Mishnah Impossible

All right. Well, again, welcome to Hope Lowertown. Those of you who don't know me, my name is Brian, lead pastor here, and excited to jump back into the Gospel of Mark. I have already lost track of how many weeks we've been here. I think this is week eight, maybe nine. I don't. Oh, week eight. I know it's week eight. So that was how I saved my PowerPoint. All right. This is Gospel, Mark. Who cares? I forgot to have you introduce yourself to your friends and families and neighbors and all the things. And I had a really cool question for you. I know. And all introverts are like, amen. I get it, I get it. But I forgot, so we're just gonna move on. But I had a really good one. It was a banger this morning, and I was gonna ask, has there ever been a task in front of you that was. You just thought it was insurmountable? You thought it was impossible. There was just nothing, you know, I remember when you'd go to school, right, and you'd get the syllabus on the first day, and it was like, no, like, I'm out. And then you'd go to the next class and you'd get another syllabus. It just kept adding on. I was like, there's no way. And then you end up doing it. Well, most of the time you ended up doing it. And just whatever it may be, any task, maybe it's a book or a job or whatever. And I was going to ask that because I want to talk a little bit this morning about the Mission Impossible series. Not really. I mean, it's part of the analogy. But this series has been going on for a while, all right? Tom Cruise, Ethan Hunt, going back to 1996. And I haven't seen the newest one that just came out. It says the Final Reckoning. Who knows? Will it actually be the final. I don't know. And will they actually finish? Does Ethan Hunt finally save the world permanently? Or is there probably going to be some spinoff in some new Mission Impossible to do the missions that are always possible? Which is ironic. Today's sermon, though, the point of it, is called Mishna Impossible. There it is. Now, I can't take credit for that. We had our Monday morning meeting with staff, and I was kind of talking about maybe where I was thinking about going with this. And then Paul Stiver said, oh, you should call it Mishnah Impossible as a joke. And I was like, that'll preach. And so we did it. We're sticking with it. And so we're going to be in Mark 2:23, 3:12. Your handout's wrong, and I apologize. That's totally my fault. I did my PowerPoint and the Sermon slides that Sarah just read at the exact same time. Somehow I totally messed that up. Anyways, so that's that Mishnah. Impossible. Okay, so what is the Mishnah? Just want to briefly touch on that, because it's going to be very evident as we go through the text this morning of what the Mishnah is. But briefly, it's extra biblical traditions orally handed down by a group of religious Jews that were called the Pharisees. We've already talked a lot about the Pharisees. I'm not gonna bring that in so much today. But these are traditions that were said and memorized. They were repeated over and over. So they had these books, like 14,000 words and lines that were memorized from the Mishnah and then even the Talmud. And so they had these memorized. It wasn't written down like how we can read them today until after 70 AD. But they would have had these. These would have been well known within the Jewish community, especially among the Pharisees, or anyone who was a devout Jew would have been very familiar. If they ever went to a synagogue, they would have heard the repeating and teachings of the Mishnah. And so the Pharisees, though, claimed that these oral traditions that were handed down were equal to and on par with scripture of the Old Testament, with the law of Moses. They would have said, it's the same thing. And so we're gonna see that. That the Pharisees, which Sarah just read, you're gonna hear them say, is that lawful for you to do? And Jesus is going to go, what law? What are we talking about? We're not talking about law of Moses. We're talking about the Mishnah. We're not talking about Moses. We're talking about Mishnah. And so he's going to do this. And as we're going to see, Jesus has some problems with the oral traditions negating the word of God. So again, just to go back to Mark, Chapter one, I've done this now for eight weeks. In the beginning of the good news about Jesus. Mark, his name is John. Mark, he's an interpreter for Peter. And as he travels around Peter, Peter is telling him the teachings and the life of Jesus. And Mark is writing this down as an eyewitness from Peter as a first source. And this is the good news about Jesus. This isn't Mark's Gospel. This is Jesus's gospel as the Messiah, the anointed one, the Son of Man, his favorite title for himself and the Son of God. So let's get into this. Let's look at Sabbath, another Jewish word that maybe we are familiar with, maybe not. It's a word that people still will throw