Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
(Isaiah
38:1-6.21-22.22,7-8; Matthew 12:1-8)
In today’s
gospel Jesus makes an outrageous claim.
He says, “… the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” In other words, Jesus, who frequently calls
himself “the Son of Man,” created the sabbath as well as all in heaven and on earth.
It is like saying that some bricklayer
built Yankee Stadium by himself.
Some wonder
whether Jesus ever said that he was Lord of the sabbath. They note that in the Gospel of Mark, likely written
before Matthew’s, Jesus gives another defense for the disciples’ Sabbath picking. He tells the Pharisees, “The sabbath was made
for man, not man for the sabbath.” According
to those commentators, Matthew changed the reason to indicate that Jesus really
was God’s Son with authority over God’s written law.
We should
not be scandalized when we hear that the evangelists changed the wording of
Jesus’ statements or even the basic idea of what Jesus said. They believed on the testimony of the
apostles that Jesus rose from the dead to give lasting life to his
followers. And they composed their
gospels to assure others of the same belief.
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