NOTES for Mat 12:1-21

On the holy day of the Sabbath, the law permits no work. This day belongs to God. On the Sabbath a devout Jew must attend the synagogue and listen there to the Torah, the Law, God's revelation given to Israel, or read it himself. The only ones who must practice their professional work on that day are the priests and Levites in the Temple, because they do not work for themselves but perform service to God: they circumcise and offer sacrifices. This is precisely the argument Christ gives the Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew. For He is the One greater than the Temple. His whole life is continuous worship, the fulfillment of the Father's will. He does His will always, including on the Sabbath, just as the daily sacrifice in the Temple must not be interrupted for the Sabbath.

The same applies to us: through faith in Christ we become a "royal priesthood." Our whole life is transformed into service to God, carried out on Saturday and Sunday and at every moment of time. All our deeds must be dedicated to the Lord, and every thought or word of ours must be a pleasing sacrifice to God, one that does not cease for even an instant.

Today's reading is devoted entirely to the Sabbath. This has always been one of the most important subjects for Jews. Representatives of different theological schools interpreted both the Sabbath itself and the manner of its observance differently. The discussion mainly concerned what could and could not be done on this day dedicated to God. The Sabbath commandment had been known since the time of Moses (Exod. 20:8–11). In Gospel times, however, theologians and learned rabbis concentrated on the part forbidding everyday occupations on the Sabbath (Exod. 20:9–10), debating precisely what should count as work and what should be avoided that day. Often the disputants forgot the Sabbath's meaning, focusing on prohibitions and restrictions that became ever more petty and formal.

Jesus, meanwhile, constantly returns to the commandment's original meaning. He reminds His hearers that Sabbath rest cannot be understood purely outwardly (vv. 3–4), and that someone doing God's work in no way violates the Sabbath (vv. 5–6). Above all, He continually brings them back to the Kingdom He has brought into the world (v. 7). Originally, Sabbath rest was not merely abstention from work and everyday occupations: it was time dedicated to God and spent in communion with Him.

Now the One has come into the world who can give more than any rabbi or learned theologian. They could only speak about communion with God; Jesus could bring anyone who wanted it into the Kingdom, where such communion was an unconditional reality. To those who do not see the Kingdom, healing seems merely medical treatment, work like any other. They ask a question perfectly natural in such a situation: does treating the sick violate the Sabbath (v. 10)?

Of course, if a human life, or even that of a domestic animal, were in danger, Sabbath rest could be broken to save it (v. 11). But in this case there was no such danger, and many thought the healing could perfectly well wait until the Sabbath was over. For Jesus, however, every healing involves bringing the person healed into the fullness of life in the Kingdom—the very fullness sought by those observing Sabbath rest. Naturally, He does not want to wait until the end of the Sabbath, for this very day is the most fitting time for the Kingdom to be manifested (vv. 12–13). But to those who do not see the Kingdom, such behavior seems a deliberate, demonstrative violation of the Sabbath, deserving death (v. 14). A religious consciousness unable to embrace the Kingdom's fullness rejects the One who brings it and condemns Him to the cross.

In establishing His right to perform works of mercy on the Sabbath, Christ refers to what happened to King David. But David and his warriors ate the consecrated bread with the priest's permission. Christ is therefore implying, although not openly to everyone, that He has the right to act as a priest. This alone was enough to make the Pharisees feel affronted, but Christ does not stop there and bears witness to Himself as the One who is greater than the temple. Such words seem blasphemous to the Pharisees, and surely not only to them. It is probably no accident that precisely after these words the Pharisees plot to destroy Jesus, whose statements are unacceptable to them. But apparently the time had come for Christ to reveal who He is and why He came to humankind. In healing the man with the withered hand, He not only demonstrates His power and not only calls us to perform works of mercy regardless of the obligations imposed by the present moment. Yes, all this is obvious to those who read the Gospel; these are ideas we have “kept from our youth.” But was it obvious to everyone who listened to Christ on that distant Sabbath that a human being is worth more than a sheep? And is it obvious to everyone today that a human being is more precious than any possession?..

