LET’S HAVE a little compassion for the Pharisees, because in some ways, they’re not all that different from us. Along with the scribes or teachers of the Law of Moses, they probably understood themselves to be the guardians and arbiters of God’s truth. The identity of God’s people had always been under threat; what made them distinct from other nations? Was it not that they worshiped the one true God? And had that God not prescribed that they were to behave in particular ways and follow specific rules and rituals?

As I’ve suggested before, think of all the ways we form in-groups and out-groups, all the implicit or explicit criteria we use to define who’s in and who’s to be kept out or pushed out. Who votes the “right” way? Who dresses the right way? For that matter, who worships the right way? They get to be part of us, while everyone else is seen as naive, wrong, misinformed, or even traitors to the faith. In short, when it feels like group identity is under siege, it’s human nature to default to rules that draw clear lines between us and them.

This was part of the mindset of the scribes and Pharisees who opposed Jesus, because Jesus continually offended their sense of right and wrong; he kept crossing boundaries that to them no reputable rabbi would cross. In Luke’s narrative, you can almost feel the tension rising as the story progresses. The more Jesus does, the more his fame spreads, the more the scribes and Pharisees fret over his influence, especially when he does things to offend their religious sensibilities. What decent Jewish teacher would dare to declare a man’s sins forgiven? Or share a table with tax collectors and sinners? Or neglect to fast regularly as good and pious people should do?

And repeatedly, to the Pharisees’ way of thinking, Jesus violated the Sabbath. Along with the rite of circumcision, Sabbath-keeping was one of the key distinctions that marked off God’s people from the heathen Gentiles surrounding them. And don’t forget: in the Old Testament, the willful violation of the Sabbath was considered a capital offense, a felony rather than a misdemeanor (see Exod 31:14 and 35:2). Did God really mean it? Apparently so; in Numbers 15:32-36, we read of a man who was executed for gathering wood on the Sabbath.

To us, that probably sounds unthinkably extreme. It’s hard to imagine just how unique, how exclusive God’s covenant relationship with his people was in distinction to the other nations. The man who forfeited his life for gathering wood didn’t just forget what day it was; more likely, the attitude was, “Who cares? I need wood and I’m going to get some.”

For the moment, the point is that the Pharisees weren’t just being spiritual nitpickers for being offended by Jesus’ violation of Sabbath regulations; to them, this was a major offense. But the question is: were they reading the law rightly, or taking their own interpretations and restrictions for granted?

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IN LUKE 4, Jesus was in the synagogue in Capernaum on the Sabbath when he cast an impure spirit out of a man. One imagines there must have been some Pharisees present, but in the face of such a new manifestation of God’s power, no one seemed to raise a stink. That soon began to change, to the point where a delegation of scribes and Pharisees was present when Jesus healed the paralytic and forgave his sins. After that, Luke gives the impression that the scribes and Pharisees were now on the lookout for any new transgressions.

Thus, chapter 6 begins with two stories that share a common theme: the anger of the scribes and Pharisees at Jesus for what seemed like bold violations of the Sabbath. Here’s how the first story begins:

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and his disciples began to pick some heads of grain, rub them in their hands and eat the kernels. Some of the Pharisees asked, “Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” (Luke 6:1-2, NIV)

What was the offense? It wasn’t stealing. If you snuck into my backyard and started picking lemons off my tree without my permission, I could charge you with trespassing and petty theft. Contrast that with this provision in the Law of Moses:

If you enter your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat all the grapes you want, but do not put any in your basket. If you enter your neighbor’s grainfield, you may pick kernels with your hands, but you must not put a sickle to their standing grain. (Deut 23:24-25)

In a world without fences, you might pass through another person’s property. If you were hungry, you had the legal right to pick and eat what you needed to satisfy that hunger—but not more. Indeed, the law required harvesters to leave some grapes, grain, and olives for the sake of the poor and foreigners living in their land (Lev 19:9-10; 23:22; Deut 24:19-22). The practice allowed the disadvantaged to feed themselves without having to ask for a handout.

So what crime had Jesus’ disciples committed? It’s not as if they had sickles out and were mowing down someone else’s grain. They were hungry, and picking a few kernels of grain here and there as they walked through the field. The way the Pharisees asked the question makes it clear that this behavior wasn’t problematic in itself; it was only problematic because it was being done on the Sabbath.

And why was that a problem? There’s no specific rule in the Law of Moses against it. But over time, the scribes and Pharisees had developed traditions that interpreted the law in increasingly specific and narrow ways that defined which behaviors were permissible and which weren’t. For them, the traditions themselves became law, and were taken for granted. In their eyes, what Jesus’ disciples were doing, picking heads of grain and separating out the kernels, was tantamount to reaping and threshing on the Sabbath.

Again, I don’t think they were nitpicking. Rather, they may have been horrified that Jesus would allow his disciples to do something that was so flagrantly in violation of God’s law.

But as we’ll see, Jesus’ response suggests that they didn’t understand the law as well as they thought they did.