I find restaurants who claim they’re hip because they break all the rules super annoying. I mean, can I really break all the rules? Might I order filet mignon after filet mignon and walk out without paying? Could I build a small fire pit on my table and roast my meat myself? What if I dined in my underwear? As you can see, this concept totally bugs me.

Which perhaps is how the Pharisees felt when sitting with Jesus in a synagogue one fine morning, watching like hawks to see if he would heal someone on the Sabbath. Jesus, in the sometimes you got to break the rules mode, blatantly did just that.

A man was there whose right hand was shriveled…Jesus asked them, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?”

The crowd sat silent. Jesus 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.

This healing on the Sabbath created massive animosity among the Pharisees and led to their destruction of Jesus. It seems odd to me that Jesus did no work here at all, but simply spoke and the man’s hand healed itself. But rivalries were afoot, and a healing created a good pretext for violence (which is a strange thought in itself).

The bigger issue involved Jesus’s earlier statement: The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. The religious authorities rejected the idea that Jesus might represent the Lord—or actually be God in the flesh—and that Jesus created the whole Sabbath idea and could bend it as he wished. This represented a stunning claim, one many refused to contemplate. Not sure if I could have either.

Can a person really break all the rules? Not me or you, but with Jesus it appears that an entirely different set of rules apply.

Luke 6 & Mark 3 in reading the Bible cover to cover in 2022

Photo by Jonathan Stout