Was that sermon a rerun?  I’m not just talking about the ongoing insistence that following the Law is the greatest evil around.  I’m talking about the way in which Jesus was a type of David.  For this was Jesus’ point at the end of Mark 2.  The type/ antitype relationship is a literary device used to poetically express one thing through another thing.  It’s kind of like an allegory.  Husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loved the Church.  In this instance the marriage of Christ and the Church is the antitype and every other marriage is a type, or is should be.  The greater is reflected by the smaller, the main event is copied in the smaller events.  This device is used often in scripture but in a unique way.  Jesus is the antitype, though he came after the types, because he is the ultimate reality which they reflect.  So David is a type of Christ.  Insofar as he acted like Christ he couldn’t reflect Christ because he preceded him in history but he foreshadowed him.  And in reality we know Christ was and is and is to come he is the antitype of antitypes.  So Jesus was a rerun of David but ultimately David was the rerun.  This is a two way street of meaning.  We learn more about David from Christ and we learn about Christ from David.  Jesus loves making these connections between himself and the heroes of the Old Testament that the Pharisees claimed to respect.

August: Pharisees censuring Christ for permitting his disciples to eat on the Sabbath. By Abel Grimmer.
I’m not sure why they are harvesting in the background on the Sabbath.

At the end of Mark 2:24 the Pharisees accuse Jesus’ disciples of breaking the Sabbath Law.  They did no such thing, of course, but Jesus uses it as an instance for teaching.  Rather than just saying he loves the Old Testament Jesus dives right into it.  Lets do the same.  Jesus pulls out an Old Testament story with lots of connections to his present situation.  In this story David was a type of Christ.  In 1 Samuel 21 David was fleeing from Saul with a few of his men.  David had been anointed to be the rightful King a few chapters earlier, but Saul was still asserting authority.  Hmm does this sound familiar.  Mark lays out the story of Jesus, who was the rightful king yet was chased out of the city by the crowds and religious leaders.  He had the rightful authority but the religious leaders reigned.

David fled to Nob where the tabernacle was currently set up and the priests of Levi resided.  But the ark of the presence was not in the tabernacle at this time.  If you recall the Israelites had lost the ark to the Philistines because they thought it was a magic toy that could help them win battles.  They marched it out and the Philistines took it, and Israel was defeated.  The ark killed the fake god Dagon a few times and started giving the people cancer so the Philistines put it on a cart and let it go.  It made it’s way back to Israel, but the Israelites who looked at the ark died.  They were afraid so they told the Gentiles of Kiriath-jearim to take care of it.  The ark stayed here 20 years until David brought it back to Jerusalem.  This was a Gibeonite city which should have been destroyed by Joshua but he didn’t seek the Lord and they tricked him into signing a treaty with them.  So the Gentiles have the ark much like in Jesus’ time when the Gentile Romans ruled the land.  Both situations were a time of transition from old leadership to new.

Mark gives us the short version connecting us with the story.  Matthew fills in the details which give us better insight into what the Pharisees would have realized. We are not as adept in the Old Testament as the Jews so we need all the help we can get.   So the bread of the presence was there but the presence of the ark was not.  Not only did David and his men eat of the sacred bread just like the disciples ate of bread, but the Levites were commanded to replace the loaves every Sabbath. This was Sabbath breaking commanded by the Law for the sake of the temple.  But Jesus is greater than the temple, any Sabbath breaking would be justified.  But no one had broken the Law.  The Pharisees were incorrectly judging by the Law.  Jesus judged rightly and showed them their error.  He used the Old Testament as the basis of his argument.  The Law was never meant as a weapon to cause more harm than it prevented.  The same with the Sabbath.  They were designed to be a blessing. There were always more fundamental authorities than the Law.  Hosea 6:6 says “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”  They made it all about the application of their rules.  But we should beware lest we do the same thing.  We can make “we are not under the Law” into a rule.  We can defend it at all cost to the point of silliness to the point of forgetting love.  We are all guilty under the Law, especially as Jesus read it.  The grace he has extended to us by pouring out his wrath on his son in our place is the most incredible thing this earth has ever seen.  But the fact remains that we are like sheep without a shepherd.  Even the church can be thrown into great error.  The Church fell into the error of slavery to the Law, Paul addresses this inGalatians.  But there is another error of leaving people without the instruction laying right there in the Old Testament even the Law.  God gave every one of those rules for a reason.  He wasn’t just making stuff up, he wasn’t just putting on a show with flaming hoops for his people to jump through.  We should search the Law to understand what he meant by each one of them.  What was at the heart of the matter?  How was he loving his people and trying to get them to love in return?

How can we mock the Laws of God?  How do we take pride in the fact that our civil laws have strayed far from the Law of God?  Why wouldn’t we want the rules of God to be the rules of our people?  What are the other options, manmade laws?  We screwed up God’s Law, how much more our own?  I was just reminded of how Jews during the spread of the black plague were often spared because they washed so often, because they followed the Law.  Few Jews died which actually lead to anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories that the Jews caused the plague.  I’m sure all the washings were a hassle, but it sure beats your limbs turning painfully black and eventually death.  Like any laws they must be justly administered, why wouldn’t we want that?  Don’t we pray “for his will on earth as it is in heaven”?  We sure aren’t doing too well with this new “all I need is my bible” garbage.  Sin is rampant and out of control in the name of Christian liberty.

The sabbath was meant to be a blessing, can’t it be a blessing today?  Can’t we take one day a week off and trust God that he will provide for us even if we don’t work every day?  I think so, most of the Church throughout time thought so.  Sunday was never a time for work, yet Saturday was for most people throughout Christendom.  They were blessed and blessed and we enjoy our current prosperity on their shoulders.  Talking about how we are not under the sabbath because it is not repeated as a command in the New Testament is to take the Pharisees at their word.  It is to take the sabbath as a burden that they wanted to apply on everyone woodenly and we want to unapply to everyone just as woodenly.  God want’s to bless his people with a day off.  He want’s us to love him by enjoying his bounty.  So pick the heads of grain as you flit through the fields with your savior, or tell your boss you can’t work on Sunday, both have judged rightly, and work hard to judge correctly under the Law the other six days of the week.

Further Reading:  A Son to Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel by Peter J. Leithart

Further Listening: Mercy Stands Taller, Douglas Wilson