NOTES for Luk 6:1-16
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.