Tuesday January 16, 2018
Picking ears of standing corn with the hand (not with a sickle) as you walked through a neighbor’s field was permitted in the Jewish Scriptures (Dt 23:26). The Pharisees’ objection, therefore, was not to the act itself, but to the fact that it was done on the sabbath. They considered this simple act of plucking a few heads of corn as a five-fold breach of the Law: reaping, threshing, winnowing, bearing a burden and preparing a meal! To Luke’s version of this incident, one manuscript adds an interesting (but the scholars say probably spurious) saying: “On the same day, seeing a man working on the sabbath day, he said to him, ‘Friend, if you know what you are doing, you are blessed; but if you do not know, you are accursed as a breaker of the Law.’” In a Zen monastery I once saw a piece of calligraphy that said, “If you break the law you will never attain freedom.” Grim, but true, I thought. Then, underneath I saw written, “If you keep the law you will never attain freedom.”
