Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath and told him to take his bed and walk. That must have been against the Sabbath customs, because the local Pharisees milked the guy to find out who’d told him to walk around carrying a bed, and then went after Jesus when the guy talked.

In a way, though, I see the Pharisees’ point. The usual tactic for undermining a social norm is to nibble around the edges. Pick some kind of sympathetic case and attack the norm on the margins, all the while claiming to be a supporter of the core norm. Then, once the norm is reset, nibble again. Doubtless a number of the Pharisees thought that Jesus was a typical subversive.

What they missed was that Jesus was not a subverter of the Sabbath norm. He was the maker of it. He could authoritatively state that “man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man,” because he had made both.

Authority is the only way to change norms without subverting them.