around in our popular culture. But it says this one, Sabbath, he was going through the grain field. So again, we have to just briefly, what is Sabbath? It is simply a day of rest. Culturally, we might think like, oh, it's a Saturday. Saturday is my day off. Historically, within a lot of us in our jobs and rhythms, that Saturday is my day off. But on our day off, we usually do a lot of other projects and a million other little things. And if you have kids, forget a day of rest. What are we talking about? No such thing. But this is what it was. It was a day of rest. But it's more so. It was very, very prevalent within the Jewish culture and community because of the law of Moses. And so they would do this every Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown. That was the day of Sabbath. But the interesting thing is this wasn't just for the wealthy. This wasn't just for people who could afford to take a day off. This was for servants and field laborers. And you can imagine how that would be a major problem if you are an agricultural community or I am a pharaoh in Egypt, and my slaves are saying, hey, we need a day off. No, of course not. You're not doing that. It's not how this works. The Sabbath is intended for everybody, not just the people, but also for the animals. The animals weren't even allowed to work on the Sabbath. Everyone took a day off. And even the land was to take a day off and even a year off every seven years. So this was a big deal. So where does this come from? Where does this idea of Sabbath come from? Comes from the second book of our Bible. From the law of Moses is what's traditionally called. In Exodus, chapter 20 says this. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God, a rest to the Lord your God on it. You shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, or your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days, the Lord made heaven and earth and the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. And then if you skip forward To Exodus chapter 35, there's one more snippet that's pretty important. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death. Whoa, that's really intense. So God's saying, stop, like, seriously stop. You shall kindle no fire in all of your dwelling places on the Sabbath day. There's really not a whole lot more as far as rules and regulations go in the Old Testament when it comes to Sabbath and what you should and should not, could and could not do. Okay, that's really much. We have. So the Pharisees, religious people who said, okay, well, now we're looking at Sabbath, and we have a couple snippets of what we can and can't do. So then we need to add, what is it a fuller meaning? What does it mean to have a day of Sabbath rest? How do we know that we're keeping the commandment and shouldn't be put to death if we don't really know what that means? So then they have this Mishnah, right? And I explained this, the Mishnah and the Talmud. And so when we. When we look at specifically we're going to be focusing on the Mishnah, the Talmud was just another work to help us understand and interpret the Mishnah. And the Mishnah was then to help us understand and interpret the law of Moses. There are 39 works that someone could do that would profane the Sabbath day, this day off, this day of rest. Some of them we might expect things like plowing and hunting, butchering an animal. But then there's several that you would not maybe expect, such as tying or loosening a knot. So don't tie your shoes. Sewing more than one stitch, writing more than one letter. Basically, what the Mishnah was saying is, don't even start something you know you can't finish. Okay? So if it's Friday evening and you're trying to write a manuscript, I don't know who does that, but you're doing something, say stop, you stop, full stop. Don't even start it. Just wait until the beginning of the week or the Sabbath day, till Saturday night to do this. And so basically, within the Sabbath, within the Mishnah law, unless it was absolutely necessary, meaning unless your life was in danger, don't do it. Okay, that was kind of the caveat that we read about in the Mishnah. This is all going to hold. Hopefully makes sense as we get into the text. So here we go. Not lawful. One Sabbath, he's going through the grain fields. Jesus and his disciples. And as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees were saying to him, look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath? There is nothing in our Old Testament that forbids taking grain from someone's field. As actually, as a matter of fact, in Deuteronomy 25, it says that you are allowed to do this. Okay? So the Pharisees, their problem is that they are doing it on the Sabbath. They are harvesting grain on the Sabbath, which is a. No, no, not according to the law, Old Testament law, but to their law, extra law in the Mishnah. And so this is why the Pharisees then asked