This Sabbath was to Jesus a travesty on the true worship of His Father, and met His instant and repeated condemnation. He intentionally and openly violated its laws, and challenged the Pharisees to defend their position. As in the case of prayer, He again defined His Father's attitude as caring nothing for these outward observances. "I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Matt. XII:7). The weighty matters of the law are "judgment, mercy and faith" (Matt. XXIII:23). In the expressive language of the Old Testament His "soul hateth" their Sabbaths and appointed feasts and solemn assemblies. They were a "trouble" to Him and He was "weary to bear them." "When ye make many prayers, I will not hear" (Isaiah I:13, 14, 15). Jesus sums up His conception of the Sabbath in one of His pregnant sentences, "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath" (Mark II:27; Luke VI:5). If Jesus were on earth today, He would make our Sunday a day of cheerful rest. Children would rejoice in it, learn to love it, instead of its being to them (more formerly than now) a day of penance and gloom, with their forced attendance on a distasteful Sunday school, to study creeds and catechisms, not suited to their immature years. Attendance at "church" would be a matter of minor importance, to be determined by each one for himself. The desire to worship could be satisfied without these public assemblies, for "where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matt. XVIII:20). But the significant deliberation of the day, the only one important before God, would be the marking it out as the day especially for the doing of deeds of mercy. Much more righteous in the sight of the Lord would be the man who had spent the day in hunting, fishing or other innocent recreation, but yet had one good deed to his credit, than he who had spent the whole day in religious exercises, and given his "tithe of mint and anise and cummin," but had not helped, or comforted, or made happier a single fellow human being. Jesus would say with the poet: "_Count that day lost, whose low descending sun Views from thy hand, no worthy action done._" [31] Jesus had already told the disciples of His approaching death and resurrection (Matt. XVI:21, 22; Mark VIII:31; Luke IX:22). [32] Jesus probably spoke to His disciples in the veiled language so often used by Him, since it is clear that His disciples, down to the last days in Jerusalem, had not accepted the idea of His immediate bodily death. "But they understood not that saying and were afraid to ask Him" (Mark IX:32). "And they understood none of these things; and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things that were spoken" (Luke XVIII:34; see Matt. XXIV:3). It is probable that up to the hour of the Crucifixion many of the disciples still clung to the hope that Jesus would exert His miraculous powers to confound His enemies and establish an earthly kingdom.