November 14, 2010: You Are (Not) What You Do – Michael Hidalgo

Jesus’ disciples are hungry – so they are picking kernels of grain and eating them (Deut 23). Presumably they are doing this on the edge of the field which was to be left for the poor. Jesus, in response to the religious, speaks of another time when David was hungry and he took bread from the tabernacle. The discussion of their plucking the grain would never had happened however, had it not been Sabbath. But it was, and one was not to harvest anything on Sabbath (Exodus 34).  

Sabbath was given to a group of slaves who never had rest. Sabbath was the time that God called holy. It was a space, a place that we were called to inhabit. Yet the religious still managed to make it a legalistic practice. In the end, the people ended up taking this gift from God and allowed it to control them, rather than seeing it as something that was given to them freely.