Time to Think Outside the Box

Floyd Roseberry, Retired Pastor

In this text we find two incidents of Jesus’ breaking the Sabbath rules of the religious leaders. In the first, he and his disciples picked some heads of grain to eat, and in the second he healed a man with a shriveled hand during a Sabbath service. The first thought that came to me was, “Think outside the box.” Over a period of some 200 years the Pharisees had created many rules that boxed people in on what they could do on the Sabbath. For example, you were not to look in a mirror on the Sabbath. You might see a gray hair and be tempted to pull it out, and that would be “work” on the Sabbath. Jesus lived outside the box and threatened the whole religious system.