When Jesus’s lesson in synagogue turned into an ambush.
Mark 3.1-6 • Matthew 12.9-14 • Luke 6.6-11
Matthew bunched together all the stories about Jesus outraging people by doing stuff on Sabbath, but Mark (and Luke follows Mark) sorta told them in the order he knew the stories. Clearly the Pharisees believed curing disease and healing the sick counted as the sort of work you were to stop doing on Sabbath, and Jesus didn’t agree in the slightest.
Considering Jesus couldn’t cure a soul without the Holy Spirit empowering him to do it, you’d think these Pharisees would’ve put two and two together, and realized God had mightily taken Jesus’s side. But we aren’t dealing with the sharpest knives in the butcher shop. They figured they were right, Jesus was wrong; they had 50 years of Pharisee tradition backing them up, and who was he?
So yeah, once again here’s a story about the religious Right of Jesus’s day, taking advantage of their lack of separation of church and state, hoping to get Jesus prosecuted or killed for violating their traditional values.
Okay, enough loaded political buzzwords. Here’s how the story unfolded.
Mark 3.1-2 KWL - 1 Jesus entered synagogue again. A person with a paralyzed hand was there.
- 2 People were watching Jesus: If he healed the person on Sabbath, they could criticize him.
Matthew 12.9-10 KWL - 9 Leaving there, Jesus entered their synagogue. 10 Look, a person with a paralyzed hand!
- People questioned Jesus, saying, “Ought one heal on Sabbath?”—
- so they could criticize him.
Luke 6.6-7 KWL - 6 Jesus happened, on another Sabbath, to enter synagogue and teach.
- A person was there, and his right hand was paralyzed.
- 7 The scribes and Pharisees were watching Jesus:
- If he healed on Sabbath, they could find a critique against him.
The
Not that this stops artists from painting or drawing some pretty creepy-looking, messed-up arms for Jesus to heal. But if this guy’s arm had been that level of messed up, he wouldn’t have been allowed to enter synagogue. The Pharisees would consider his arm ritually unclean. So likely it was no more than paralyzed. Still not good, but it wasn’t like this guy had a shriveled tree branch attached to his arm.