Tag: mishnah

  • Who feeds you?

    On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grain fields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?” And Jesus answered them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?” And he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.” Luke 6:1-5

    Mishnah

    Photo by Martin LaBar via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    This is one of those passages that I’ve glossed over for years. But recently, I’ve been drawn to its intricacies which unlocked the bigger picture.

    First and foremost, the complaint never made sense to me until I started reading Mishnah. Various rabbis passed down various interpretations and instructions on Sabbath regulations. While the written Old Testament gave general directions for obeying the Law, mishnah was the oral tradition that defined the boundaries. And depending on your rabbi and who trained them, the oral tradition told you how many steps you could take on the Sabbath and not be “work.” Or how to cook in a way that wasn’t work for the cook or work for the animals who provided sustenance. As referred to in the passage, there were disagreements about  pulling an Ox out of a hole to save its life. Was it OK to do that on the Sabbath or should we wait? Was it OK to save a life on the Sabbath? Or was it OK to just save its life but not try to help it once you’ve gotten it out of the hole? Various rabbis had various opinions that were passed down through the mishnah.

    While all agreed that the Law required that farmers left a few rows of grain unharvested along the road for the poor/traveling to glean, there was disagreement as to whether it was lawful for the poor/travelers to glean on the Sabbath. So when Jesus replies back to the Pharisee referring to Old Testament passages, the Pharisees are really trying to figure out which oral tradition gave him permission to glean on the Sabbath.

    He frustrates them by offering a remixed version. He didn’t respond from the perspective of a certain rabbi. Nor did he respond by quoting the Law of Moses. Instead, he asked a question that reframed the inquiry altogether.

    Even if you obey the Sabbath— who is the Lord of the Sabbath? And ultimately– who feeds you from his gleanings, the farmer or the Father?

    Physical food

    Who feeds me physically? Our food chain is so messed up that I don’t think we can even comprehend this question. In my fridge right now are fruits/veggies grown on a farm about 30 miles from me. But there is also milk which came from another farm in California. And that cheese? It came from yet another farm in California. Juice? Well, some of the fruit came from Australia (I think) and the rest came from a chemical plant in Ohio.

    The sad reality is that we are so far removed from our sources of food that this passage is completely foreign to us. We don’t have a clue where our food comes from! Our best guess is that we kind of know the grocery companies that we purchased food from. And we certainly don’t go and glean from farmers fields when we are out of cash or on the road. They’d shoot us!

    Ultimately, God provides the food. As messed up and distorted as our food chain is, God is the ultimate source of food. While I don’t think He is the author of high-fructose-corn-syrup, grain filler, and the other GMO crap most of our food is laced with, He is the ultimate provider of both the food that we eat and the money we use to buy it. It all comes from Him.

    Emotional food

    If we zoom out the lens just a little bit we can ask a deeper question. Are you free to eat emotionally on the Sabbath? Are you slowing down enough to listen? Not just to the preacher or the Sunday school teacher or to other people in your small group. But are you slowing down enough on the Sabbath to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit in your life? Is He feeding you words of instruction, comfort, and rebuke? Or are you drowning the Spirit out by turning the volume up too loud with the human voices in your life?

    Are you slowing down enough on the Sabbath to listen to your own voice? Are you taking time to process the stuff that is happening? Are you taking time to rest your body? Are you taking time to rest your mind by doing recreational stuff?

    That’s emotional food. The passage evokes a visual of Jesus and his disciples walking along the road, probably quietly as they observe the Sabbath, and the group of them spreading out and gleaning the grain. Each of them plucking heads of grain and grinding away the chaff between their fingers or with their palm before popping the uncooked grain into their mouth. This isn’t tossing a bag of popcorn in the microwave! This took time. And it was likely full of introspection and listening.

    Who feeds you during quiet times of self-reflection? Who speaks to you and gives you emotional food to prepare for the week ahead?

    Spiritual food

    Finally, we zoom the lens on this passage out as far as it goes. With our wide angle lens Jesus asks the question, “Ultimately, who is the Lord of the Sabbath? Who is in charge of the Harvest?”

    Jesus is our ultimate source of nutrition. He is the Provider. He gives us life. He made the sun which warms the soil and provides the energy for photosynthesis.

    Spiritually, Jesus is the source of life on the Sabbath. Rather than leaning on the interpretations of man alone… modern day mishnah… Jesus is eternal, alive today, and active among His people bringing nutrition to the poor and sojourners among us willing to glean along the roadside.

