Mark 2:27

And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: so that the Son of man is lord even of the sabbath.

Sabbath made for man, not man for sabbath ... is a reference to the sabbath: (1) as God made it, and (2) as the Pharisees made it. God indeed had made it for man; and quite early in the history of the sabbath law a man decided that his "human needs" took precedence over it, picking up sticks on the sabbath. Did God approve of such conduct? He commanded Israel to stone the man to death. Christ was one with the Father, and it cannot be argued that Jesus was here critical of the way God made the sabbath for man. On the other hand, the Pharisees, by their unbelievable multiplication of little frills and furbelows regarding sabbath-keeping, and their extrapolation of the basic God-given laws concerning it to include an entire dictionary of "do's" and "don't's" God never heard of, and then by their construing their own doodlings in that regard as on an equality with the law of God and as even more sacred than God's law - that was making man for the sabbath!

The Son of man is lord even of the sabbath ... "Son of man" as used in Psalms 8 is merely a synonym for man; but that should not be allowed to contravene Jesus' use of the words in a unique sense as applicable only to himself. In Christ's usage of this title it refers to one who has the power to forgive sins (Mark 2:10), hence to himself as God. Jesus meant everything by this title that he meant by "Son of God," the evident reason for his preference for "Son of man" deriving from its freedom of the secular connotations (in the Jewish mind) of "Son of God." The latter title they identified with "Messiah," the re-establishment of Solomon's throne, and the lifting of the yoke of Roman tyranny.

McMillan is correct in pointing out that if "Son of man" in this passage is reduced to mean any man, or all men, it would make Jesus say that "Man is greater than any religious institution and that religious laws were made for the benefit of his own self-expression!"[7] This view, of course, must be rejected.

For fuller discussion of the title "Son of man," see Commentary on John, p. 54.

Lord of the sabbath ... Wholly apart from the fact that no violation of God's sabbath law had happened, there was the additional truth that Jesus' disciples were exempted from God's true sabbath laws, due to their being in the service of Jesus Christ. Matthew's record emphasizes this. The Pharisees themselves "profaned the sabbath and were guiltless"; because the sabbath law did not apply to servants of the temple, who every sabbath day continually did things which in any other service would have been sabbath-violations. After pointing this out, Jesus said that "One greater than the temple is here," the same being a reference to himself. Therefore, the apostles in his service were even more entitled to exemption from the true sabbath restrictions than were the Pharisees who served in their temple, inasmuch as Christ was the greater temple (Matthew 12:5,6).

Furthermore, Jesus' lordship over the sabbath derived from his oneness and equality with God. He was in the process of abolishing the sabbath institution altogether. He would nail it to his cross, abolishing it totally and completely; and his words here were a prophecy of that very thing.