Jesus Confronts Sabbath Hypocrisy -- a study of Matthew 12:1-14
- mww
- 3 minutes ago
- 15 min read
Jesus will always find your idols.
Bible Study Ideas and Commentary for Matthew 12:1-14
Matthew next describes the conflict that will eventually get Jesus arrested -- rejecting the Pharisees' teachings about God's Law. The Pharisees had drifted so far from God's heart that they were truly saying it was more important to follow their personal law code than it was to do good for people in need. And they hated Jesus for making that clear.
they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” (12:9)
Eating Things You Find Growing Outside
I grew up in a suburb of Houston. We had a "Nature Center" nearby, but when we walked there we were explicitly told not to eat anything -- no berries, no mushrooms, nothing that looked like fruit. It was probably poisonous and would kill (8-yr-old) you. So, I still flinch a bit when people around here offer me something they just picked.
In this week's passage, Jesus' disciples eat a few heads of grain from a field they walk by. Have you ever done something like that? What are foods you have growing in your backyard? And more to the point of this topic, What do you like about eating food you just picked?
My guess is that eating freshly plucked kernels of wheat was a shared joy for those men.
Sacred Cows
I wasn't particularly active in a church growing up, so I was pretty clueless about the phrase "sacred cow" when I started working in a church. How about you -- do you know what a "sacred cow" is? This concept is helpful for understanding this week's passage, so you might take a little time explaining it.
(In my opinion, there are two key elements to the definition -- a sacred cow is something that is completely untouchable, but also something that the people are no longer willing to even consider otherwise. "Unreasonably untouchable.")
If you're comfortable with this, you might then ask What's a "sacred cow" in our church? It's an interesting question because sometimes the answers might surprise you. (And I can tell you from experience that I learned a thing was a sacred cow to a church only when I tried to kill it!)
In this week's passage, Matthew introduces us to one of the "sacred cows" in conservative Judaism: the Sabbath (or more specifically: their laws for the observance of the Sabbath). Your transition out of this topic would be that Jesus had to confront the Pharisees that turning the Sabbath into a sacred cow had caused them no longer to be reasonable or rational about it. If they could just listen to themselves, they would realize how ridiculous they were being.
We want to be cautious about what we allow to become a sacred cow.
[Note: the nuance here is what makes this topic so difficult. The Sabbath wasn't the sacred cow; the Pharisees' laws were. But they could not grasp that distinction.]
Hypocrisy in Lawmakers and Law Enforcers
Goodness, I am so hesitant even mentioning this in the current political climate; I fear it could derail your entire group time. But I can't help that this is the passage we're covering right now. (For anyone who reads this post in the future, know that we are in the middle of a number of protests in early 2026.)
In this week's passage, Jesus confronts the Pharisees for endorsing an unreasonable law code (non-biblical Sabbath laws) and also being hypocritical as to its enforcement. (The Pharisees were not dinging themselves for working on the Sabbath by following the disciples around and acting as the Sabbath Police.)
What's a time you observed a religious authority being unreasonable or hypocritical that really bothered you and why? (Two-part: why did you think they were unreasonable or hypocritical, and why did it bother you?) What did you do about it?
(Note: Jesus would caution you to make sure you've been thorough in self-evaluation before you charge your high horse through the gates.)
[Note: thinking through a topic. When putting together an outline for a Bible study session, it's our responsibility to think about where the discussion could go. If this particular topic jumps from the church sphere to the secular sphere, there's no way it doesn't get very political. Whether or not you agree, the protesters you see in the news are complaining that the laws are themselves unreasonable and also that they are being enforced unreasonably. That is a very important discussion, and it might sound like this week's passage. But that's not what Jesus is talking about in this week's passage. Jesus is talking about how the Pharisees are misrepresenting God's Old Testament Law to God's people.]
This Week's Big Idea: Sabbath vs. Lord's Day (and Blue Laws!)
This topic has come up so many times. Here are a few related posts.
If you want to learn more about the Pharisees and Sabbath laws, I suggest you read the "Reigns" post. That's Luke's parallel passage to this week's. (I also suggest the fun idea "Rules that have outlived their usefulness".)
But here, I want to focus on how Christians have tended to handle the Sabbath discussion. We tend to fall into one of three camps:
The Seventh-Day Adventist Camp. This group believes that Christians were wrong to go away from the Sabbath (Saturday), and they maintain Saturday as a strict day of worship and rest, following Old Testament Sabbath laws.