Disputes about the Sabbath between Jesus and the Pharisees were constant—accusations of breaking it accompanied the Savior throughout His earthly ministry. Observing the Sabbath prohibitions would not seem to have been especially difficult—so why did He continually, and often pointedly, disregard them? One might, of course, explain everything by saying that Jesus Himself, like His followers, held a particular understanding of the norms and rules for observing the Sabbath rest, but was that the only issue?

If we turn to the Sabbath's original meaning, it becomes clear that this is a special, sacred time given to God and intended solely for communion with Him. All the rules and prohibitions are secondary; they are merely a means to the main purpose: that every seventh day should be spent not on ordinary, everyday affairs but in communion with God and in His presence. The strict treatment of those who violated the Sabbath rest was chiefly connected with the fact that an offender could easily disturb those around him—people who wanted to spend the day in peace and quiet but risked losing that opportunity because of neighbors who were too noisy or active. Yet as the Yahwistic, and later the Jewish, religious tradition developed, the prohibitions became ends in themselves, losing their supporting role and becoming almost the very purpose of the day. For many members of the Pharisaic brotherhood, the chief meaning of the Sabbath became not communion with God but observance of numerous prohibitions.

Jesus restores the Sabbath to its original meaning and enriches it with the new revelation He brought into the world. It is no accident that, in response to the Pharisees' accusations, He recalls the story of the consecrated bread that the high priest gave David even though he had no right to do so. There are situations in which an established order is broken. If the One who bears within Himself the fullness of the Kingdom has come into the world, then the Sabbath without Him loses all meaning. The situation has changed radically: it is now possible to spend the day not merely in communion with God but in communion with the Messiah in His Kingdom. To ignore this and behave as though nothing in the world had changed is to hollow out the Sabbath, leaving only its outward legalistic form. The Savior never tires of reminding His listeners of this so that the Sabbath may become for them not an observance of religious formalities but the beginning of the way into the Kingdom.

Sometimes one hears from very intelligent and educated people that ritual is a kind of injection of faith for the uneducated, for simple people, for the average person. That through such injections some healing substance enters the body of society. It seems that Christ says "No" today to exactly this kind of reasoning.

Let us think once more about the position of the guardians of ritual purity. They can be understood, because there are things before which they feel sacred awe, and that is not alien to us. But is God there? Or is there only our habit of worshiping Him? When you love a person, you carefully keep everything connected with that person; some funny, unnecessary little trinket given many years ago can become ritual, can inspire awe, and that is beautiful.

Of course, the same is true in relation to God... on the personal level. But there is one essential addition here: the Lord is one, and there are many of us. Then the Savior's words are simple to understand, for what did Christ command us? He commanded unity: that they may be one (John 17:22). And what unites us, people of different confessions, and what divides us? On what ground can we seek ways to fulfill what God has commanded? We have one God, our Lord Jesus Christ, one word of God, the Bible, but we have completely different rituals. So where should we seek unity? After all, what matters is not the house, and even less its load-bearing structures, but the one who lives in it, although everyone loves his own home dearly and with trembling. It can even be said more sharply: remember how Christ does not share the disciples' admiration at the sight of the Temple.

So can ritual be a bearer of faith, as medicine brings health? Perhaps for someone, under some conditions... But it seems to us that only God heals.

Perhaps it is a feature of modern humanity that we have become less capable of perceiving reality as a whole and more inclined to analyze it and divide it into its components. We have grown less ready to marvel, begun to hide our own “childlike” joy and thus gradually started to lose the ability to see things as a whole, to perceive the paradoxical nature of the universe and its Creator. We mentally dissect existence, arrange it on the shelves of our minds and “appropriate” the knowledge we acquire. But since we are simply unable to contain the immensity of life within ourselves, this knowledge inevitably loses something—its many facets, beauty, color, depth. And only what we are able to take in remains within us; ultimately, what we ourselves choose…

Then we begin to resent it when reality spills over the boundaries we have set for it. In particular, when God turns out to be more than what we imagine Him to be. We may think that, since He loves us, He will refuse us nothing and must answer our requests; and when it turns out that the Creator owes us nothing—“or who has given to Him beforehand, that He should repay?” (Rom. 11:35)—we do not like it. Conversely, when we expect God to bring just punishment down on the heads of those who live more freely than we do and do not do what we believe they are obliged to do, God may show His mercy. For mercy is generally more pleasing to God than our sacrifices (see Matt. 12:7), which place Him in the position of a debtor who has to work off a debt and completely distort our relationship with Him.

