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

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”

“Dear woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied, “My time has not yet come.”

His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.

Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim.

Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”

They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”

This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed in Cana of Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.

One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. There in front of him was a man suffering from dropsy. Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him away.

Then he asked them, “If one of you has a son or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull him out?” And they had nothing to say.

When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this man your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

When one of those at the table with him heard this, he said to Jesus, “Blessed is the man who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.”

Jesus replied: “A certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests. At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’

But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said, ‘I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.’

Another said, ‘I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.’

Still another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’

“The servant came back and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.’

‘Sir,’ the servant said, ‘what you ordered has been done, but there is still room.’
Then the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full. I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.’”

Mark is here concerned to distinguish the radical social practice of the kingdom from the cosmetic social piety of the Pharisaic holiness code. The “young” discipleship movement must not conform to a practice that looks novel, even progressive, but in truth is “old,” meaning fundamentally aligned with the dominant social order. To do so would be to jeopardize the messianic project, represented by the images of “a worse tear” and “the wine skins will both be lost.” The “new” wine will later be revealed by Mark as the genuine social practice of nonviolent love (14:24f.).

- Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, 159