The Sabbatarian Camp. This group calls Sunday "the Christian Sabbath" (it goes back to Tertullian, but it found more recent foothold, especially in America, among the Puritans). They believe that Sunday should have no "worldly labor or busyness".
The Majority Camp. Most Christians believe that the Sabbath laws are a part of the "ceremonial law" that was fulfilled in Jesus. The principle of "rest and worship" -- and emphasizing gathering together for worship and fellowship -- is achieved apart from legalism.
[Historical note: the early church gathered very early and very late on Sunday. That's not because they were "extra devoted" -- it's because they were working around everyone's work schedules. Pretty much everybody worked 7 days a week.]
Here's a paragraph from the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology:
[block quote]
When the early church began Sunday worship is not known. Nor do the NT writers offer a rationale for the shift from Saturday's sabbath observance to Sunday's meetings, but several factors may be suggested.
(1) The seventh day, Saturday, was no longer regarded as a day to be especially observed by worship and rest from labor (Rom. 14:5-6; Gal. 4:8-11; Col. 2:16-17; cf. Acts 15:28-29).
(2) The event of the resurrection, at the heart of the Christian gospel (e.g., Acts 2:31; 4:2, 10, 33; 10:40; 13:33-37; 17:18; Rom. 10:9; 1 Cor. 15:4, 12-19; 1 Thess. 1:10), occurred on a Sunday.
(3) When the NT writers designated the various days on which the resurrected Christ appeared and spoke to his disciples, it was uniformly a Sunday (e.g., Matt. 28:1, 9; Luke 24:13-34; John 20:19, 26).
(4) The coming of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2) occurred on Pentecost, a Sunday.
(5) After the NT era the first and "eighth" days of the week (both Sundays) were referred to respectively as the day of God's creation (Justin, First Apology 67.7) and the day that anticipated the new creation or eternity (Barnabas 15:9; cf. 2 Enoch 33:7). Sunday was thus seen as a "firstfruit" of the future eternal state (cf. 1 Cor. 15:20).
[end of block quote]
Early Christians wanted to distinguish themselves from Jews -- understanding that the Jewish law pointed to and was fulfilled in Jesus -- and this was one important way.
Blue Laws. You might be too young for this. If you don't know what "blue laws" are, please look them up. American blue laws are rooted in Puritanism, and they are the reason why discussion about "the Sabbath" can create generational tension.
I'm just going to say this as a student of the Bible and church history: nowhere in the New Testament or the early church was the Lord's Day called a "Christian Sabbath". The Lord's Day is something completely new, something set aside for the well-being of Christians growing in Christlikeness together as a church. That's why we emphasize congregational gathering and worship.
What do we do about the fourth commandment?
Ex 20:8 Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy: 9 You are to labor six days and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. You must not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female servant, your livestock, or the resident alien who is within your city gates. 11 For the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything in them in six days; then he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy.
Well, before we got snowed out two weeks in a row, David was going to have preached on this commandment last week. So that would have been easy -- we were just going to "debrief" what we learned the week before! But now, he's not preaching on it until March 1, so I'm going to make the strange suggestion of sitting on a lot of these questions until we hear that sermon.
For those of you who don't attend First Baptist Church, that doesn't help you. When we studied the Ten Commandments last year,
we established God's Law as a way to "create a covenant people". God's people were to be different from the rest of the world, and they would have no idea how to be apart from God's instruction.
When we look at the Ten Commandments like a "Bill of Rights", this is what the fourth commandment looks like:
God has the right to His people’s time (and—a household has the right to proper rest).
I love that. That helps me so much.
Jesus confronted the Pharisees with something very simple: they had fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of God's Laws, and that's why they could only woodenly and slavishly build unimaginative fences around it. The Sabbath was never about "do or do not" but about "worship and rest" -- which is itself an expression of "trust and obey".
Christians do not observe "The Sabbath" anymore. But we do practice worship and rest.
Where We Are in Matthew
Here we get into the conflict that's more famous than last week's. The more people begin to understand Jesus' ministry, the more they realize the threat to the "old order of things". In the Gospels, one of the faces of that "old order" is the Pharisees.
