Plucking of cornheads on Saturday.

(Matt. 12:1-8; Mark 2:23-28; Luke 6:1-5).

Following this, Jesus left Judea and went to Galilee. On the way back to Galilee, on a Saturday that Saint Luke calls the “second Sabbath after the first,” ie. the first Saturday after the second day of Passover, the Lord was passing with His Disciples through a cornfield. Feeling hungry, the Disciples commenced to pluck the corn, rubbing them between their palms and eating the grain. This was permitted by the Law of Moses, forbidding only the use of scythes on a foreign cornfield (Deut. 23:25). Regarding even this as a violation of the Sabbath, the Pharisees, not one to let an opportunity slip past, rebuked the Lord for allowing His Disciples to do this. In order to defend His Disciples from this censure, the Lord points out to the Pharisees the incident with David, as described in the first book of Kings (21^st chapter).

Fleeing from Saul, David came to the city of priests, Nob, and asked Ahimelech the priest to give him 5 breads or whatever he could find. The priest gave him some bread that was brought as offerings and according to the Law, could only be eaten by priests. The efficacy of this example is in that, if no one judged David, driven by hunger and eating this bread, then the Lord’s Disciples, overtaken by hunger on the Sabbath - in serving God and sometimes not having time even to eat - do not deserve condemnation for violating the peace of the Sabbath in such a trivial way. Thereupon, the Lord reveals the source from which the unjust condemnation of the Disciples emanated: it is an erroneous understanding of the demands of God’s law. If The Pharisees understood that compassionate love for a sufferer is greater than tradition and custom, they would not condemn the innocent that plucked cornheads in order to satisfy their hunger.

A human was not created for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was given to the human for his benefit; that’s why the human himself and his preservation from death and exhaustion, are more important than the law of the Sabbath. The fact that the law does not appear to prohibit any type of activity, can be seen from the fact that on the Sabbath, the priests in the temple slaughtered sacrificial animals, skinned and prepared the offering, and burned them. And they nevertheless, are not guilty of violating the Sabbath. But if the innocent servants of the temple are not guilty of violating the Sabbath, then more so those that are the servants of Him, Who is greater than the temple and Who is the Lord of the Sabbath that has the authority to abolish it, just as He had established it.