Commentary - Mark 3:1-6

Bird's-eye view

This brief account in Mark's Gospel is a compact and potent demonstration of the Lordship of Jesus Christ over the Sabbath, and by extension, over all of God's law. This is not simply a healing story; it is a battlefield. Jesus deliberately enters a synagogue, the Pharisees' home turf, and orchestrates a public confrontation over the true meaning of the fourth commandment. He exposes the grotesque hypocrisy of their religious system, a system that had twisted a day of rest and mercy into a straitjacket of life-denying regulations. By asking a question that reveals their own murderous hearts, Jesus demonstrates that their legalism is not only foolish but diabolical. The passage climaxes with a display of both divine power in the instantaneous healing of a withered hand, and divine passion in the Lord's righteous anger and grief. The immediate result is the cementing of an unholy alliance between mortal enemies, the Pharisees and Herodians, who find common ground in their shared desire to destroy the Lord of life.

This incident serves as a crucial turning point, escalating the conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities from mere verbal sparring to a deadly conspiracy. It establishes a principle that runs throughout the Gospels: the law of God is about promoting life, goodness, and mercy, and any interpretation that hinders these things is a perversion. Jesus is not breaking the Sabbath; He is restoring it.

Outline

Context In Mark

This event does not occur in a vacuum. It is the culmination of a series of conflicts in which Jesus has systematically challenged the authority of the scribes and Pharisees. He has claimed authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:1-12), associated with sinners (Mark 2:13-17), redefined fasting (Mark 2:18-22), and, just prior to our text, declared Himself to be the "Lord even of the Sabbath" after His disciples plucked grain (Mark 2:23-28). This healing is the practical demonstration of that declaration. It is the final straw for the Pharisees. After this public humiliation and exposure of their wicked hearts, they move from simply watching and questioning Him to actively plotting His death. This event solidifies their opposition and sets the trajectory for the cross.

Key Issues

Sabbath Life, Sabbath Death

The Sabbath was given by God as a gift. It was a day of rest, a day of feasting, a day to commemorate God's work in creation and redemption. It was a taste of heaven, a sign of the covenant. But in the hands of fallen men, the best things can be twisted into the worst things. The Pharisees had taken this gift of life and turned it into an instrument of death. They had encrusted it with thousands of man-made regulations, creating a system where a man could be condemned for performing an act of mercy. They had made the Sabbath a burden, not a blessing.

Into this suffocating environment walks the Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, which means He came to show us what it truly means. In this confrontation, He pits two visions of the Sabbath against each other: their vision of restriction and death versus His vision of restoration and life. The battle line is drawn not over a minor point of interpretation, but over the very character of God. Is God a petty tyrant who is honored by inaction in the face of human suffering, or is He a gracious Father who delights in mercy?

Verse by Verse Commentary

1 And He entered again into a synagogue; and a man was there with a withered hand.

Jesus returns to the synagogue, the center of Jewish religious life. He is not avoiding the conflict; He is pressing His claim right in the enemy's headquarters. And there, conveniently, is a man with a withered hand. His hand is shriveled, dead, useless. This man is a living picture of spiritual impotence. He is unable to work, unable to provide, unable to act effectively. He is a picture of Israel under the thumb of the Pharisees, and a picture of every sinner apart from the grace of Christ. He cannot heal himself. He needs an outside power to intervene.

2 And they were watching Him to see if He would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him.

Notice the posture of the Pharisees. They are not watching with anticipation to see a wonderful work of God. They are not watching with compassion for the suffering man. They are watching like predators, like secret police, looking for a violation. Their entire religious system was built on accusation. The word Satan means "the accuser," and here they are, doing his work on the Sabbath, in the synagogue. They have already decided that healing on the Sabbath is unlawful, a conclusion they reached through their labyrinthine traditions, not from Scripture. Their goal is not truth or righteousness, but a charge that will stick.