The Pharisees. Just a reminder that the Pharisees and Sadducees were the two major political parties in Israel in Jesus' day. The Pharisees were ultra-conservative. They believed (rightly) that God had punished Israel in the past for violating God's law. Their solution was to police the entire country by making the laws even stricter and watching to make sure everybody was doing what they said. Their "authority" was purely self-proclaimed. They acted like they had authority, so many people treated them as if they had authority. (And remember, that's why Jesus blew the people away -- they understood that Jesus truly had capital-A Authority.)
The Pharisees' original intent basically proved God's point in sending Jesus. They believed they were supposed to work their way to righteousness through careful obedience, and they just couldn't get the people to do it. Unfortunately, over time, they also started to like their stature as "respected holy men".
Anyhoozie, Matthew makes it clear that Jesus' conflict with the Pharisees -- triggered by their Sabbath regulations -- was not simple; it made the Pharisees want to kill Jesus.
How far from God they had fallen!
Part 1: The Conflict Setting (Matthew 12:1-2)
At that time Jesus passed through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick and eat some heads of grain. 2 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “See, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.”
Surely you notice when a book or movie telegraphs a future conflict. I get the biggest kick out of that. Somebody leaves their keys out. Somebody leaves the gate open. Somebody forgets to lock the door. Something that makes you say, "Oh, that's going to be a problem." Well, that's exactly what Matthew is doing here for his Jewish audience. Remember that Matthew's original audience would not have needed a primer about the stakes of this exchange.
"At that time" does not mean "that day" but the equivalent of "around that time". This didn't have to happen the same day as chapter 11. Events like this probably happened every week to Jesus; Matthew put it here to illustrate the problems the Pharisees caused and how Jesus confronted them about it.
If you read my "Reigns" post linked above, you know that the Pharisees even had rules about how far a person was allowed to walk on the Sabbath. They don't complain to Jesus about that. That would suggest that Jesus and His disciples were simply out on a "stroll" talking about Jesus things. Matthew mentioned their hunger to explain why they picked the heads of grain (they weren't being provocative).
You might have in your head a scene like this picture, where a person is just walking through somebody's field. Remember that in those days, they didn't have fences like we have. There were "landmark stones" that identified "property lines" and walking paths just went through the fields. Farmers sowed seed up to (and beyond) their strict border to maximize the harvest. Deuteronomy 23:25 -- "When you enter your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck heads of grain with your hand, but do not put a sickle to your neighbor’s grain." -- gives people the right to do what the disciples did.
But according to the Pharisees, picking grains of wheat by hand was considered "reaping" and was thus a category of work forbidden on the Sabbath.
Part 2: The Pharisees Misunderstood the Bible (Matthew 12:3-8)
3 He said to them, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and those who were with him were hungry: 4 how he entered the house of God, and they ate the bread of the Presence—which is not lawful for him or for those with him to eat, but only for the priests? 5 Or haven’t you read in the law that on Sabbath days the priests in the temple violate the Sabbath and are innocent? 6 I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. 7 If you had known what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the innocent. 8 For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
I'm going to make this quick. Verse 3-4 refers to an event in 1 Samuel 21 which includes David lying directly to a priest(!!). Jesus is not trying to say that there should be exceptions to the rules. Jesus' point is that nowhere in the Old Testament was David condemned for his actions at all! In other words, the Pharisees misunderstood the Old Testament. By reducing the Old Testament law to a set of "do and do nots", the Pharisees could not explain 1 Samuel 21.
To be very clear, Jesus' disciples were not breaking any biblical laws by picking these heads of grain -- they were breaking the Pharisees' laws (well, the laws that the Pharisees endorsed that had been written over the generations). There are very few parallels between what Jesus' disciples were doing and what David's men were doing. Rather, Jesus used that example to make a deeper point to the Pharisees: the events of 1 Samuel 21 should be a red flag to you that your interpretation of the Bible does not hold up.
And then Jesus changes gears and pushes closer to home, so to speak, in verses 5-6. Would anybody suggest that priests aren't "working" during worship services on the Sabbath? Of course not! And yet they are not condemned, nor should they be.
What does that have to do with Jesus' disciples? Obviously, Jesus is comparing Himself to the temple in Jerusalem -- He is the true and greater temple. But how is the disciples' picking heads of grain in the same category as the priests engaging in temple service? That's a great question, and there are a lot of suggestions. But as you might imagine, I'm riding with D. A. Carson on this one:
Because the priests' responsibilities took precedence over Sabbath restrictions, that clearly said that the temple was greater than the Sabbath. But Jesus is greater than that.
