Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Mark 2:27

Mark 2:27. The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Peculiar to Mark, but intimately connected with the quotation from Hosea (Matthew 12:7). The Sabbath is a means to an end; it was instituted by God (in Paradise, and, like marriage, has survived the fall), for the moral and physical benefit of man. To this gracious end, as all experience shows, the observance of one day in seven as a day of RELIGIOUS REST is a necessary means. Pharisaism makes the observance itself the end, and so establishes its minute rules, as shown in the days of our Lord.

Irreligion misapprehends the end, by forgetting that man's spiritual needs are to be met, and hence despises the means, namely, a religious observance of the Christian Sabbath. But because ‘the Sabbath was made for man,' because of our needs, the first day of the week which our Redeemer, as Lord of the Sabbath, has substituted for the seventh day, is to be observed by Christians, not as a day of pleasure-seeking, or even of excessive religious exertion, but as a time for physical rest combined with a religious activity and enjoyment. Like all Christian duty, Sabbath observance is to be prompted by love, by a desire for such religious enjoyment, not by any minute rules of Pharisaism. To observe the Christian Sabbath in such a way that our temporal and spiritual welfare is thereby furthered is in one aspect a far more difficult duty than to conform to Pharisaical external rules on the subject. But it becomes easy, as other duties do, under the promptings of grateful love to ‘the Lord of the Sabbath.' While Christian men may hold a different theory, the workings of that theory on the continent of Europe proves its incorrectness. While the State cannot make men religious, or secure a Christian observance of the Sabbath, it can and ought to prevent its open desecration, and to protect Christian citizens in their right to a day of rest, which is also necessary for the welfare of the state itself. ‘Man' here includes children. For them, also, Sabbath observance should be a means, not an end. Too often parents, from conscientious motives, have exacted from their children only a legal, Pharisaical observance of the day, making it a burden and a dread to them. It should rather be used as a day for the training of the little ones, not in Pharisaism, but in the gospel of Jesus Christ; so that, as soon as possible it may Become to them a day of religious pleasure Neither pastor nor Sunday-school teacher can do this so well as parents.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Mark 2:27

Old Testament

New Testament