In their conversations with Jesus, the Pharisees often challenge Him over how He treats various prescriptions and traditions. The Sabbath occupies a central place in these disputes. What may and may not be done on the Sabbath?

In the mind of a Jew of that time, answering this question required serious knowledge of the Law and the commentaries of authoritative teachers. But the way Jesus poses the question turns a theological discussion into a direct challenge to the conscience, which is not limited to teachers and theologians: what may be done on the Sabbath—good or evil? Save life or destroy it? The Gospel teaches us to frame the questions that concern us in precisely this way, for conscience is often the best adviser, even in theology.

Today's reading offers us two episodes connected with the Sabbath and with the way Jesus understands the Sabbath. One of them (vv. 1-5) describes a situation well understood by every Orthodox Jew. In gospel times, as now, the Sabbath day was subject to many prohibitions regulating what Judaism regards as work forbidden on the Sabbath day by the fourth commandment. The systems of such ritual prohibitions in different rabbinic schools could differ somewhat from one another, but in essence all of them had already largely lost their spiritual meaning, while retaining a strictly religious function. The purpose of the Sabbath commandment was to draw a person away from his everyday occupations so that at least one day out of seven he would devote himself entirely to God, forgetting his own affairs. Meanwhile, the system of ritual prohibitions that took shape after the Babylonian exile was based not on this spiritual and practical task, but on more-or-less formal theological criteria that defined one action or another as work. All such actions, of course, were forbidden on the Sabbath day, and rubbing grain, even by hand and in a very small amount (v. 1), was formally equated with grinding grain and was included among the forbidden actions.

Jesus answers by referring to events from the history of ancient Israel (vv. 3-4), alluding to a rabbinic rule well known to the Pharisees, which allowed Sabbath prohibitions to be broken if this was necessary to save the life of a person or a domestic animal. More than that: He reminds His interlocutors that in ancient times even the norms of ritual purity were violated to save life, because to give sacred bread to someone who was not a priest meant to defile that bread.

Of course, if Jesus' disciples were starving to death and had no other food, they would have been allowed to rub as much grain as they needed in order not to die of hunger; in that case, rubbing the grain would not have been a violation of the Sabbath. But for that to be so, the threat of starvation had to be unavoidable for them. Jesus, however, looks at the Sabbath differently. He says that in the Kingdom the Sabbath is not a system of ritual restrictions, but the fullness of communion with God, inseparable from the One who brought the Kingdom into the world (v. 5).

The second episode (vv. 6-11) describes Jesus' healing of the man with a withered hand. And here we see the same difference in understanding the Sabbath. For Jesus, healing is not work, but the manifestation of the Kingdom, which is most fitting to appear precisely on the Sabbath, the day dedicated to God; therefore He heals on the Sabbath especially often, reminding those present of the true meaning of this day (vv. 8-10). But for religious formalists there is no Kingdom, only a violation of prohibitions, which they carefully track (v. 7). And they hate anyone who violates those prohibitions (v. 11). Thus devotion to religious prohibitions hides the Kingdom from a person. And it leads to the cross the One who brought this Kingdom into the world.

According to the evangelist's testimony, the people around Jesus, and first of all the Pharisees, more than once reproached Him for a disrespectful attitude toward the Sabbath, expressed in particular by His doing on the Sabbath day something that violated the prohibitions connected with Sabbath rest. Some commentators even interpret these actions of the Savior as a deliberate violation of the Sabbath, which in their opinion He "abolished."

Meanwhile, Jesus Himself said that He came not to destroy the Torah, but to bring it to fullness. And this fully applies to the Sabbath: after all, keeping the Sabbath is the prescription of the fourth commandment of the Decalogue. The only question is what in this case should be considered the meaning, and what the form.

The original meaning of the commandment about the Sabbath was connected first of all with the need for deepened communion with God, which one could learn only by dedicating special time to such communion, every seventh day according to the Torah's prescription. The prohibition against doing ordinary things on the Sabbath day was connected first of all with the need to step out of that cycle of everyday affairs that usually seizes a person completely. It is no accident that Jewish tradition forbids on the Sabbath not only work, but also speaking about work, and even thinking about it.

However, already in the post-exilic period the commandment about the Sabbath became overgrown with numerous rules and prescriptions, connected mainly with ritual prohibitions that were in many ways external and formal. For many, the Sabbath day was turning from a day dedicated to communion with God into a rather harsh and gloomy religious obligation: one had to think no longer about God, but about not violating some prohibition, while also making sure that those around him did not violate anything either. Jesus returns to the Sabbath its original meaning as a time of communion with God.

If a person is hungry, he must be fed; if he is sick, he must be healed, and there is nothing here that hinders communion with God, nor can there be. In fact, this is not about everyday work, busyness, and hustle that seize a person completely, but about a completely concrete situation in which a person in need of help finds himself. From the point of view of religious rules the Sabbath has been violated, but in essence it has not, because helping one's neighbor does not separate a person from God.

But there was something else as well: testimony to the Kingdom. After all, Jesus does not merely treat; He heals. The one healed recovers not because of someone's work, but because the Kingdom has entered the world and touched the one being healed. And it is precisely in the Kingdom that the Sabbath receives its fullness. In fact, where else could communion with God be fuller? And that is the only meaning of the Sabbath. Then it is no longer important what a person does or what he is occupied with. No act, provided it is done in the Kingdom, will violate the Sabbath.