This solution is entirely consistent with what we have perceived to be Jesus' attitude to the law in this Gospel. The law points to him and finds its fulfillment in him (see on 5:17-48). Not only, then, have the Pharisees mishandled the law by their Halakah (vv.3 4), but they have failed to perceive who Jesus is. The authority of the temple laws shielded the priests from guilt; the authority of Jesus shields his disciples from guilt. It is not a matter of comparing Jesus' action with the action of the priests; nor is it likely that Jesus is suggesting that all his disciples are priests. Rather, it is a question of contrasting His authority with the authority of priests.
This is a different line of argument from verses 3-4. That's why Jesus says "or".
Likewise, verses 7-8 present still another way in which the Pharisees are wrong (though it ties to the first two). By approaching the law as a tool of condemnation, the Pharisees demonstrated that they did not understand the "heart of God" or their own hypocrisy. Their default mode was "accusation"; God's default mode is "mercy". (Remember -- the law itself is a tangible product of God's mercy on His people.) Verse 8, then, simply summarizes the truth that Jesus has the authority to establish these things.
Recap:
Verses 3-4 -- the Pharisees do not understand how to interpret the Bible.
Verses 5-6 -- Jesus' authority supersedes that of the temple, and the temple supersedes the Sabbath.
Verses 7-8 -- the Pharisees do not have the heart of God, and that is why they consistently miss Jesus' point.
Jesus calls Himself the "Son of Man" here; it is a Messianic title that means He will handle the Sabbath laws (or any other law -- cf. the Sermon on the Mount) as He will.
Application for us:
How do we "use" the Bible? Do we use it to bludgeon sinners? To justify ourselves? To make us feel better?
How does God want us to "use" the Bible?
Part 3: The Proof: A Human Being (Matthew 12:9-14)
9 Moving on from there, he entered their synagogue. 10 There he saw a man who had a shriveled hand, and in order to accuse him they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” 11 He replied to them, “Who among you, if he had a sheep that fell into a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn’t take hold of it and lift it out? 12 A person is worth far more than a sheep; so it is lawful to do what is good on the Sabbath.” 13 Then he told the man, “Stretch out your hand.” So he stretched it out, and it was restored, as good as the other. 14 But the Pharisees went out and plotted against him, how they might kill him.
Matthew then shares a story that makes it clear that Jesus' condemnation of the Pharisees is entirely justified. The Pharisees had drifted far away from God.
Luke 6 says that this event took place a week later, fyi.
An important difference: this time, it's not the disciples; it's Jesus Himself. The behavior in question is not tangential; it's the point of the event.
The same law codes that established what was considered "work" on a Sabbath even went to the point of what kind of medical care was permitted. If something saves a person's life, it can be done; otherwise it can wait a day. To Jesus, this made a mockery of God's law.
To prove, Jesus again referenced an animal. The Pharisees would not condemn a sheepowner (such as themselves) for pulling an animal out of a pit on a Sabbath, even though the animal was not in mortal danger at that moment. So, should we be allowed to do something good for an animal, but not for a human? Do they realize how ridiculous and misanthropic they sound?
Did the Pharisees really think that there is ever a situation in which God would not want His people to do good?
The fact that they think there is is proof that they are no longer in tune with God.
Luke's version makes it clear that the Pharisees were less upset that Jesus did this on the Sabbath and more upset that Jesus defied them (and moreso that Jesus claimed Messianic authority in doing so).
Luke 6:9 Then Jesus said to them, “I ask you: Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?” 10 After looking around at them all, he told him, “Stretch out your hand.” He did, and his hand was restored. 11 They, however, were filled with rage and started discussing with one another what they might do to Jesus.
Note that Matthew says nothing about the man's faith. That's not the point this time. The point is that Jesus had identified an idol for the Pharisees. That idol was themselves. They had remade god in their own image.
No matter what kind of front we put up, what kind of lifestyle we purport to lead, Jesus will always cut to the heart of things -- always cut to that place where we are not singly devoted to God but rather "serve both God and money" so to speak. He does it over and over again in the Gospels, and He is still doing it today.
My prayer is that as we get into the next section of the Gospel, our hearts will be open to how we might not be in tune with God's priorities.
But for closing discussion purposes, what are things people don't like about Jesus? (I like the Lifeway question: "How might the authority of Jesus be perceived as a threat?") How can we help overcome those conflicts?