GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 2:26
The Sacred Becomes Profane
The Christmas season is just a few days past. Christmas trees are discarded—some burned, some shredded, and some dumped in lakes to make fish habitats. The lights are tangled into balls to be unwoven next year. The gift wrappings have been sent to the landfill. And merchants are still coping with the thousands of gifts returned or exchanged. Huh? Where’s the birth of a baby in Bethlehem in all this? Oh, yeah, the manger scene is dismantled and tucked away in the storage room, not to be bothered with for another ten or eleven months.
Not too far from where I live in northeast Georgia, there is a church building that sits prominently beside the highway. The building is brick, and it has the columns supporting a covered entryway; it looks like a church building. There is the marquee for announcing meeting times. However, today the marquee announces that the building now houses a brewery—a change from one spirit to another spirit.
St. Mark says that when some Pharisees criticized his disciples for picking some heads of grain along the road and winnowing them in their hands, Jesus presented them with a story they surely knew: “And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did, when he had need and hungered, he, and those with him? How he entered into the house of God at the time of Abiathar the high priest, and he ate the bread of the presentation, which is not lawful to eat except for the priests, and he also gave to those with him?’” (Mark 2:25-26)
Some commentators try to unwind the Gordian Knot about whether the high priest was Abiathar or his father Ahimelech, but the real issue, it seems, is when the sacred—the Bread of the Presence or the Showbread—becomes common. The huge loaves of bread were meticulously prepared and placed before the altar every Sabbath to represent each of the twelve Jewish tribes. It could only be handled by the priests and could only be eaten by the priests. On this occasion, however, David, fleeing for his life, showed up on the Sabbath at the tabernacle, the temple had not yet been built, hungry. On the Sabbath the priest would remove the bread and replace it with newly baked loaves. David requested the bread, the old loaves, which were only to be eaten by the priests. On this day, however, the sacred became profane. The sacred met a common human need—human need took precedence over ritual law.
Jesus was not arguing that the ritual law should be ignored, but that ritual law should not be worshiped at the expense of human need. Christmas trees, lights, and gifts, should not overshadow the birth of the Christ child.
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