Teachings on the Sabbath

Mark For Everyone

MARK 2.23–28
Teachings on the Sabbath...

...The twentieth century saw a great deal of secret police activity. The KGB in the Soviet Union, and the Stasi in East Germany, were legends in their own lifetime during the Communist period. Several countries in Central and South America, and some parts of Asia, have thriving secret police forces that are rightly feared by ordinary folk.

That’s the picture we naturally think of when we find Pharisees spying on Jesus and his followers; and it’s actually very misleading. The Pharisees were not in any sense an official secret police force, in Jesus’ day or at any other time. They were an unofficial party, who had been active as a religious and political pressure group for nearly 200 years by Jesus’ time. (Most political parties in modern Western democracies are much younger than that, at least in their present form.) The Pharisees were entirely self-chosen, and had no authority to make laws or enforce them. They did, though, have considerable influence on ordinary people, who respected their expertise in Israel’s ancestral laws and traditions...

Taken from Mark for Everyone by Tom Wright