Matthew 12:8

Matthew 12:8

I. Note the title Jesus gives Himself: "the Son of man." He applied this phrase to Himself in all the different aspects of His great life. While He deemed His equality with God not a thing to be clutched at, He claimed, in humanity's name, more than an equality with men. In Him, as the Son of man, humanity is again restored to its sonship of God. It is the child alone who can show the father in the fatherly relationship; the neighbour can show the neighbour, the work the worker. When the Christ said, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," He claimed to have done something so appalling in itself, and in its consequences, as to dwarf the most notable of His miracles. Christ was all-human, whatever else we believe Him to be. The pure ever lives in the all, not in the part. But whence this authority with nature which Christ possessed, which was equal to the suffering of hunger within Himself, and to feed a multitude with five loaves? If it be only the triumph of the universal man in the Son of man, the triumph is so complete as to constitute Him our King and our God. For He besets us behind and before, and lays His hand upon us; we can look neither within nor without, without beholding symbols of His might, and turn neither to our past nor our future without seeing that the fortune of our race is in His hand.

II. The claim He makes on His own behalf, as "Lord even of the Sabbath day." This is but one of the many claims which Jesus made, and by which He asserted His authority to be greater, if not higher in kind, than had ever been arrogated by man before. Authority and obedience meet in Christ, and blend. He is the atonement of the Great Father with His many children. Father and child meet and kiss each other again in Him, and are at peace. And man, if he be an hungred, can pluck the corn on the Sabbath day in the presence of the God who "will have mercy, and not sacrifice."

J. O. Davies, Sunrise on the Soul,p. 233.

Reference: Matthew 12:9. Homiletic Magazine,vol. viii., p. 114.