Breaking the Law

Brian opened Matthew 12:1-14 and asked the congregation to sit with two linked scenes, Jesus' disciples picking grain on the Sabbath and Jesus healing a man's withered hand in the synagogue, under the title "Breaking the Law." Together the scenes pressed a single point: time spent with Jesus produces freedom, and that freedom will always look like lawbreaking to a religious wineskin that has no room left to stretch.

What was said

Brian started by asking people what they actually pictured when they imagined the disciples walking through the grain field. Responses pulled in different directions. One person saw a foreshadowing of communion, the wheat connecting to Jesus' body. Another saw ordinary people just trying to eat, set upon by the religious establishment the moment they relaxed. A third noticed that the disciples, good Jewish men all, would have grown up thinking exactly the way the Pharisees thought, which made Jesus leading them through the field and apparently going first all the more striking. Brian tied that to an Old Testament provision requiring farmers to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so that the poor could glean with dignity, pointing out that the disciples eating grain like that were not living comfortably.

Brian then moved to the second scene, where Jesus does not wait for another day or another town. He walks straight into the Pharisees' own synagogue, finds a man with a withered hand, and heals him while he is still in the middle of answering his accusers. Brian noted the style of it: Jesus addresses the Pharisees, the miracle is already happening, and only when he is done making his point does he tell the man to hold out his hand. Verse 14, where the Pharisees immediately begin plotting to kill him, landed with weight in the room.

Brian connected both scenes to a theme the church has been carrying through the end of last year, the image of new wine and new wineskins. The point Jesus is making, Brian said, is not that rules do not matter but that the Pharisees' wineskin had no capacity left to hold what Jesus was pouring out. Their only move was to insist he conform to the container rather than let the container be remade. A congregant drew a connection to Revelation 12, where the accuser attacks the brothers day and night, and Brian picked that up directly, saying that some people in the room have begun to walk in real freedom and the same accuser shows up to remind them of past failures and drag them back into guilt and shame. That voice, Brian said, is a liar.

Brian then shifted to a practical question: how do you actually grow a new wineskin? He worked through a reading and listening list he said has stretched him more in the last couple of years than in the previous two decades of following Jesus. He named books by Michael Heiser, David Pawson, Art Katz, and Joel Richardson, a teaching series through the FAI app under the Maranatha Global Bible Study, the Blurry Creatures podcast, and two documentary film series from FAI called Sheep Among Wolves and Covenant and Controversy. He was clear that none of these are without bones, and that the Holy Spirit in a person is enough to know when to spit one out.

Brian brought it back to the text to close. The disciples, he said, had some kind of transformative encounter with Jesus that let them walk through a wheat field and not be paralyzed by religious constraint. Two thousand years later the same thing happens. He said he is not particularly moved by how much someone knows about Jesus, but he is drawn to people whose lives have clearly been changed by spending time with him, because that is what he wants for himself. Freedom, he said, is the consistent mark of a person who has actually been with Jesus.