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[Jesus] entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see if he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him.
And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.(Mark 3:1-6)
In our love for Jesus, we have a hard time imagining that anyone who met him could hate him. Yet the sad record of the gospels is that Jesus met obstinate opposition, even from some religious leaders, and this opposition led to his death.
What did Jesus do to arouse such antagonism? The gospels describe opposition to Jesus arising over his healing on the sabbath or otherwise not keeping the sabbath holy in the way his critics thought he should.
When Jesus healed the sick man by the pool in Jerusalem and told him to pick up his sleeping mat and walk, the reaction of Pharisees was to exclaim, “It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat” (John 5:10). John notes that some began persecuting Jesus “because he was doing such things on the sabbath” (John 5:16).
When Jesus healed a man who was born blind, his opponents did everything they could to deny that a miracle had taken place—even questioning the man’s parents to make sure that he had truly been blind (John 9:18-23). But despite the clear evidence that in Jesus the power of God had been made present in their midst, they continued to deny it: “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath” (John 9:16).
Perhaps the most ludicrous response to one of Jesus’ miracles was the reaction of a synagogue official. Jesus had healed a woman who had been crippled for eighteen years, but it was the sabbath and the official feared that others might also come to him to be healed. So he told the crowd that gathered, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day” (Luke 13:14).
We must marvel at such blindness: to try to deny the manifest power of God at work in Jesus, to try to limit the days on which God was free to heal, and to want to do away with the one who was healing the afflicted but without complying with their rules.
What was the cause of such blindness? It stemmed in part from emphasizing obedience to the letter of the law and multiplying the details of the law. God did command, “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8), abstaining from work. But this law had become so filled with prescriptions of what did and did not constitute work, that even a healed man’s picking up his bedroll or the disciples’ picking grains of wheat as they walked through a field (Mark 2:23-24) were judged violations of the law. When Jesus didn’t abide by these minute prescriptions, then his critics refused to see good in anything he did.
That was a real tragedy. Jesus didn’t heal only on the Sabbath, he healed every day of the week. But because what he did one day a week did not conform to the Pharisees’ rules for what was acceptable, they refused to accept what he did the other six days of the week. They blinded themselves to who Jesus was and set out to destroy him.
Does this tragedy have a lesson for us? Do we let our preconceived notions of how God ought to act limit our awareness of how or through whom he might be acting today? Do we presume that there is only one way of being pleasing to God—namely, our way? Do we insist that the pattern that works best for us must therefore be the pattern for everyone? And when others do not accept or live up to the full truth, do we blind ourselves to the truth they do live by, to the life of God that they do have?
What makes the rejection of Jesus by his opponents so doubly tragic was the fervor with which they did it. They were zealous to uphold the law as they understood it; they were sincere in their belief that no one who broke their regulations could be from God. But they were also so misguided and blind that in striving to serve God by obeying his law, they managed to reject God’s own Son.