Mark 3:4 The Jesus asked the, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent.
Have you ever been in conversation with someone and you were sure that they just weren’t understanding what you are trying to convey? Couples often come into my office because this is precisely what is happening to them at home. They just can’t seem to say what they want to say and have it understood by their partner. It is almost as if they were speaking a different language.
This doesn’t just happen in marriages. We have a battle for language going on in our society right now. Categories of words have been redefined leading to a rift between people. The justice of Martin Luther King Jr. has turned into the reparations of Luis Farrakhan. Simple words like the pronouns he and she have been turned into weapons to hurt and not heal. And so conversations spiral out of control.
Jesus often spoke in ways that were very different from the religious talk of His day. He thought, lived and spoke in a very different manner; He spoke with authority. The questions that He asked and the answers that He gave to questions demonstrated that He was thinking about issues in a very different manner. Let me explain.
If the religious leaders of Jesus’ day were asked about what was lawful to do on the Sabbath, their weekly day of worship and gathering, they would have responded with things like this. They would have dictated how many steps you could take, what kinds of activities you could engage in and what foods you could eat. Their categories of lawful and unlawful had to do with specific laws outlined in the Old Testament and their application of those laws.
Jesus, on the other hand, looked at lawful activities in a very different sense. The religious leaders were always looking at the minutia, the specific applications of the Law, while Jesus would take the macro perspective. We see it here in our text. His categories are good and evil, save a life or kill. These are big categories. The specific application of those big categories wasn’t spelled out by Jesus.
Jesus went from the general to the specific. If we understand the big principle, then we can apply the principle to the specific. The religious leaders started with the specific and missed the general. That is why they remained silent.
So Jesus upholds the principle of doing good and saving on the Sabbath. He has a man standing next to Him who was considered ‘broken’ by the religious leaders. His physical defect meant there was a spiritual defect, and so he was considered unacceptable for many of the religious duties of his day. He was held at arms length, not wanting his stigma to rub off on them.
Jesus pulls this man in close, heals him, and then allows him to reenter the fellowship of those who trust in the LORD. And the religious and political leaders of Jesus’ day are furious and begin to actively plot Jesus death.
What I find ironic is that the very categories of evil and killing are the very categories that these religious leaders choose for themselves when they plot and kill Jesus. And these activities were even wrong in their own view of right and wrong. They violate their own standards. Their hypocrisy is revealed by Jesus in this simple act of healing this man’s hand.
The Arnold Journey 