Hey everybody I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and today we are talking

about Matthew chapter 12. Specifically we're talking about the beginning of

Matthew chapter 12 where we've got ourselves a little controversy between the point of view characters of the good guy

characters of the Gospel of Matthew that would be Jesus and his pals the disciples

and the bad guy characters of the Gospel of Matthew which would be the Pharisees the teachers of the law these are the religious leaders now

This in itself is a flipping on the head of the narrative because people in the original audience would have automatically thought that the religious leaders are the good guys because they're so well behaved and not only do they obey all the rules but they also get to make all the rules and they get to tell you what the rules are and only they really totally

know what the rules are because the rules aren't written down at this point in history.

They're just passed down within this group of almost Jedi-like characters but without the powers

and so you got this increasingly popular and highly unlikely hero character in Jesus

who's going around and doing stuff for people that the religious establishment can't do,

actually fixing people's problems, and unlike the religious establishment, who advocate like so many in political power positions do for stuff

that kind of mitigates suffering and a little bit makes things better but

eventually the institutionalism takes over and these characters historically end up also kind of

proliferating the problems because the problems are what justify the existence of people in these institutional roles.

So you've got the complete wild card in Jesus versus the complete institution card in the Pharisees,

but theoretically the Pharisees would be the good guys in awesome and brilliant

and Jesus would be the bad guy in the idiot and the outsider because, well, if the Pharisees

don't like you, you're probably wrong because the Pharisees own the law.

They are the law. So Matthew 12. 1 says at that time

Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and

began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. And when the Pharisees saw this they said to him

look your disciples were doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.

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