What it was made for

In today’s Gospel (Mark 2:23-28), our Lord makes this simple statement:

The Sabbath was made for man,
and not man for the Sabbath.

The Pharisees and other authorities had twisted around the original meaning of the Sabbath, obscuring a fundamental purpose for which the Sabbath had been made – even to the detriment of that very purpose.

This twisting of purposes is very common: the history of humanity is full of things created in goodness being twisted to evil. Indeed, the twisting often seems to be getting worse.

(Ironically, today - on the very day of this reading - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia issued these words:

“If the term ‘legitimate medical purpose’ has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death.” (emphasis in original)

Unfortunately, on the very day of this reading, the majority of the Court did the twist, solemnly pronounced the term ‘legitimate medical purpose’ as ‘ambiguous’ and opened the door wider for state-sponsored suicide.)

There are many things that were created with clear and good purposes that people today twist to their own selfish and ultimately destructive ends.

But our Lord’s words are not just about “hot button topics” of modern politics and morality.

Our Lord’s words invite us to a ressourcement – a ‘return to the source’: to look beneath the accumulation of cogitation, accommodation and rationalization we may have piled over the simplest things – too often for our own selfish purposes – and to look for God’s purpose.

What was this made for?

What was and is God’s purpose?

How can we be more faithful to the loving, omniscient Creator of all things?

This is the invitation and the challenge set before us by his Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, through whom all things were made.