Mark 2:23-3:6

The conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders has been ramping up in this section, from minor to major threats from the religious leaders. Can you imagine walking into a place as full of hostility as that synagogue? This sabbath-day healing is one of the first big moments in Mark’s account of Jesus’ public ministry– and the gospel writer tells us at the end of this incident that the powers-that-be are already plotting to kill him. How on earth did they get there so quickly?

To the Pharisees, being the people of God meant that you looked and behaved a certain way; obeying God meant obeying the law in all its minutia. Jesus didn’t represent their idea of what God’s law was supposed to be about, and I think they were genuinely convinced that he was a bad person, a corrupting influence, a heretic that needed to be contained. They thought they had figured it out, thought they knew what God had asked of them—but I have learned that the second I think I have God all figured out is the very same second I get it all wrong. God is not confined by our rules about God or our way of perceiving God. Jesus reconfigures everything. Jesus is proclaiming in word and deed a new way of understanding who God is and a new way of being part of God’s covenant people—different from the ideas that had been constructed by tradition, which is really threatening to those who have staked their whole lives on that tradition.

So these religious leaders show up looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, not looking to meet with God or celebrate God’s work and certainly not expecting God to show up in a new or different way. Notice the question was not COULD Jesus heal the man, but WOULD he? They know Jesus has a kind of power and authority they’ve never seen before, so this isn’t about Jesus’ power, but rather about their belief that he poses a threat to their own power.

Both Jesus and the Pharisees in the synagogue notice this man with a shriveled hand. Jesus, we have been told, looks at people and is moved with compassion. The Pharisees, on the other hand, look around and start conniving. They see this man as a way to get the leverage they need to get rid of this new rabbi threatening their status and authority. But Jesus deliberately faces their opposition, always with compassion, offering them a chance to be a part of God’s new creation and to lean into the new work that God is doing.

As Jesus confronts them, he frames the issue around doing good or doing evil, saving life or destroying it, recalling Deuteronomy 30: “See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction…. I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” The question contains its own answer. Jesus reiterates that Sabbath observance is about LIFE and REST and RESTORATION, and here is the crucial moment: their chance to choose life and restoration—yet they remain silent.

In the face of the callousness of the synagogue gathering to the suffering of this man, Mark says Jesus is “angry” and “deeply distressed” at their “stubborn” hearts. Mark’s description of Jesus’ anger at their callousness is forceful and passionate when we read it in Greek. The only other place in Mark’s gospel that this level of deep distress appears is when Jesus is praying in Gethsemane. This is huge: Jesus is just as disturbed by their stubborness in this moment as he is when he is grappling with the prospect of his impending death in Gethsemane.

The word translated “stubborn” does not mean malicious as much as completely unwilling to understand. A hardness of heart and a hardness of mind that made one calloused to any spiritual truth and engendered scornful disobedience to God’s will. This stubbornness and hardness of heart is not isolated to Jesus’ opponents; it will equally describe his own disciples later on. This is intriguing to me because it suggests that the greatest enemy of divine love and justice is not direct opposition, not even malice, but hardness of heart and indifference to divine grace. One of my favorite writers and theologians, N. T. Wright, puts it this way: “The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God’s new creation right in the middle of the old one.” I think we see a glimpse of that failure to cope here. What is it that the Pharisees are so upset about, what exactly can’t they cope with?

The context suggests that sabbath is the key. Jesus is messing with sabbath rules, and the religious leaders can’t handle it. The observance of the Sabbath was one of the crucial markers of Jewish identity, one of the things intrinsic to being the chosen people of God. Sabbath is not just what they do—it is who they are because of what God has done.

Listen to this passage from the law in Deuteronomy 5: “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day” (Deuteronomy 5:12-15, emphasis added).

Notice that Sabbath is about what God had done for them—God’s rescue and God’s restoration given with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Sabbath is about receiving God’s rest and restoration and extending that to everyone. The Sabbath is made for God’s blessing to be felt and experienced—it’s a strategic message about God’s heart, plan, and purpose for all creation.