that question, why are they doing what's not lawful on the Sabbath? And Jesus is going to ask the question, who's lawful laws are we talking about? Not God's laws. And so we get this amazing scene from the 1996 hit, right? Mission Impossible. Ethan Hunt, super intense scene comes down out, and he's doing something that's impossible. He's breaking into the vault at. I forget where it was. Langley. Thank you. And I love that you knew that. Yeah. So this is Ethan Hunt dangling from the wires. But here's the point. This is impossible, right? And so I spent a lot of time making this graphic, okay, so now we've got Mishnah, impossible. Okay, this is impossible to do here. So he says to them, have you read what David did when he was in need and was hungry? He and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God at the time of Abiathar, the high priest. And the bread of the presence, there's bread in the tabernacle. And that only priests were allowed to go in there. And so David does this. This is a big no no, he says, which it is not lawful for any but the priest to eat. And also he gave to those who were with him. This is bad, David. Okay, if we go back. All right, this is extra. This is even in my notes. King Saul, the first king of Israel is king. And he's going into war. And he's about to fight. I don't remember who he's fighting, but he wants to perform a sacrifice to God to get God's blessing. And the high priest is taking too long. And so he says, forget it, I'm going to do it on my own. And so he performs this sacrifice, something that kings were forbidden to do, to do a priestly duty. And what is what happens as A result of Saul the king doing a priestly duty. He loses his kingship. He ceases to be king. Now we have King David, who does the exact same thing. He does something only a priest is permitted to do, but he doesn't lose his kingdom. Kingdom. Okay, so that's what Jesus is bringing up here. He says it also gave it to those who are with him. Okay, so what in the world is happening here? One quote, I think this is only one I have this week because I had way too many last week. Again, by Jonathan Edwards, not John James Edwards. Anyway, doesn't matter. He says this. Jesus, however, does not raise the incident, this Old Testament thing, in order to plead for a Sabbath exception for his hungry disciples. Because you can read that at first he cites David's violation of the Torah not as an excuse for his action, but as a precedent. In making the allusion to David, Jesus is inviting a comparison between his person, David, and Israel's royal messianic prototype, right? He's saying, look at me and David. And as a Messianic royal prototype, which was David. Now, now you're drawing the picture here. Because what would happen was, right? So he's not so much, again, a proof text that what he and his disciples do are permitted because David did it. Well, see, David did it, so we can do it. That's not really what he's doing. It forces the religious leaders who are there to ask or to state, but you aren't King David. And then Jesus would, in his mind, or at least say, now you're getting it. Now you're getting it. Because I actually, I'm actually a greater fulfillment of King David. There's something else going on here. So then we get into the Lord of the Sabbath, and again he says to them, the Sabbath was not made. Sorry, the Sabbath was made for man. The Sabbath was made so that you would rest and take a day off and enjoy being free from your labor and your toil. Not man for the Sabbath. Don't, don't get this flipped around. Don't be bogged down by all your extra rules and regulations that you don't even have a Sabbath. This is more of a. The Sabbath has become more of a burden than just their normal everyday work. It says, so the Son of Man, again, his favorite title for himself, just as the Anointed One, the Messiah is Lord, even of the Sabbath, even of the day of rest. Says your rules negate the whole point of the day of rest. These rules become a burden rather than a blessing of rest. I know that There's a. I haven't seen it yet, so no spoilers. But there's a new movie with Downton Abbey, right? And this is the Dowager Countess. And this is really fascinating. All right. Because I forget if this is in the season. Probably one of the episodes. Oh, yeah, it's gotta be, because Matthew's still alive. Oh, spoiler alert. And so her son in law, he's like, I'm gonna go get a job. And she's like, well, how in the world are you gonna be able to care for the estate if you're working your job? And he says, oh, I'll have plenty of time to do that over the weekend. And as a wealthy aristocrat, she says, what does a weekend do, right? It's like just no concept of it, right? Which is wild. And matter of fact, the Jews, because they had a day of rest, and then Constantine in the 4th century, in the 300s, he actually gives the Christians a day off. And so that's when the weekend is