Houston, We Have a Problem
Matthew 12:2 And the Pharisees seeing said to Him, “Lo, what your disciples are doing is not permitted to do in regard to the Sabbath.”
If only those Pharisees knew who they were speaking to. And they should have known; they were the leaders of the system built to keep God’s people separate from the surrounding pagan nations. They were leaders of the system built on the commandments written by the spirit of God, which included the spirit of Jesus.
Jesus was there when the tablets of the sacred Shall-Nots were written in stone, the rule book to see these people through the centuries and centuries into the future. Maybe Jesus was sent by God to earth like a Geek Squad service call. There was a glitch in the system, and they needed a technician to get on the computer board to make an upgrade. The memory was full. The Ten Commandments no longer served the purpose for which is was created.
When the tablets were first brought to the people by Moses, the Sabbath was just a day, a day to be set apart from all the other days, but as time went by and temples were being built, positions of hierarchy infected the system with pride and ego. The Sabbath became a tool with which to judge other people rather than what it was meant for, a ‘holiness’ application.
In God’s perfect timing, Jesus was sent to upgrade that broken system: We need more megabytes; We need more cowbell; We need more something! But what? Holy cow, the temple of holiness was no longer a holy production. The temple emissions did not smell like Jesus.
For the general public, the upgrade for the Ten Commandments might have been manageable; a culture-shock maybe, but a manageable one. For the commandment-wielding, Moses-protecting leaders of the temple, this upgrade was like jumping from a manual typewriter to an I-phone 15…inconceivable…just like nobody but Steve Jobs saw the I-phone coming in 1978.
Upgrading the Ten Commandments would have been like adding fifty-six new signatures to the Declaration of Independence; just unthinkable. I can’t imagine that when Jesus met with Moses and Elijah on that mountain in Israel with Peter, James and John in tow that there wouldn’t have been some commandment-upgrade fodder for conversation.
The life-change was as radical as Newton’s discovery of gravity or Edison’s lightbulb. That upgrade to Twenty Commands was going to impact the rest of the globe. For instance, rather than keeping a day holy that turned into a judgement tool, Jesus flipped the script: “Do not judge” took care of that problem. Not judging others became the new-normal for holiness rather than a day of the week.
And why was Jesus able to make this upgrade? Because He is the Lord of the Sabbath! He can do anything He wants to with the Sabbath. Actually, God probably sent Him, seeing the holiness standards going haywire, “Jesus, We have a problem.”
