Because no one can have everything their way. Certainly we all deserve a fair shot at that, but if different groups in society are aiming in different directions, at some point someone gets less than what they want. I don't see this an an excuse to stop doing good. Lord knows, if queer people stopped doing good because we didn't get everything our way... it wouldn't be pretty.
Jesus was challenging not the pharisees' insistance on keeping the Sabbath holy, but the method that they espoused, which actually was in contradiction to keeping it holy.
How's that? What does "holy" mean? In Jesus day, as today, it was pretty well established in Jewish tradition that the way you keep the Sabbath holy is by not doing any labor. (For good measure, cf. Ex. 20:8-11.) Picking wheat in public is pretty easy to categorize as "labor."
It was not a compromise of morality, it was an intensification of it.
An intensification that has the very odd effect of resulting in LESS punishment and thus looking suspiciously like mercy. Deuteronomy 17:1-7 says that God gave people the duty of 'purging the evil within their community' by stoning wrongdoers to death on the testimony of three witnesses. According to Lev. 20:10, one of the evils deserving of death is adultery. So according to the letter of the old law (of which, according to one statement of Jesus, not a jot or a tittle shall pass) it was the moral duty of the woman's accusers to have her stoned to death.
If Jesus intensified the moral code by asserting that only those who are without sin are worthy of passing judgment, that would contradict scripture by rendering impossible the duty of passing judgment (not the right, the duty) commanded in Deut. 17.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-03-14 04:44 am (UTC)Jesus was challenging not the pharisees' insistance on keeping the Sabbath holy, but the method that they espoused, which actually was in contradiction to keeping it holy.
How's that? What does "holy" mean? In Jesus day, as today, it was pretty well established in Jewish tradition that the way you keep the Sabbath holy is by not doing any labor. (For good measure, cf. Ex. 20:8-11.) Picking wheat in public is pretty easy to categorize as "labor."
It was not a compromise of morality, it was an intensification of it.
An intensification that has the very odd effect of resulting in LESS punishment and thus looking suspiciously like mercy. Deuteronomy 17:1-7 says that God gave people the duty of 'purging the evil within their community' by stoning wrongdoers to death on the testimony of three witnesses. According to Lev. 20:10, one of the evils deserving of death is adultery. So according to the letter of the old law (of which, according to one statement of Jesus, not a jot or a tittle shall pass) it was the moral duty of the woman's accusers to have her stoned to death.
If Jesus intensified the moral code by asserting that only those who are without sin are worthy of passing judgment, that would contradict scripture by rendering impossible the duty of passing judgment (not the right, the duty) commanded in Deut. 17.