    Clearly and obviously, Jesus wants us to gather with fellow believers to corporately worship Him on the Sabbath. But he doesn’t want us to get lost in the granular act of going to church for spiritual food. That’s a supermarket approach when Jesus gave us the example of finding food where we are on the Sabbath. He reminds us again and again, “I am the Lord of the Sabbath. It belongs to me. It’s ultimately about me. You want to rest, it’s found in me. You want to eat, I am the bread of life.”

    Who are the farmers in your life? Are they leaving a little on the side for you to feed from?

  • 2 Things I Learned from the Mishnah

    A couple weeks back Kristen and I took Jackson into the pediatricians office to get circumcised. This is one of the things that has changed since we had Paul 7.5 years ago. Now they wait until a baby is two weeks old before doing circumcision. When Paul was born the nurses took him for a bath and a hearing check and he came back circumcised. Don’t ask me why this is so, it just is.

    Our pediatrician is wonderful older Jewish gentleman in his early 60s. He’s the kind of doctor that when you tell other doctors who your kids pediatrician is they all go, “Oh, he’s a great, great doctor.”

    After he explained that the latest research thinks it is best to wait a couple of weeks to circumcise I quipped that maybe Jewish law had been right all along, waiting until the 8th day. As he continued preparing little Jackson for the procedure he and I struck up a conversation about Genesis 17. (Kristen rolled her eyes, she’s heard my little rant about this 100 times.) My initial thought went OK well so I moved on to my main point. I told him that when I was in Bible college I asked the professor two questions about this passage: When Abraham circumcised his entire household in one day who went first? And did God give a diagram so they knew what to do and how much foreskin was enough?

    I was showing off and he wasn’t impressed. Kristen smirked.

    He didn’t laugh. Everyone laughs when I tell that story.

    Instead he said, “You see, this is a problem for the Protestant faith. While you’ve rightfully elevated the written revelation of God you’ve completely discounted thousands of years of oral tradition.” He went on to explain that parallel to Moses’ recording the Torah in written form an oral tradition was passed from priest to priest explaining how to interpret the laws, how to translate many things into daily life, and how to actually do some of the things that the written word commands.

    In other words– Mishnah told ministers how to do their job. That’s how they learned how to do things like circumcision. Later, about 200 years after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, it was decided that they needed to record some of that oral tradition because the Jewish people were increasingly scattered. This resulted in what is now the beginning of the Talmud, what’s called Mishnah.

    I was a pretty good student. All I remember learning about the Talmud as a student was that there was Mishnah, defined as oral tradition, and Midrash, defined as commentary. It was literally just a test question and a couple of paragraphs in a couple of books.

    After the procedure we took Jackson home. And I went on Amazon and bought a Mishnah translation of  for my Kindle. With 25 other books I could be reading, I’ve been reading 1800 year old instructions on how to be a good rabbi.

    Reading through Mishnah has opened my eyes to two things:

    1. I never understood the non-temple responsibilities of a priest, Levite, or rabbi quite the way I do now. The Old Testament makes the job seem mostly ceremonial. In fact, their job was deeply engrained in daily life. The entire first section is about farming/gardening. I can envision the rabbi in the field with the farmer, “OK, you need to put wheat over there.  Yes, you can plant barley in an adjacent field, just angle it like this. Now make sure your furrows are as deep as they are wide, about the width of your foot. Now, the vineyard. The reason you don’t want to plant onions between rows in the vineyard…” This wasn’t an office job. It was literally and out-in-the-ministry-field life, helping congregants understand God’s way for doing just about everything.
    2. Perhaps one of the problems in the Protestant church today is that we don’t have Mishnah? We disregard (disrespect perhaps?) oral tradition so much that we’ve assumed that those old time ministers didn’t know what they were doing. When was the last time you spent a day making house calls? Visiting jails? Visiting hospitals? We don’t bother with such things– let the volunteer deacon and small groups do that. We have important stuff to get done in the office. Like meetings and preparing for our programs and updating our Facebook status to complain about going to meetings all day. I think this has lead to the average minister considering himself more of a manager than a minister. They consider their sacramental duties limited to the things they do in the church itself. Teaching the Bible, preaching, communion, baptism, etc. Sadly, our profession is no more engrained in the daily life of our congregants than the occasional appearance at a congregants home or a visit when they are in the hospital. Instead of going and being with people every day we spend the majority of our time thinking about how to best serve the church when they come to us. Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t supposed to be like that and our predecessors had it right and we have it wrong?