Br. Lain Wilson

Matthew 12:1-8

Our gospel lesson today may sound very familiar to some of you. We heard Mark’s version of Jesus’s encounter with the Pharisees last night at Evening Prayer (Mk 2:23-28). Moreover, today at Morning Prayer we heard the account from the life of David that Jesus refers to (1 Sam 21:1-15).

These echoes are not incredibly common, and when our lectionaries line up lessons like this, I like to imagine God saying to me, “Hey, this is important! Pay attention!”

So what’s important about this encounter?

In this story, Jesus runs up against a rigid interpretation and application of the Law, of what it means to keep Sabbath. At issue is a basic human need—the disciples are hungry! And if this were not enough to respond to the Pharisees’ objections, Jesus invokes the precedent of David and his companions, as well as the very practice of priests serving in the temple on the Sabbath. Human need, sacred history, and the Law all provide license for what the disciples do.

Now I can’t imagine that the Pharisees didn’t know this. They knew their Scripture. But one of the realities they faced—and indeed, one that we all face—is a tendency toward rigidity, toward inflexibility as a defense against the messy contingency of life and human relationships. Our Rule expresses something similar when it speaks to “the tendency for communities to harden into institutions, and for officialdom to replace the spontaneity of mutual service.”

We all face this pressure—to normalize, to rationalize, to conform. Especially now, in a time of such numbing conflict and polarization, it is so easy to set boundaries, red lines, purity tests. God had to harden Pharaoh’s heart in the book of Exodus; we do it to ourselves all too easily. We are uncomfortable with exceptions, with things that come at us slantwise, that break our neat and tidy categories, because they reveal all too well that this desire for order, for control, for us and them, is a desire that fails to account for, or ignores completely, our very humanity: messy, contingent, needful.

And not only that: it fails to account for the actions of the God of mercy, of grace, of love in the very midst of our messy, contingent, and needful lives.

Where do you notice your own tendency toward rigidity and inflexibility? How is God challenging this?

As Jesus shows us today, it is precisely where our human imposition of order and clarity on a messy world is challenged that we find God inviting us to join God in doing the work of the kingdom. It is in these places that we are called, as the prophets exhorted, “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God” (Mic 6:8). It is precisely in encountering the world as it truly is, and not just as we’d like it to be, that we are able to encounter the God of mercy, of grace, and of love at work.

Amen.