In looking toward our text for Sunday, N.T. Wright – as always – has some rather brilliant thoughts. If you get the chance, read through his take on the passage:

“The twentieth century saw a great deal of secret police activity. The KGB in the Soviet Union, and the Stasi in East Germany, were legends in their own lifetime during the Communist period. Several countries in Central and South America, and some parts of Asia, have thriving secret police forces that are rightly fear by ordinary folk.

That’s the picture we naturally think of when we find Pharisees spying on Jesus and his followers; and it’s actually very misleading. The Pharisees were not in any sense an official secret police force, in Jesus’ day or at any other time. They were an unofficial party, who had been active as a religious and political pressure group for nearly 200 years by Jesus’ time. (Most political parties in modern Western democracies and much younger than that, at least in their present form.) The Pharisees were entirely self-chosen, and had no authority to make laws or enforce them. They did, though, have considerable influence on ordinary people, who respected their expertise in Israel’s ancestral laws and traditions.

If they weren’t like a secret police, then what were they like? Some were wise, devout, holy men. Some, though, behaved like nosey journalists in the modern world, setting themselves up as the self-appointed guardians of public morality and spying on people in the public eye. That’s what seems to be going on here. they probably would have bothered to check on an ordinary group of people walking through the cornfields on the sabbath. But Jesus and his followers weren’t ordinary people. They were already marked out because of what Jesus was doing and the implicit claims he was making. They needed watching, to see if they were loyal Jews or not. just as anyone who even looks as though they might run for office in some modern democracies will find the journalists taking a sudden interest in their everyday private behaviour, to see if there’s any mud that might stick, so Jesus’ growing reputation attracted similar attention.

Keeping the sabbath was, of course, one of the Ten Commandments, and it had been reinforced by the prophets and by subsequent Jewish teaching. It was one of the things that marked out the Jews, over the centuries, from their pagan neighbours – one of the things that reminded them that they were God’s people. It wasn’t an odd moral commandment which people observed to earn merit or favour with God; it was a sign that they belonged to the true God, the creator of the world, who had himself rested on the seventh day. Just as today, in some parts of Jerusalem, the successors of the Pharisees watch carefully to see that everybody in the area is observing the sabbath properly, so in Jesus’ day some Pharisees check up at least on would-be leaders and new movements.

Jesus’ reply is a bit of a tease, but packs a strong punch. He doesn’t deny that the disciples are out of line with traditional sabbath observance, but he pleads special circumstances and scriptural precedent. He puts himself on part with King David in the period when David, already anointed by Samuel but not yet enthroned (because Saul was still king), was on the run, gathering support, waiting for his time to come. That’s a pretty heavy claim: the implication is that Jesus is the true king, marked out by God (presumably in his baptism) but not yet recognized and enthroned. He therefore has the right, when he and his people are hungry, to by-pass the normal regulations. In other words, this kind of sabbath-breaking, so far from being and act of causal or wanton civil disobedience, is a deliberate sign, like the refusal to fast: a sign that the King is here, that the kingdom is breaking in, that instead of waiting for the old creation to come to its point of rest the new creation is already bursting upon the old world.

All of this is summed up in the riddle at the end, which probably puzzled Jesus’ hearers as much as it does people today. It is a combined comment about the sabbath and about Jesus’ own authority. This is the second time we meet ‘the son of man’ in Mark; the setting seems to reinforce one particular meaning the phrase could have, namely the messianic figure which first-century Jews discovered in Daniel 7, whose arrival and enthronement signals the start of God’s kingdom. Jesus doesn’t mean that just any human being is the ‘Lord of the sabbath,’ but that the Messiah, the true representative human being, has authority over institutions that might otherwise repress human beings.

Jesus’ action, and its explanation, were a coded messianic claim, a claim that in him the new day was dawning in which even Israel’s God-give laws would be seen in a new light. How much more are the institutions and local customs of ordinary societies to be judged by the humanizing role of the son of man!”

- Mark for Everyone, 26-28