Advent Devotional for Dec. 20
Saturday, December 20 Mark 3:1-6
Healing is God’s first priority.
We often underrate laws. As modern Christians, we celebrate the triumph of grace over the law, that reconciliation with God is not achieved by perfectly keeping a series of ceremonial rules, but by God’s gracious action in Jesus. But the law was deeply important in Jewish culture, mostly because of its divine origin. Think of it this way: the law might seem a burden to us today because we have not considered the alternatives. The Israelites had just been released from Egypt after 430 years as slaves. Few if any of them were scholars or even educated people; who could possibly come up with a way for these new people to organize their society? Even the most advanced civilizations of that day had ruthless legal codes which mandated death for things like simple thievery or false witness. How could this fledgling people begin to organize themselves in the middle of the wilderness? The law was God’s answer to this; though “an eye for an eye” seems harsh today, it was a humane punishment at the time when there were many capital offenses. Jews revered the law because it was a sure way in which God had intervened in history for their benefit.
Jesus was a scandalous figure at times, in part because of his apparent disregard for the rules. But we should not read our modern rebellious tendencies onto him: Jesus did not set aside the law lightly. In fact, most often, he intensified rather than relaxed the laws. But here, he recognizes that the laws—or perhaps human interpretation of the laws—must be bent in order to heal. Because they revered the law so much, observant Jews not only sought to keep the law, but to “build a fence around it,” to prohibit all sorts of related activities so one would not accidentally break the law. So the Sabbath regulations were intensified from their original intent so that one could not even accidentally break a Sabbath law. Jesus recognizes that to silently acquiesce to this level of strictness is a decision with its own consequences; he asks, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” One could not look the other way in the interest of maintaining ritual purity when to do so mean that someone would die. In this story we get a glimpse of the one who went to a criminal’s death, becoming unclean on our behalf so that we could be reconciled to God.
Healing is God’s first priority.
We often underrate laws. As modern Christians, we celebrate the triumph of grace over the law, that reconciliation with God is not achieved by perfectly keeping a series of ceremonial rules, but by God’s gracious action in Jesus. But the law was deeply important in Jewish culture, mostly because of its divine origin. Think of it this way: the law might seem a burden to us today because we have not considered the alternatives. The Israelites had just been released from Egypt after 430 years as slaves. Few if any of them were scholars or even educated people; who could possibly come up with a way for these new people to organize their society? Even the most advanced civilizations of that day had ruthless legal codes which mandated death for things like simple thievery or false witness. How could this fledgling people begin to organize themselves in the middle of the wilderness? The law was God’s answer to this; though “an eye for an eye” seems harsh today, it was a humane punishment at the time when there were many capital offenses. Jews revered the law because it was a sure way in which God had intervened in history for their benefit.
Jesus was a scandalous figure at times, in part because of his apparent disregard for the rules. But we should not read our modern rebellious tendencies onto him: Jesus did not set aside the law lightly. In fact, most often, he intensified rather than relaxed the laws. But here, he recognizes that the laws—or perhaps human interpretation of the laws—must be bent in order to heal. Because they revered the law so much, observant Jews not only sought to keep the law, but to “build a fence around it,” to prohibit all sorts of related activities so one would not accidentally break the law. So the Sabbath regulations were intensified from their original intent so that one could not even accidentally break a Sabbath law. Jesus recognizes that to silently acquiesce to this level of strictness is a decision with its own consequences; he asks, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” One could not look the other way in the interest of maintaining ritual purity when to do so mean that someone would die. In this story we get a glimpse of the one who went to a criminal’s death, becoming unclean on our behalf so that we could be reconciled to God.
posted by Michael Jordan at 6:00 AM
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