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Latter-day Saints take the concept of the Sabbath very seriously, though I sometimes think that we can easily clutter it up far too much and often do so.
But we don’t make a fetish of it.
For that matter, I might add, neither do many Orthodox Jews, whose punctilious observance of the Sabbath some non-Jews like to mock as merely formal and legalistic. Such mockery is unfair. I’ve seen examples of passionate Jewish love for the Sabbath that have moved me, and from which we Latter-day Saints could learn a great deal.
Jesus’ claim, in these passages, to be “lord of the Sabbath” is extremely important, as is his statement, preserved in Mark, that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
The teachings of the Gospel don’t exist for their own sake. They exist for the sake of God’s children.
“For behold,” the Lord has said, “this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). “I am come that they might have life,” Jesus declared, “and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).
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