invented, right? Is because of Christians and Jews and their culture of taking a day of rest. Okay, here's the whole point. Here's this impossible. Here's our mission impossible, right? Because we don't use the Mishnah. At least I don't. And I'm pretty sure none of you do. So what's the big deal? What are we talking about? All of us, every single one of us, have extra biblical rules that we place on ourselves and then we place on others. Could be rules, could be desires, expectations, and they weigh you down rather than set you free in Jesus Christ and really experience Sabbath. So there's a million that we could have put up here to do this Mishnah. Impossible. But the first one I have is just achievement, right? Once I finish this project, or once our church grows or once our house is paid off, fill in any blank that once this thing I just. Once I. Once I have a girlfriend, once I get married, once I have kids, once I retire, like, it just. It just keeps going. And I think actually all analogies break down, but this one's actually landed pretty good because it's taken Ethan Hunt, again, 30 years to try to accomplish these missions. And it's never gonna be finished. It's still gonna go on and on. We might have these extra rules or desires, expectations based on approval. Maybe it's a job review or the car I drive, or maybe even my children's performance, or maybe if I'm a student, it's my grades and wanting to look good to my professors or to try to get an internship and to get a job that I want. The truth is, every compliment at some point expires. At some point, hey, I want to hear that. I want to get that pat in the back from dad or from Coach until the next time I mess up and then I got to do it all over again at some point. This just doesn't work. It's impossible to satisfy. Maybe we look at busyness. We tend to confuse activity with fruitfulness. And we look to. We look to be productive, but we usually try to just cover our own fear of insignificance or stillness. If I just say I'm busy, if I just say I'm working hard and I'm doing this and I got so much going on that maybe they'll think more of me and they just will always end up leaving us feeling lacking. Last one. And again, there could be a million. And I hope that the spirit is maybe just pointing out your own thing that maybe I didn't list here, but control. This is a big one for me. I want to control my family, I want to control my workers, I want to control my ministry, I want to control my finances. Because if I allow somebody else to come in and do something different than my way, the way I'd like to do it, well, then it messes things up and it gets ugly and it, it makes it inconvenient for me, it makes me uncomfortable. And so I want to have control. It maintains my peace when we just do it my way. Sabbath rest, real rest, the rest that God gave us. The whole point of it was utter surrender to him. Complete surrender to him. Because it's saying that trusting God will keep the world spinning. Even when we stop, even when we stop, everything's gonna go on. God does this in the wilderness, in the desert, they've got no food. So what's he give em? He gives them manna. What is it? Bread from heaven. And they go out every day and they pick up bread from the ground and they're able to eat it, but not on the Sabbath. They have to go out on Friday and pick up twice as much. Why? Because on Saturday, what if we don't have any food on Saturday? God says, oh, I'm gonna provide Saturday. You stop, you let me deal with it. That's surrender, that's trust. So then we get into Jesus response, is it lawful? Anytime you're reading your Bible and someone asks Jesus a question and then he responds with a question, just sit in that for a little bit. Because there's usually Something really intense going on. Again, he entered the synagogue and a man was there with a withered hand. And they watched Jesus to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand, come here. And he said to them, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm? To save life or to kill? But they were silenced. There's two parts to this question. The first part, to do good or to do harm. The second part, to kill. To save life or to kill. The first part is in response to Jesus and this man, this crippled man. The second one, though, is for the observer's response to Jesus, which I think we'll see right in this text. His response to the man, to do good or harm will determine their response to him, to save or to kill. Because the whole point of this, to do good or to do harm, of course it's okay to do good, but only if it's life threatening. But to do harm, well, then it would be bad. And the Mishnah even attributes this, that if you're in a position to do what is good, to not do what is right and good and helpful is then bad. Okay, so he's posing this. I'm in a position to heal this man. If I don't heal this man, am I then in the wrong? Or