But at the point in the story of the Jewish people where Jesus shows up, keeping the Sabbath had been turned into a mountain of fine-spun interpretations—a burden instead of a rest. The religious leaders watching are ready to enforce all these Sabbath rules, yet they are blind to the present suffering of the man right in front of them. They’re too busy looking for leverage to use against Jesus. But Jesus sees a man in need. Jesus cannot remain unmoved in the face of suffering. To Jesus, people matter far more than systems and are far more important than rituals. There is no question here—of course Jesus will heal this man on the Sabbath, that’s the entire God-designed point. Jesus works differently from the societal norms and the expectations of the religious leaders and their interpretation of the law. His allegiance is exclusively to the good news of God, directed to needy and alienated people.

In this Sabbath story, I notice that God is not at rest, God is at work in that synagogue. God is on the move, doing something totally new exploding all the categories we thought we had for God and God’s work. Jesus shows up proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is here, and he’s offering a new kind of rest and he’s working out a new kind of holiness—just what Sabbath had always been intended to be. Jesus re-centers Sabbath practice around human need (because it was always originally centered there). When Jesus says, “The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath,” Jesus is emphasizing that Sabbath is about LIFE, not LAW.

So Jesus asks the man to step out in front of everyone… and we feel the temperature and tension in the room rising. This man responds to Jesus’ invitation “Stretch out your hand,” and his hand is completely restored.

By reaching out to Jesus this man is healed. God has come to us as one of us, and offers the gift of new life and complete restoration. This is Sabbath. With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, God reaches to us. With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, God rescues us. With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, God restores us. Jesus shows up and sees us with our shriveled hands—he looks at us, and knows us, and he invites us to stand up, and says “Stretch out your hand”—and when we accept this invitation and reach out to Jesus with our own shriveled hands, we are met by the mighty hand and outstretched arm of the living God.

After the man’s hand is completely restored, it’s publicly obvious that Jesus healed on the Sabbath, so the Pharisees have found the leverage they were looking for and they immediately start scheming. What seems so tragic to me is that the very people who were supposed to have seen God coming have totally missed it. The withered hand of the man is nothing compared to the withered souls of the Pharisees. Jesus had shown up with a radically new vision of God’s work and God’s people, and they wanted nothing to do with it, preferring to keep things as they were, to keep the world they had created themselves, rather than the new world God was creating.

We have to ask, How often is this us? How often are we the ones with hard and stubborn hearts? How often are we showing up to criticize and control rather than to wonder and worship? How often are we missing the movement of God because we’re looking to accuse? How often do we prefer our own power over Jesus’ power?

If we’re brutally honest, often we prefer a dormant God, easily contained by our rituals and rules over the living, active, category-exploding God who moves with a mighty hand and outstretched arm and whose presence turns everything upside down and out of our control. When God gets too close, we are faced with the difficult truth that we might rather kill Jesus than reach out our shriveled hands to be restored. God forbid we get so caught up in our vision of reality that we totally miss out on God’s vision for new creation.

When we are confronted with the Jesus who inaugurates God’s new creation right in the middle of the old one, we can respond with hard hearts, or we can reach out to Jesus. Every time we are confronted with Jesus we have a choice. We can harden our hearts or we can stand up, reach out our shriveled hands to meet the mighty hand and outstretched arm of the living God and find that we are completely restored. And the good news is that Jesus is always inviting us to reach out and be restored. Inviting us to step out exactly as we are, shriveled hands and everything, and find ourselves restored by God’s love and grace. Because here’s the thing: God is not at rest around here– God is at work. God is working out the new creation right in the middle of the old one, and God is starting with us, starting with our hearts and hands, restoring us, renewing us, and sending us out as agents of the Kingdom of God to extend this LIFE and REST and RESTORATION. Amen, may it be so.