When one considers the question of sabbath observance under the New Covenant one invariably runs across these words spoken by Yeshua in reference to the sabbath:

The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath… (Mark 2:27 KJV)

What did Yeshua mean by that? If we consider just those words alone there are a number of possibilities. Perhaps He meant that the sabbath is a plaything for man. If man doesn’t feel like playing along, that’s okay. Or perhaps Yeshua meant that man has dominion over the day and, as its master, can take it in whatever direction he pleases. Another possibility is that YHWH really doesn’t care about the day as it was made for man anyway and so it would be all the same to Him whether men took it or left it. I could come up with more possibilities but I won’t. You get the point.

That phrase, like almost any other, can have a variety of meanings if taken outside the context in which it was spoken. In fact, Yeshua’s words can be made to say just about anything one might happen to want to make them say. And they often are.

Usually this sabbath phrase is used in defense of what amounts to a “man-made sabbath,” that is, a sabbath made in the image of man’s desire for the day. And that usually means doing away with it or replacing it with something else. But for those of us concerned with hearing what Scripture actually says, rather than making it say what we want to hear, we must ask “What did Yeshua mean by those words?”

If we really want to know what Yeshua himself meant by His words, then we must consider them in the context in which He spoke them. Once we understand the point Yeshua was trying to make, in the specific situation in which He spoke them, we can then derive general principles from what He said which can be applied to our own faith and practice today. So let’s start there, at the context, to understand what Yeshua specifically meant in His comment about the sabbath having been made for man and not the other way around.

Happily, we have plenty of context to work with. The context is given from three different perspectives via Matthew (12:1-8), Mark (2:23-28), and Luke (6:1-5). That will allow us to get a clearer picture of what was going on. And that will help us arrive at a better interpretation of Yeshua’s words.

Of course, each of those passages have the yet broader context of the rest of the gospel in which it appears. I’ll refer to that broader context where necessary, but you might find it helpful to reread the Matthew, Mark, and Luke passages referenced above if you are a little rusty on the details. For your convenience, I’ve included the text of all three of these passages below, after the article.

Turning our attention to the event we should first consider the facts presented. To begin with, we have the players: Yeshua, His disciples, and some group of Pharisees. Then we have the setting of place and time. The place: A field of grain, which the KJV refers to more archaically as “corn.” The time: one sabbath day during the course of Yeshua’s itinerant ministry. It is a point in His ministry where He has already begun to draw the ire of the “religious” status quo and they are at the point of actively seeking to discredit Him. The Pharisees are one sect of that establishment.

Next we have the situation: The disciples and Yeshua were passing through a grain field on a sabbath day. They were hungry. As they walked along they picked grain and ate it. The Pharisees, attempting to discredit Yeshua, criticized His disciples by accusing them of breaking the sabbath. Yeshua turns it around on them, as He had done so many other times, by demonstrating that the application of their religious traditions stood in the way of their actually doing and teaching Torah.

Those facts lead us to an important question: “Were Yeshua’s disciples actually breaking the sabbath here?” We shouldn’t assume the Pharisees were correct in their accusation. Their motive was often to protect their traditions by discrediting Yeshua as a teacher of Torah. We know that many of the Pharisees addressed by Yeshua in Scripture were not necessarily concerned with truth. The ones we mostly see in the gospels were usually interested in preserving their religious position.

As we look for an answer to that question in what was written of the event, we find that the disciples weren’t harvesting, carrying loads of grain, or even preparing a meal on the sabbath (other than to “unwrap” it by rubbing them in their hands). There was no cooking or fire made to prepare dinner. They were eating as they went because they were hungry.

The fact that they weren’t criticized by the Pharisees for stealing another person’s crops underscores the fact that the disciples were only picking what they were immediately eating. By Torah, they had the right to pick and eat from a field belonging to another as long as they didn’t harvest or otherwise carry away any produce with them (Deut 23:24-25). The bottom line is that the disciples were doing the equivalent of walking alongside a food table on sabbath and picking up something to eat from it in passing.

The disciples weren’t harvesting, carrying work loads, or otherwise conducting business on the sabbath. They weren’t actually breaking the sabbath. Yeshua verifies this by describing them as “blameless” in the matter (Matt 12:7).

So what then was the problem for the Pharisees? The same as it usually was in Scripture. They had imposed a number of their own rules around Torah, so-called “fence-laws,” that attempted to not let anyone near any possible violation of Torah to begin with. Though an arguably commendable idea, these fence-laws ended up becoming more important in their eyes than Torah itself. As a result, they broke Torah, or at least the spirit of it, with the letter of their rules devised to keep Torah. Yeshua adressed this situation with them over and over:

He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do. And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition. (Mark 7:6-9 KJV)

Other examples of this common criticism of certain Pharisees by Yeshua can be found in Mark 7:1-13 and Matthew 5:20-48. The underlying issue between Yeshua and some Pharisees was the use of the letter of their own man-made additions to YHWH’s law to kill the spirit of His law, and thereby break it.

And that is the heart of the issue in this instance as well. They were excluding mercy from sabbath observance by their sabbath rules. Because they did that, it was they who broke the sabbath, not the disciples. That’s why Yeshua said:

Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an hungred, he, and they that were with him? How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him? (Mark 2:25-26 KJV)

His point was that mercy (an expression of love) is the whole point of Torah. Even to the extent that even the letter of Torah itself does not do away with the requirement to act in the spirit of Torah, which is love for YHWH and love for one’s neighbor. To further support His point, Yeshua quotes (in Matthew 12:7) from the prophets:

For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice…(Hosea 6:6 KJV)

The entire issue at hand in the context of our “sabbath for man” phrase is that the Pharisees were falsely accusing the disciples of breaking sabbath when they themselves broke it in the very act of trying to exclude mercy from it—something not even done by YHWH-inspired Scripture, let alone their own man-inspired traditions.