3 And He said to the man with the withered hand, “Get up and come forward!”

Jesus seizes the initiative. He knows their thoughts, their malicious intent, and He refuses to let them conduct their interrogation in the shadows. He brings the man and the issue out into the open for everyone to see. The Greek is literally "Arise into the midst." He places the man at the center of the assembly. This is a public challenge. Jesus is forcing a decision. There will be no neutrality here. Everyone present will have to decide whether they stand with the life-giving Christ or the death-dealing Pharisees.

4 And He said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill?” But they kept silent.

This is the master stroke. Jesus reframes the entire debate. They wanted to argue about their petty regulations concerning "work." Jesus elevates the question to the highest possible moral ground. The Sabbath presents a choice, He says, between two fundamental opposites: doing good or doing harm, saving life or killing. He holds up a mirror to them, because while He is contemplating an act of goodness and life, they are contemplating an act of harm and death. They are plotting to kill Him, the very Lord of life, in order to "defend" the Sabbath. The question is brilliant and unanswerable. To say it is lawful to do harm would expose their wickedness. To say it is lawful to do good would be to approve of the very miracle He is about to perform. And so, they say nothing. Their silence is a confession of their guilt and the bankruptcy of their system.

5 And after looking around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored.

Here we see the holy emotions of God incarnate. He is angry, and He is grieved. This is not a contradiction. He feels a hot, righteous anger at the sin, at the perverse twisting of His Father's law, at the religious hypocrisy that would leave a man in misery for the sake of a tradition. But He is also deeply grieved at the state of their souls. He feels a profound sorrow for their spiritual blindness, their calloused and impenetrable hearts. His anger is directed at the sin; His grief is for the sinners. Then, with a simple command, He acts. "Stretch out your hand." The command itself contains the power to obey it. The man, in an act of faith, does what was previously impossible, and the healing is instantaneous and complete. The word "restored" means it was made whole, just like the other one. This is a work of re-creation, a sign that the Lord of the Sabbath is also the Lord of creation.

6 And the Pharisees went out and immediately began taking counsel together with the Herodians against Him, as to how they might destroy Him.

The response to this undeniable miracle, this act of pure grace, is not repentance. It is rage. The Pharisees, the hyper-conservative religious separatists, immediately make common cause with the Herodians. The Herodians were a secular, political party, supporters of the Roman puppet King Herod. These two groups were bitter enemies on every other issue. The Pharisees detested the Herodians' worldliness and compromise with Rome. But their shared hatred of Jesus was greater than their hatred for each other. This is what the kingdom of darkness does. It unites disparate factions against the true King. And what is their counsel? Not how to refute Him, but how to destroy Him. An act of life-giving mercy on the Sabbath has provoked them to plot a murder on the Sabbath. The hypocrisy is absolute.

Application

This passage is a severe warning against the perennial sin of religious externalism. It is tragically possible to be zealous for all the right forms of religion while having a heart that is hard, cold, and even murderous. The Pharisees loved their Sabbath traditions more than they loved their suffering neighbor, and they hated the one who exposed this fact. We must constantly examine ourselves. Do we use our doctrine, our standards, our piety as a way to control others or to feel superior? Or is our religion a wellspring of goodness, mercy, and life, both for ourselves and for those around us?

The man with the withered hand is a picture of us all before Christ. We are spiritually disabled, unable to do any good work that can please God. We cannot stretch out our hand to save ourselves. Our only hope is to hear the authoritative command of Jesus and, by the grace He supplies in that command, to respond in faith. He does not ask us to heal ourselves first and then come to Him. He commands us to do the impossible, and then He grants the power to do it. That is the gospel.

Finally, we must see that the gospel is a sword. The same sermon, the same miracle, the same truth that brings life and healing to one man brings out the murderous rage in others. The presence of Jesus forces a decision. There is no middle ground, no room for silent observation. We either fall down and worship the Lord of the Sabbath, or we go out and take counsel with His enemies on how to destroy Him. May God give us grace to see His glory, to rejoice in His mercy, and to stretch forth our hands to Him in faith.