Matthew 12:8

his weighty logion is best understood when taken along with that in Mark 2:27 = the Sabbath for man, not man for the Sabbath. The question is: Does it merely state a fact, or does it also contain the rationale of the fact? That depends on the sense we give to the title Son of Man. As a technical name = Messiah, it simply asserts the authority of Him who bears it to determine how the Sabbath is to be observed in the Kingdom of God. As a name of humility, making no obtrusive exceptional claims, like Son of David or Messiah, it suggests a reason for the lordship in sympathy with the ethical principle embodied in the prophetic oracle. The title does not indeed mean mankind, or any man, homo quivis, as Grotius and Kuinoel think. It points to Jesus, but to Him not as an exceptional man (“der einzigartige,” Weiss), but as the representative man, maintaining solidarity with humanity, standing for the human interest, as the Pharisees stood for the supposed divine, the real divine interest being identical with the human. The radical antithesis between Jesus and the Pharisees lay in their respective ideas of God. It is interesting to find a glimpse of the true sense of this logion in Chrysostom: περὶ ἑαυτοῦ λέγων. Ὁ δὲ Μάρκος καὶ περὶ τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως αὐτὸν τοῦτο εἰρηκέναι φησίν. Hom. xxxix. κύριος, not to the effect of abrogation but of interpretation and restoration to true use. The weekly rest is a beneficent institution, God's holiday to weary men, and the Kingdom of Heaven, whose royal law is love, has no interest in its abolition.