to save a life or to kill? And that's gonna be the observer and their response to Jesus. So moving on in the text here, we're going to have this hardness of heart. So looking now in verse five, it says, and he looked around them, right? Setting the scene here, he looks around them with three things. Anger. And he's grieved at their hardness of hearts. These are three words that Mark uses that are as intense as you could possibly write. And Mark's not going to use these words any of the rest of the time. In the book, Jesus is not happy. But what is he not happy? Mostly about their hatred for this man, their hardness of heart. The greatest enemy of love and of grace from God isn't hate. It isn't enmity and fighting, it's hardness of heart. It's indifference to divine grace. And we're gonna see as this book unfolds that even his closest disciples are also gonna fall prey to hardness of heart. And so I think this is a warning to all of us that we should take notice of our own heart. And where are we? Cause I think there's a big takeaway. We can just pause here for a Takeaway. Hardness of heart doesn't always mean rebellion. It can be hardness of heart. And I can be comfy in my ways. I can sit in my pew, I can sit in my small group. I can sit in my office studying my Bible and praying and, and have a hard heart. How do we do this when our rules become more important than caring for people? Well, this is the way I do it. And if you don't do it the way I do it, well, then I don't know if I can trust you. I don't know if I can be friends with you. Routine can lead to a hard heart going through the motions. This is something that I think we all fall prey to. We go to church every Sunday, we go to small group every week. We read our bibles, we pray, we have communion every week. And I come up and I just eat a cracker and I drink some juice and we sing some songs and it just becomes routine. That's a hard heart that you can go through the motions without actually feeling and seeing Jesus. We need to repent of that. Do we criticize rather than celebrate? Do we look at maybe a church in some other neighborhood that's flourishing and go, well, they're not really preaching the gospel over there. That's a hard heart. Why can't we celebrate that? Is it pride, my desire to be right? Or is it conviction? We did a whole sermon on that not that long ago. Is it indifference to the lost? Is it indifference to my friends and family and neighbors that say, I don't believe in this Jesus guy? I think this is all gobbledygook. That's the new word and Webster's dictionary. And it's not because we hate them. We don't hate these people. But it makes me uncomfortable. It makes either them or the situation or just something about this. I just don't like it. And so I'm indifferent. It's a hard heart. It's not because I hate them. I don't hate them, I love them. But enough to make me uncomfortable to share the good news? I don't know. So let's set the stage. Jesus looks around, okay, so he's looking at them with anger, grieved, the hardness of heart. And then he says to the man staring at them with anger in his eyes because of their hardness of heart. But he says to the man, stretch out your hand. And he stretched it out and he was restored. This is wild in the sense that a withered hand was not a life threatening situation. Jesus doesn't have to heal this guy, it's not threatening his life. It's not a qualification for the Sabbath rules or qualify as an exception to the Sabbath rules. And to quote the Mishnah explicitly in Shabbat 22:6, this is a quote from their law. They may not straighten a deformed body or set a broken limb on the Sabbath. Jesus looks at them, knowing full well they know the law. They've got it all memorized, and they're challenging this law. And Jesus says with looking out, straighten your hand. Jesus knows exactly what he's doing here, and he's breaking their law, not God's law. God's law is one of grace and compassion and healing. He's completely doing this on purpose. But what's interesting here, it says, he stretched out his hand and he was restored. This guy didn't have to do that. You see this. This guy right here has a choice. He could keep his hand withered and be in with his friends and his teacher, his pastor, his rabbi. So I don't know. I don't want to shame my rabbi. I don't want to shame my teacher. I don't want to shame my community. I don't want to shame my friends and my family by allowing this man to break the law on me. He has a choice, and he chooses to stretch out his hand. But it is a public risk, and we risk telling when we risk telling everyone that Jesus is worthy of being trusted over any other hope or desire or dream. There is a cost to being a fully devoted follower of Jesus, and this man knew it. So he stretched out his hand and it was restored. And the Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. They're saying, jesus, you go against the law