Mark 3:1-6 (NIV): Another time he went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Stand up in front of everyone.”
Then Jesus asked them, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent.
He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.
These Pharisees watching Jesus so closely are some of the saddest cases in the whole gospel story. To begin with, when they went to the synagogue that Sabbath morning, their focus was not on God, on worshiping Him, or on submitting themselves to His agenda. Instead, they went in order to see if they could catch Jesus doing something that they could charge Him with. That morning their hearts were so turned against God that He could have spoken to them through a million loudspeakers and they wouldn’t have heard or understood His voice. So, of course, when He spoke to them through Jesus, they missed it entirely.
Jesus knew exactly what was going on in their minds. So rather than doing something in secret, He called a man with a shriveled, paralyzed hand to the front so that everyone could see and hear what was going on. “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good (as Jesus would do when He healed this man) or to do evil (as these men were plotting right then), to save life (as Jesus was trying to do by confronting the evil prejudices of those schemers) or to kill (as those men were already plotting to do)? This question should have been a no-brainer. Of course it was not lawful for God’s people to do evil on the Sabbath (or any other day)! Of course it was not lawful for them to plot murder on the Sabbath (or on any other day)! The answer was so simple that a child could have given it. But their evil hearts sealed their lips. Jesus had put His finger right on the pulse of the issue: the Pharisees, who believed themselves to be so righteous as to stand as judges over Jesus’ actions, were now confronted with their own vileness and unlawfulness. But they shut their mouths, hardened their hearts, and plunged themselves deeper into the darkness.
When Jesus healed the man with the shriveled hand, He actually did it in such a way that nobody but God could be pointed to as the healer! Jesus didn’t touch the man; He spoke no words of healing. He simply told the man to stretch out his hand, and when the man obeyed, the healing took place. This angered the plotters even more. Even in the face of a clear Sabbath healing they had been robbed of anything that they could reasonably hang on Jesus in a criminal court! And so they left in a rage, and joined together with the Herodians to figure out how they could kill Jesus. What they had intended to be a life or death test for Jesus ended up being a test of their own righteousness or wickedness. And they had failed miserably.
Father, it is really easy to see bad motives and hidden agendas in others. Help us to keep our eyes open to our own motives and agendas, to keep our hearts soft before You, so that we never fall into the same trap, the same condemnation as those self-righteous Pharisees. Amen.