Homily for Friday, 18 July 2014– Ferial

Friday of the 15th week in Ordinary Time

Optional Memorial of St. Camillus de Lellis

Readings of the day: Isaiah 38:1-6; Responsorial Canticle: Isaiah 38:10, 11, 12abcd, 16; Matthew 12:1-8

Have any of us ever acted in a way we knew was against a rule? Rules, laws, commandments, and guidelines are meant to establish and maintain social order. Ideally, in the case of our Church’s laws, they are meant to bring us closer to God. Laws or rules, then, are not meant to be broken without good reason. And yet, in the Gospel reading today, does not Jesus quite boldly condone his disciples’ breaking of the law not to work on the Sabbath? Clearly, the Pharisees take exception to Jesus’ permissive attitude toward his disciples’ picking of “heads of grain” and eating them on the Sabbath.

The Pharisees’ main responsibility during the time of Jesus was to defend and interpret the Jewish Law, the Law of Moses. Most Pharisees were just people. They were even considered to be a more liberal group of Jewish leaders than the priests who administered the Temple in Jerusalem. Here, though, some Pharisees criticize Jesus for allowing his disciples to break the Sabbath.

Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ criticism is a humanitarian one: Are there not exceptions to the Sabbath in times of human need, such as hunger? The punch line of Jesus’ argument against the Pharisees is memorable: “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” When David “and his companions were hungry,” David broke the law against feeding themselves from “the bread of the offering” on the Sabbath. The priests of the Temple in Jesus’ time were routinely exempt by their service from the Sabbath rule against work.

Jesus breaks the rule against “unlawful” work on the Sabbath, but for good reason: Jesus himself is “Lord of the Sabbath.” Jesus’ reason for breaking this rule and allowing his disciples to do the same is not so much because he is God as because he is human. Jesus understands intimately what it means to be human; to experience the urgent need for food, both physical and spiritual. In this context of his intimate knowledge of human need; of his full humanity, Jesus shows us that urgent human need can be an exception to important rules, in this case that of the Sabbath fast from work.

Neither Jesus nor our Gospel reading condone disregard for laws, rules, or commandments, whether civil or of the Church. Rules are generally meant to be kept, although there are exceptions that we are occasionally called to discern thoughtfully and prayerfully. Will breaking a rule lead us and others closer or farther away from God (as is usually, but not always, the case)? Would breaking a rule, in exceptional cases, better satisfy an urgent human need than obeying it? Who or what rules over us: God or a rule or law? 

Laws like the Sabbath fast are meant to draw us to God. And yet these laws, we are reminded in today’s Gospel reading, are not gods. Jesus Christ, Son of Man and Son of God, “is Lord of the Sabbath.”