And then Yeshua said it:

The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath… (Mark 2:27 KJV)

From the context it is very clear that by this phrase Yeshua is teaching the Pharisees the proper spirit in which the sabbath is to be observed. The sabbath was made for man. Therefore it should be a blessing to man. It should not be a curse to him by withholding mercy or kindness on the day in order to make man a servant to the sabbath.

Nowhere in the context of these passages is the idea that the disciples were breaking sabbath and that it was okay because they were somehow exempt from it because it was made for them. Rather, the lesson was that the sabbath (as is true with all Torah) is to be observed in the spirit in which it was given: as an expression of love for YHWH or love for one’s neighbor.

And that message is consistent with Yeshua’s message throughout Scripture. In His “sermon on the mount,” for example:

For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee…(Matthew 5:20-23 KJV)

And Yeshua continues on for the rest of the chapter describing how the letter of the law was to be followed in accordance with the spirit of the law. And that was the point of the context in which Yeshua stated the “sabbath for man” phrase.

So if we are to interpret Yeshua’s meaning from the point He was making on the occasion of His statement, we must interpret it to mean that the sabbath is to be observed in the spirit in which it was given. Yeshua’s statement actually supports sabbath observance.

The issue at hand was not whether or not man has the right to dictate how and even whether to observe sabbath. The issue at hand is that the sabbath is to be observed as YHWH intended and not changed by man’s imposition on it.

With that understanding of Yeshua’s meaning and purpose, I can draw an illustration from personal experience to better understand how something made “for us” means “for our benefit” and not “for us to do with as we see fit.”

For a number of years my children have observed the house rule I made that they would read for one hour each week day. One half-hour is to be spent reading from a fiction book and the other half-hour is to be read from a non-fiction book. They are almost always free to choose the book, subject, and sub-genre within those two assigned categories, though from time-to-time I do make “suggestions” about specific books as I see fit.

As a result of this rule, they are now voracious readers of a wide variety of books on a wide variety of topics…on their own in addition to the required hour. They have experienced the benefits of becoming good readers and the enjoyment to be found in reading a variety of books, as well as the ability to learn how to do things they desire to pursue using books to teach themselves. That was my intention in making the rule. It lead them into the path of a good habit that has, and will continue, to enrich their lives. They would not have naturally chosen that path for themselves.

I made it the rule for the good of the children. I certainly didn’t have the children in order to make the rule. If I didn’t have children, I wouldn’t have made the rule. The reading rule was made for the children, not the children in order to make the reading rule. But because the rule was made for them, that doesn’t mean they can do with it as they please.

Imagine if they had come to me and said: “Since you made this rule for me, and not me for the rule, that means I can change it to suit my liking, and in fact my liking is to just disregard it altogether.” That argument wouldn’t have worked with me. I made the rule for their benefit, not for their ownership. It was not optional.

They were and are free to enjoy the benefits of it, that’s why I made it for them. And I left many decisions in regards to how they would carry out the reading rule up to them. But there were parameters I set that were not negotiable. Those parameters were put in place precisely because I had made the reading rule for them. It was for a specific purpose I set them. To not do them would have negated my purpose in establishing it in the first place.

Getting back to the Scriptures at hand, no where in the context is the meaning that man “owns” the sabbath and may do with it as he pleases. Rather, the specific meaning is that the law of the sabbath was given in the spirit of blessing humans. It was not meant be be a curse to them in that it precludes acts of mercy on that day. So the specific meaning of the phrase, as defined by the context, is that sabbath is to be observed properly by keeping it in the spirit in which it was given. From that we can draw principles to apply Scripture to our lives.

The general principle that we can draw from this specific teaching of Yeshua here is that it is a proper application of Torah to show mercy on the sabbath. We can heal, feed, bless, and otherwise help alleviate human suffering or need that arises on the sabbath.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions. Your input will help me to revisit this again and make my points more clearly or differently, as the need may be.

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NOTE: You may find refreshing your memory of these three texts to be helpful to following my points in the article above:

At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath day. But he said unto them, Have ye not read what David did, when he was an hungred, and they that were with him; How he entered into the house of God, and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests? Or have ye not read in the law, how that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are blameless? But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the temple. But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day. (Matthew 12:1-8 KJV)

And it came to pass, that he went through the corn fields on the sabbath day; and his disciples began, as they went, to pluck the ears of corn. And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold, why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful? And he said unto them, Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an hungred, he, and they that were with him? How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him? And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath. (Mark 2:23-28 KJV)

And it came to pass on the second sabbath after the first, that he went through the corn fields; and his disciples plucked the ears of corn, and did eat, rubbing them in their hands. And certain of the Pharisees said unto them, Why do ye that which is not lawful to do on the sabbath days? And Jesus answering them said, Have ye not read so much as this, what David did, when himself was an hungred, and they which were with him; How he went into the house of God, and did take and eat the shewbread, and gave also to them that were with him; which it is not lawful to eat but for the priests alone? And he said unto them, That the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath. (Luke 6:1-5 KJV)

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Copyright 2010 Jim Zboran. All rights reserved.
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