New Hearts for Nitpickers
Why is it so hard to see what’s happening deep inside me? This past weekend, I was preparing classes, and a friend told me my info was wrong. I suddenly got this weird, panicky feeling. Oh no! “I have no idea what’s going on!!” My mental model of this project was collapsing! I had simply “missed a memo” — I had been given info but had yet to read it. Why did it make me nervous to realize I was working with old info? The feelings that surface are like Check Engine lights showing that something deeper is going on inside.
Jesus could read the dashboard lights well. He knew that when emotions stirred, something profound was going on. Luke 6 shows us how crucial it was for Jesus to get to these deeper issues.
On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?”
And Jesus answered them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?”
And he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”
In this first incident, Jesus’s followers were picking snacks off a neighbor’s plants and eating them. In my American mindset, I think “theft!” but God had explicitly said through Moses that eating the grains was okay. The Pharisees must have been near the disciples and saw the snacking happening. They equated the picking of the grain to farming. But this harvesting action occurred on the Sabbath, the day God set aside for rest. Sabbath-keeping was crucial to marking Jewish people as a separate nation, so they felt free to criticize the disciples for this infraction against national pride.
Suppose a person had been watching all this but knew that Jesus was the promised Messiah, the chosen servant of God that would deliver the people of Israel from bondage. That person would have thought, “I should watch what this man does because he has been chosen to lead his people.” But that wasn’t the heart of these outspoken religious men. They didn’t connect Jesus with the Messiah; instead, they found a boundary marker he had crossed.
Jesus could have done the “lawyerly” thing: picking the low-hanging fruit or showing the Pharisees that picking grain was not equivalent to harvesting grain. But instead, he went to the heart. He connected himself to David. He reminds them that David rightly chose to take the tabernacle bread. And he draws the link between David and himself, explaining how he is the Son of David, the Messiah.
On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was withered. And the scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, so that they might find a reason to accuse him.
But he knew their thoughts, and he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come and stand here.” And he rose and stood there.
And Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?”
And after looking around at them all he said to him, “Stretch out your hand.”
And he did so, and his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.
In this second scene in the synagogue, Jesus encountered another misinterpretation of God’s design for humans. The logic is this: because dispensing and applying medicine was a form of work for physicians, the Pharisees equated all healing with labor. Again, Jesus could have focused on the surface condition, arguing that miraculous healing is not technically the same as a doctor dispensing medicine. Therefore, Jesus could have said healing the man violates no law.
But Jesus didn’t come to reform their technicalities; he came to transform their minds.
Imagine the kind of hatred a person would have to have to look at a sick man standing next to Jesus and know that Jesus could relieve him from suffering, but instead, desire that the man stays sick. Jesus said that choosing to leave the man with his condition would be harming the man and causing ongoing suffering. To make it worse, these men wanted to say they expressed the desire of God.
Jesus’s question is asking them, “Do you think God created the sabbath to keep this man suffering? Is God’s law something cruel?”
Jesus lived in complete harmony with God’s laws and revealed their deeper meaning. He came not to nitpick our flaws but to save us entirely. By coming to Earth, He highlighted our moral rebellion and failings and took on the punishment we deserved. Trusting in Him transforms us and allows us to live a life of genuine trust and right action.
