Thoughts on Mark 2

Today’s reading: Hosea 13-14; Mark 2

I know I’ve talked about this before, but as we are starting into the Gospel of Mark, it seems like a good time to stop and remember that the Pharisees were not concerned with people following the law for the sake of personal salvation, but for the sake of avoiding another exile.

It is very common to hear people talk about the Pharisees’ obsession with keeping the law in terms of salvation, as though they thought their personal righteousness earned them eternal life. But when we stop and think about the interaction with them and Jesus’ disciples at the end of Mark 2, we can see that doesn’t fully fit the bill. If it’s just about their own personal salvation, why do they care what Jesus’ disciples are doing that might violate the law? Sure, you could argue that they are just trying to discredit Jesus and His ministry by calling out the lawlessness of His followers, but there are two problems with that: (1) We are still early enough in His ministry that the Pharisees were trying to figure Jesus out and were not yet fully on the offense against Him, and (2) it was not only against Jesus or His followers that the Pharisees raised these issues and maintained these expectations, but against every Jew.

So if their concern was not with personal righteousness to earn salvation, what was it about? Primarily, their concern was exile.

Many leading Jews, in Jesus' day, were concerned about their nation being once again sent into exile. They understood past exile to have been a result of Israel's failure to keep the law, and so sought to guard Israel against that by righteously holding to the law. The Essenes (the sect famously known for producing the Dead Sea Scrolls in their Qumran community) believed that Israel as a whole was too far gone, and instead sought to separate themselves and live such incredibly righteous lives that, based on their faithfulness alone, God would spare Israel from exile. The Pharisees, on the flip side, believed that it was broader, corporate faithfulness which would stave off exile. This is why the Pharisees, while focusing on incredible personal faithfulness and obedience (even to the point of tithing their herbs and spices), also sought to constrain the broader public's actions as well. Even if a given individual didn't care about personal faithfulness to God, if there were publicly maintained boundaries that kept them from transgressing the law, that was good enough to keep the nation from experiencing God's wrath.

So when the Pharisees confront Jesus and His disciples about them plucking heads of grain and eating them on the Sabbath, it is a legitimate concern that they were working (harvesting from the field) on the Sabbath, in violation of God's direct command. In fact, God commanded Moses to have the community stone a man who went out to gather wood on the Sabbath, so you can understand why the Pharisees would take working on the Sabbath so seriously. I honestly think it's worth noting that when Jesus confronts the Pharisees about tithing their mint, dill, and cumin, He doesn't say it's unnecessary or unimportant, but rather, to the contrary, He says they should have been doing it, just without neglecting the more important things like love and mercy.

In their minds, the Pharisees were trying to protect Israel and keep them, as a nation, operating within God's law, and that was a good, right, and noble desire, but it was their implementation of it that was lacking in the love, mercy, and compassion that God values so highly.

Now, that said, there were certainly bad eggs among the Pharisees, and their self-righteousness and pride certainly come to the fore in the gospel accounts, so I don't mean to paint them as misunderstood saints or anything like that. But given the amount to wrong teaching I've heard about what the Pharisees pursued and why, I felt like it would be good to clarify before we get too far into Mark's gospel.