If you want to say "no alcohol in my home (or my bible school)," that's up to you. Romans 14 says that if your conscience doesn't allow you to touch alcohol, then I shouldn't cause you to stumble by putting wine in front of you, or even drinking it next to you.
But Romans 14 also, multiple times, says that Christians with more sensitive consciences must not judge people whose consciences are stronger. And the Bible nowhere gives us permission to say, "That would be a sin for me if I did it, therefore you must stop doing it." Jesus didn't say to His disciples that day, "Stop eating that grain! You're going to make the Pharisees stumble!" That's not how it works.
The only standard we're allowed to hold one another to is the standard of God's word. Anything else is in danger of Phariseeism.
3) Very briefly, there's a third danger that this passage warns us about, and it's the danger of being over-confident in our understanding of God's word, and defensive when anybody would try to correct us.
The Pharisees thought they were the people who knew God's word. They were the experts on godliness. And no doubt some of their anger at Jesus was a result of that sinful human defensiveness we experience when someone else challenges us on an issue that we think we've got all figured out.
And we know that's a temptation each one of us could fall in to. In Evangelical churches like ours, everybody wants to be biblical—until someone else is more biblical than us. And it's when we're challenged on something near and dear to us that we find out whether our desire really is to love God by following His word, or whether we've been borrowing from His word to reinforce our own self-constructed system of thought.
This passage calls us to have the humility to be corrected in our understanding of any issue, even an issue we think we've got all figured out.
I remember hearing a famous preacher talk about his friend, another famous preacher who was known for his strong convictions. And he said, "the greatest compliment I can give him man is that if you can show him, from the Bible, that he's wrong about something, he'll change his mind." I love that. I want to be like that.
May God give each one of us the humility to accept correction from God's word, and admit that we're wrong even if it's about something we thought we were right about for decades.
2. What do we learn about Jesus?
Now, finally, and most importantly, what does this passage show us about Jesus? It shows us that Jesus' gentleness and lowliness of heart meant that he was firm and forceful with the oppressors of His sheep. He deliberately provoked the Pharisees and did not back down from controversy because they were wrong and they were hurting His people. Jesus was gentle and lowly and bold and tough and provocative. All of those things go together in beautiful proportion.
This passage shows us a Jesus who towers over the Old Testament shadows that point to Him. David, the temple, the law, even the Sabbath itself all bow before King Jesus.
This passage shows us a Jesus who knows that we are humans, humans who sometimes need a snack on a day off, and He doesn't beat us over the head with silly laws that feel more burdensome than the work they're supposed to relieve. His yoke is easy and His burden is light.
This passage reveals a Jesus who is Himself our rest. The Sabbath law itself was a shadow of the rest we find in Jesus. “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Colossians 2:16–17).
Jesus is our rest, like we heard last week. Jesus saves us from trying to justify ourselves, save ourselves, earn our way into God's heart. When Jesus breathed His last, the temple curtain was torn, and through His death for us we can enjoy peace with God as a gift, without having to work for it at all.
We don't have to earn God's favour by trying to be super-spiritual, inventing rules He never asked us to invent, or drawing lines He never asked us to draw. We don't have to try and compete with one another for who is more holy because Jesus is our holiness. We don’t have to be defensive when corrected, because our safety comes from Christ and not our persona as the person who has it all figured out. We can trust in His grace and obey His word because He has brought us peace with God.
So enjoy that today. Enjoy that as we eat and drink together, remembering His body and blood given and shed for the sins of His people. Remember His promise to return. And enjoy going in to your week knowing you can rest in Jesus and follow His word and that's enough.