Mark 2: 23-28
Professor Stanley Fish, of Florida International University posed this hypothetical situation to his students: “Suppose you were … an executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What would happen to you?” Professor Fish said that students immediately commented: “I’d be fired.”
He then continued, “Now, imagine the same scenario and the same set of behaviors, but this time you’re a tenured professor in a North American university. What then?” Before the students could answer, Professor Fish answered his own question: “You’d be celebrated as a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies, a pedagogical visionary and an exemplar of academic freedom.”1
For those who have not kept up on the issue to which Professor Fish is referring, this hypothetical question revolves around a real issue; the very public dismissal of Dr. Denis Rancourt from his faculty position at the University of Ottawa, Canada. From what I understand, Professor Rancourt, was a tenured professor of physics for 23 years and also a proponent of what is called “critical pedagogy,” a method of teaching resulting from the hypothesis --- these are Rancourt’s words--- “that our societal structures . . . represent the most formidable instrument of oppression and exploitation ever to occupy the planet.”2.
What does this mean? For example, Professor Rancourt informed his students on the first day of class that “he had already decided their marks: Everybody was getting an A+.” Of course that is only a small part of it, because Rancourt was an academic anarchist based on his theory of education.
Before finally being dismissed in March of this year, Professor Rancourt argued that a tenured professor should be entitled to and could not be dismissed because of … academic freedom. Meaning that in an academic environment he should be free to teach and his students learn without any external censorship or restrictive interference.3
That event is an introduction in how we can misconstrue today’s Gospel on the same battle lines; perhaps not of anarchy versus rules, but personal freedom versus law. We may hear the verse "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” and think Jesus is supporting individual freedom. Certainly, there are many places where Jesus speaks against religious legalism but we need to be careful that we do not assume that Jesus is sanctioning personal freedom over the obedience of faith; human liberty against ritual and tradition.
To fully understand our gospel we need to see it in context. First, we are in the midst of five stories in these early chapters of Mark that share a common theme: conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders.4
Knowing that, let us look more closely at the lesson itself. It begins peacefully with Jesus either wandering through or beside a grain field on a Sabbath day. As they are walking the disciples possibly from boredom, but more than likely from hunger, start to pluck off heads of grain and chew or eat them. Pharisees appear literally out of nowhere to accuse the disciples of breaking the law in the Old Testament of harvesting grain on the Sabbath.5 Harvesting, quantity being beside the point, is work.
As you may have noticed, Jesus is not doing the “harvesting,” if we can call it that, but the disciples are. So, it is the disciples' behaviour and not Jesus' conduct or even a teaching that is under examination here. Yet, Jesus, as their leader, is implicated by the accusation, since it was understood in that culture that the teacher is responsible for the behaviour of the disciples.
Jesus offers a defence in behalf of his followers. Jesus cites scriptural precedent pointing to an event in the Old Testament. David and his companions were hungry. David and his companions entered the temple in Jerusalem and ate the bread of presence --- twelve loaves of bread symbolically representing the 12 tribes of Israel baked and set aside daily. It is a case in the Bible, where the urgency of human need, in this case hunger, took precedence over symbolic religious tradition.6
Now many Christians often assume that Jesus was the first and only Jewish teacher to argue that religious law is secondary to humanitarian concerns. That is not true! Human need and law was an issue in which even the religious leaders of Jesus day discussed. In this case, Jesus is clearly on the side that human need takes priority over observance of religious ritual.
But that is not the only or the major point of the lesson. We can at times ignore the second half: “So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”7 What can be overlooked is that Jesus himself is more than the receiver of the Sabbath, meaning he lives under the same rules as you and I. Jesus is also its Lord, and therefore he has the authority to allow his disciples to break the Sabbath. This episode in the field of grain is not simply a formula of human freedom; it is about the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Former US President Bill Clinton was interviewed shortly after his biography, My Life, had been recently published. He was asked why he engaged in actions that violated his marriage vows and ultimately led to an effort to impeach him as president. Mr. Clinton answered, “Because I could.”
The breaking of the Sabbath was an acknowledgement of Jesus' Lordship over the Sabbath. It was not because Jesus was saying, “because I can and so too can my disciples.”
Jesus is Lord over the Sabbath and Lord over his disciples. That is more significant than a snack when hungry. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus have ushered in a new age in which the promised salvation of God is realized. The gospel of Jesus Christ therefore, offers a rest which is more than physical and earthly but, in, with and through Jesus Christ, is also spiritual and eternal.
After this episode the disciples are not free to do what they want … when they want. Our appropriate response to this lesson is not to insist on the right and freedom to do something because somehow “I am free in Jesus.” Christians are not anarchists, insisting that obedience or even ritual and tradition for that matter should be dispensed of, but rather we are all about living wholly under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. That means in this case, we are not called to be Lord of the Sabbath or any day, that role is reserved exclusively for God.
Instead, as disciples of Jesus we perhaps best honour Jesus' Lordship over the Sabbath, neither by celebrating our freedom against ritual or tradition, nor for example, by ignoring why and what it means to rest on the Sabbath. Rather, as disciples of Jesus Christ we are challenged to see all of our life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. To see all that we do under God because it is only under that lordship that we are free. Amen.
1 The Two Languages of Academic Freedom, Stanley Fish Blog, www.nytimes.com. February 8, 2009.
2 Activist Teacher.blogspot.com, April 13, 2007
3 http://rancourt.academicfreedom.ca/component/content/article/25.html
4 I am in debt to: Mark 2:23-28, Mikeal C. Parsons, Interpretation, January, 2005.
5 For example, Exodus 34:21
6 1 Samuel 21:1-6
7 Mark 2: 28