As Professor Matt Skinner points out on workingpreacher.org, "The scene in the synagogue (Mark 3:1-5) intensifies the conflict over Jesus’ authority, his values, and the urgency of his claims. For the Pharisees who lie in wait, watching, the issue is not whether Jesus has the power to heal the man’s hand, it is whether doing so on the sabbath demonstrates a willful disregard for the law of God — a law that was believed to give good order to life and to provide conditions for encountering God’s blessings and holiness.

"Jesus’ response to the Pharisees — “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” — indicates that he disagrees with the premise of their suspicions. By orchestrating the man’s healing, he does not disparage or break the law in any way (for nothing Jesus does here can be considered “work” that the sabbath prohibits). Rather, Mark casts Jesus as honoring the purpose of the sabbath commandment. It is as if Jesus is saying that the chief objective of the law, in general, is to save and preserve life (see also Deuteronomy 30:19-20). Indeed, therefore, what better day is there than the sabbath, a day meant to promote God’s commitment to humanity’s well-being, for the restoration of a man’s malformed hand?

"It must be noted that Jesus’ argument was hardly novel and therefore not scandalous on its surface. In fact, when he notes that the purpose of the sabbath has always been to serve humankind (as opposed to making humankind serve some stern religious principle), he is essentially restating Deuteronomy 5:12-15, in which God institutes the sabbath so a people who once toiled in slavery can forever enjoy at least a modicum of rest.

"Rabbinic traditions dating to a century after Jesus if not earlier expressed opinions similar to his words in Mark 2:27, including: “The Sabbath is handed over to you, not you to it” and “Profane one Sabbath for a person’s sake, so that he may keep many Sabbaths.”1 The proper function of the sabbath is to promote life and extol God as a liberator. Everyone knew that.

"Again, Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries would not have found his basic perspective especially troublesome. “Saving life overrules the Sabbath,” according to ancient rabbinic tradition. 2

"Even as the passage emphasizes a commitment to life and vitality abiding at the heart of God’s reign, it also illustrates how religious commitments and values — any religious commitments and values — can ossify and turn oppressive in the hands of careless stewards. None are immune.

"In many ways, the entire Gospel of Mark tells a story of recurring controversy. Passages like this one help us interpret the controversies and also, eventually, the events at the end of the narrative.

"As Donald Juel put it: “For us — as for Mark — the cross ought to be a sober reminder of how easily the most noble motives can be perverted. It points out how quickly an institution can become an end in itself, stifling legitimate concerns of those outside that may seem to threaten stability. It illustrates how frequently insidious forces we scarcely notice can transform the best-educated, best-intentioned among us into insensitive leaders, desperately out of touch with what’s real.”3

1. See material quoted and discussed in Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8 (AB 27; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 245; Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 33.

2. Marcus, Mark, 248.

3. Shaping the Scriptural Imagination: Truth, Meaning, and the Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011), 175.