Would it not be better for us, following Paul, to set aside our habit of analysis and try to glorify God for who He is and for the way He loves and brings us up: “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and beyond tracing out His ways!” (Rom. 11:33)?

Jesus' answer to the people who looked at Him reproachfully does not appear entirely logical at first glance. From the point of view of those around Him, what He was about to do, and did in fact do, was a violation of the Sabbath. And He reminds them that even a domestic animal whose life is in danger is rescued on the Sabbath, and such actions are not a violation of Sabbath rest.

Reasoning in human terms, from the point of view of our untransformed world, healing a man whose main problem was a withered hand is something fundamentally different. If this man's life had been in danger, if medical intervention, in modern terms, had been required for vital indications, no one would have said a word to Jesus. And even if the issue had been a threat to the life of a domestic animal that needed help, no one would have reproached Him. The whole point was precisely that there was no threat to life: the man with the withered hand, with which he had already lived for more than one year, clearly would have lived calmly in the same way for one more day. And then, after the Sabbath ended, he would have received the expected help without violating Sabbath rest. So why hurry?

But Jesus, as we can see, looks at the matter quite differently and does not want to wait. And not because He is a principled opponent of the rules of Sabbath rest accepted in those days. He simply wants to convey to those around Him the true meaning of the Sabbath: this day is given so that it may be spent with God.

If this were simply a matter of medical help, those around Him would perhaps have been right. But this was not about medicine, but about the Kingdom; not about treatment, but about healing, and that changed everything completely. For if the Sabbath is, in fact, the time to be spent with God, then every manifestation of the Kingdom, together with the healings that accompany it, should only be welcomed. In essence, Jesus offers those who are nearby the chance to spend the Sabbath with Him in His Kingdom, and they do not understand Him and do not notice the Kingdom, seeing only a violation of the prohibitions connected with Sabbath rest.

He offers them the fullness of life; hence the mention that even an animal whose life is in danger has a right to help, even on the Sabbath. For without this fullness everyone is doomed to death, and only He, Jesus, can save them from death. But when He does this, joining to the Kingdom at least one person whom He heals, they accuse Him of violating the Sabbath. The spiritual meaning of the Sabbath has moved into the background, while religious formalities, on the contrary, have come to the foreground and obscured the Kingdom, which the people surrounding Jesus do not even notice.

The essence of the conflict between law and grace, between Christ and the legalists, is reflected as in a drop of water in this healing. The legalists question Christ in order to accuse Him. Strictly speaking, the question is what matters more: observance of the prescriptions of the law, whose absolute and literal God-givenness none of the legalists doubts, or mercy and pity for a suffering person. It is a conflict of ideas: on one side, to use a Slavonic word, the "God-written" law, which the Jews perceive as the only expression of the Creator's will; on the other side: "I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings" (Hos. 6:6). The problem is not whether the law may be reinterpreted and supplemented: the Jews allow themselves to do this all the time. The question is whether we allow God to have a will bound by nothing. Do we give Him the right to show mercy? Christ often repeats to us that with the judgment with which we judge, we too will be judged. The legalists, however, want God to limit His mercy within the framework of the law known to them.

In response, Christ does exactly what He once did with the prophet Jonah. He invites the legalists to see the situation from His point of view. To Jonah, who was offended at God because He took pity on the repentant Ninevites, God gave a plant, and Jonah was ready to lose his life out of grief for it. By this He foretold that He Himself would give His life out of pity for us (Jon. 4:6-11). To the legalists of the Capernaum synagogue, He offers a question about a sheep, because the superiority of a human being over cattle is in part like the superiority of the Almighty over the human being himself. So if you pity a creature that is perishing without your help, then, to paraphrase Jon. 4:11, "Should I not pity the suffering person?" As throughout the Bible, we see here a great revelation that the motive for God's actions in the world is compassion for us. Incidentally, by His answer Jesus also justified the lawfulness of His action: it is lawful to do good on the Sabbaths. The commandment said: on all days do your works. But good is God's work, and it may be done always.

