Thursday after the Third Sunday after Trinity Sunday
Posted on June 20, 2024 by under
Scripture: St. Matthew 12:1-8 (NKJV)
12:1 At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. And His disciples were hungry, and began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. 2 And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath!”
3 But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: 4 how he entered the house of God and ate the showbread which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? 5 Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless? 6 Yet I say to you that in this place there is One greater than the temple. 7 But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8 For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”
Devotion
“Look, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath!” Says who!? As always, the scribes and Pharisees were looking for something with which to blame our Lord. And as we also know, they failed at every turn. In this case, they failed to understand that God’s Law was not to be a burden, that is, it was not meant for the hungry to go unfed simply because it was the Sabbath. The purpose of the Sabbath is, as Luther explains, “that we may not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.”
The irony of the Pharisees’ Sabbath observance was that one had to expend a great deal of effort to make sure one hadn’t done too much. The Pharisees had completely lost sight of God’s purpose for the Sabbath, which is to draw our attention away from ourselves and focus our eyes to see His mercy toward us in Christ. Thus, the extensive work of the priests in making sacrifices on the Sabbath was ultimately to bring God’s mercy to His people. Now standing before them was the One to whom all the sacrifices pointed, the very Messiah of God. Yet, the time would come when the Pharisees would bring condemnation upon our guiltless Lord and have Him crucified.
Collect: O God, the Protector of all that trust in Thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us Thy mercy; that Thou being our Ruler and Guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever One God, world without end. Amen.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
