Daily Bible Reading 26th May 2026 // Luke 6:1-5
1 On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some ears of corn, rubbing them in their hands. 2 But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?” 3 And Jesus answered them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: 4 how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?” 5 And he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”
The underlying conflict with the scribes and Pharisees continues in these verses. It is clear that they had not understood what Jesus meant in the illustrations He gave in 5:32-39, for here again they turned critically, as they did concerning the question of the disciples not fasting, to the question of their not keeping the Sabbath. And Christ's attitude exemplifies once more the new wine bursting the old bottles. The dynamic of the new thing He had brought was too great for the old legalism. But there are problems for us here, and it is possible for us to misinterpret and misunderstand what is being said. Clearly, it was the Sabbath commandment that the Pharisees regarded Jesus and His disciples to have broken, and the question for us is: What does Jesus reply to this charge? Is He saying that this commandment is now abrogated by His coming and that it is possible now to think differently about Sabbath observance? This is where the confusions lie, and it is needful for us to spend some time examining the whole question of the relation between law and grace.