In today's reading, the evangelist Matthew applies to Jesus of Nazareth one of the Old Testament's most remarkable prophecies about the Messiah: Deutero-Isaiah's words about the Servant of the Lord, who “shall not break a bruised reed.” This prophecy was spoken in the second half of the sixth century BC, when the first caravans of returnees were coming back from Babylon to Jerusalem to revive life among the ruins of the House of the Lord. The Lord reveals to the prophet that His Servant will bring people salvation without violence. Several years later, the Lord will say something very similar to the prophet Zechariah: salvation will come “not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit.”

For the evangelist Matthew, who wrote his Gospel for Jews, it is important to let the reader see that Jesus of Nazareth is the One who is truly meek, and that this prophecy was fulfilled precisely in Him. It matters to the evangelist that Christ carries out His saving ministry by proclaiming the word of truth—“showing judgment to the nations,” as Deutero-Isaiah puts it. The evangelist applies the words about the Messiah's meekness directly to the moment when the Lord Jesus “charged them that they should not make Him known.” By quoting the prophecy in full, Matthew also applies it to the events he will relate next. In the logic of this passage, “till He send forth judgment unto victory” is a prophecy of the Cross, while the words “in His name shall the Gentiles trust” are fulfilled in the Church that embraces the whole world.

Crowds of people followed Jesus, and the evangelist notes that He healed them all. Notice that this passage does not speak of healing all the sick, but of healing all who followed Christ. It is hard to imagine that none of them had any complaints about their physical condition; after all, even those who wanted their earthly desires fulfilled could also have had other needs. But healing is not only deliverance from illness. First of all, it is the restoration of the wholeness of the human person. And Christ is able to give such healing to all of us, even to those who have not yet been freed from bodily ailments. Contrary to the pagan saying "a sound mind in a sound body," Christ makes it possible to be spiritually healthy even in an unhealthy body.

It is here that the evangelist cites Isaiah's prophecy and calls it fulfilled. The bond between the times does not break, and the Messiah, according to the fulfilled prophecy, comes without outward spectacle. His presence is unobtrusive; He constantly asks people not to advertise Him as a healer. But the expectations of those who imagined the Messiah's coming as a fearsome event, radically changing the course of history, cannot be called unfulfilled either. For although His impact on the world seemed minimal, and to this day remains unclear to many, it was He who brought the possibility of the radical healing of the distorted Creation.

We remember well the words: "Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matt. 10:34). And at times it appears to us that they contradict what we read in today's Gospel reading: "He will not quarrel or cry out, nor will anyone hear His voice in the streets; a bruised reed He will not break, and a smoking flax He will not quench, till He sends forth justice to victory." But whenever we encounter an apparent contradiction in the Word of God, it is a sign that a deep meaning is hidden here, for if the meaning is deep, it cannot be expressed by a simple one-dimensional sentence. One can even say it is not just a sign, but a signal, a signal for us.

So we are seeking the meaning. What does a sword do? Why do we perceive it here precisely as an instrument of murder? In our heads the connection sword-violence is firmly fixed. With a sword one can cut something into two parts, and in such a way that it cannot be put back together again. This is exactly how the Lord came to separate good from evil. But how will He do this? In the way described in today's passage. In such a way that no one, not only against his own will but even simply by accident, can be forced into this victory. Even if we are not atheists, but people almost ready to accept faith, when it seems that one more moment and our inner resistance to God will break like a reed, even then we ourselves will come to faith, and Jesus will simply wait. For He is not a consuming fire, but a lamp that gives light.

Can we recognize in Jesus the Son of God? What He did changed the whole world, but the one who does not want to acknowledge Him will not notice this. Could the inhabitants of Judea almost two thousand years ago recognize the Messiah in Jesus? They knew by heart the words of the prophet Isaiah quoted by the evangelist Matthew. But they too had to break through their unwillingness to acknowledge Him. For He truly brought judgment, before which every person finds himself, judgment according to the commandments. And we either accept Christ together with His commandments, or, rejecting this judgment, we seek "how to destroy Him."