to heal on the Sabbath. And then in response to Jesus, second part of that question, how about to save a life or to kill? They then go do the exact thing, you broke the law by doing. Good. Now we are going to uphold the law by destroying you. Do you see the irony in that? How dare you heal on the Sabbath day. We're gonna kill you. What for time. I knew this was gonna happen. So I don't have a ton of notes with this, and I don't want it just to be a tag on. It was my own fault. Last week I didn't preach as much as I should have, and whatever you can, forgive me, but Mark, chapter three. Just read this. Jesus withdrew from his disciples to the sea, and a great crowd followed from Galilee to Judea and Jerusalem and Odimia, and from beyond the Jordan, from around Tyre and Sidon. When the great crowd heard what he was doing, they came to him. Who wouldn't? He's healing people. He's cleansing them. He's casting demons out because of the crowd. They were gonna crush him. So they got a boat ready for him so he could get in the boat and kind of be pushed out so that people couldn't get to him. For he had healed many so that all who had diseases pressed round about him to touch him. And whenever the unclean spirits, the demons, Mark's word for unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, you are the Son of God. And he strictly ordered them not to make him known again. This is not a good thing the demons are doing. Demons be demoning, all right. Demons are trying to absolutely, utterly destroy Jesus. And this is just adding to the list of violations that Jesus is already incurring. And so now these demon possessed people are saying, he's the Messiah, he is the Son of God. And he says, be quiet because they will kill me immediately for that. Not yet. My time has not come. So in gospel application, let me just wrap it up with this. Where am I? Where are you? Heart of heart? And how can we give that to Jesus to be fully restored? That's what I love about reading the gospel, is that we get to see Jesus and we get to see him looking at you and each of us with our withered hand. Whatever it is in my soul, my control, my anger, whatever my thing is. And he says, stretch it out and you'll be restored. But we have a choice. The choice is ours to believe and put faith in Christ. To give that fully to him or to keep it to ourselves. Where are we? Heart of heart? And how can we give that to Jesus to be fully restored? And then finally, where are you seeking to find rest that isn't in Christ. What is my Sabbath? What is the thing that gives me ultimate joy of pride or success or whatever it may be that I'm seeking all these different ways to find rest, but it's not Christ. And therefore it will always leave us wanting. Christ is the fulfillment. If we will give it to him. We're going to have a time of communion. We do this every week at Hope Lowertown. As I mentioned, we have the juice that represents the blood of Christ that was shed for us. We have the. The cracker that represents his body that was broken for us. And again, let's not make this mundane. It can be. It can be routine. This is to represent Jesus and to go with new and fresh eyes. And we can worship the one who heals, even though it cost him his life. We see that so explicitly in this passage. He's willing to heal us even though it will cost him. Ultimately, he will be destroyed. And these elements we get to take and we get to break it to represent his body being destroyed and the juice that represents his blood that was shed for us to forgive us of our sins. Let's look at this meal, this festival of praise of Jesus with fresh eyes. You don't need to be a member of this church or any church, but if you're a follower of Jesus, man, I'd love to celebrate this with you. I'd love to look to King Jesus. Bow the knee to King Jesus. We've got a gluten free option on my left, your right, if that's a dietary restriction. And the worship team's gonna come, they're gonna sing two songs. And so if you would like to take these elements with us, we would love to have you do that. Let me pray and then the worship team will come up as we celebrate through communion and song. Father, thank you for this. Thank you for this passage that we can see the real heart of Jesus, because he's looking at the heart of the law. He's looking at the heart of the people that people need forgiveness. People need healing, not just of their physical ailments. As much as we desire that and want that in our own lives and for friends and family, what matters more is the healing and the ultimate rest in you. So would you help us to do that? Would you help us to find rest in you and just ignore all the other areas and places that we seek to have control and busyness and approval and all the other areas that we would just give that to you, knowing full well that you will restore us in you. And so God, we thank you. And it's in Christ's name that I pray. Amen.