27-19. The Restoring of the Man with a Withered Hand

19. The Restoring of the Man with a Withered Hand Mat 12:9-13; Mark 3:1-5; Luk 6:6-11 This is not the first of our Lord’s cures on the Sabbath day, ^[1] which stirs the ill-will of his adversaries, or which is used by them as a pretext for accusing Him; twice already we have seen the same results to follow (John 5:16; John 9:12); yet I have reserved till now the consideration, once for all, of the position which our Lord Himself took in respect of the Sabbath, and the light in which He regarded it. For this the present is the most favourable occasion; since here, and in the discourse which immediately precedes this miracle, and which stands, if not quite in such close historic connexion as might at first sight appear on reading it in the Gospel of St. Matthew, yet in closest inner relation to it, our Lord Himself deals with the matter, and delivers the weightiest words which on this matter fell from his lips. To go back then to that preceding discourse, and the circumstances which gave rise to it;—the Pharisees were offended with the disciples for plucking ears of corn and eating them upon the Sabbath,—not indeed with the act itself, as an invasion of other men’s property, for the very law which they claimed to vindicate had expressly permitted as much: “When thou comest into the standing corn of thy neighbour, then thou mayest pluck the ears with thine hand” (Deu 23:25); and the disciples had done no more. By limitations even slight as this upon an absolute proprietorship God asserted that He was Himself the true proprietor of all the land, and that all other holders held only of Him. Not in what they did then, but in the day on which they did it, the fault of the disciples, if any, consisted. The Pharisees accuse them to their Lord: “Why do they on the Sabbath day that which is not lawful?” Either He shall be obliged to confess his followers transgressors of the law; or, defending them, shall become a defender of the transgression;—in either case a triumph for his foes. So they calculate, but the issue disappoints their calculation. The Lord seeks in his reply to raise the objectors to a truer point of view from which to contemplate the act of his disciples; and by two examples, and these taken from that very law which they believed they were asserting, would show them how the law, if it is not to work mischievously, must be spiritually handled and understood. These examples are borrowed, one from the O. T. history, the other from that temple service continually going on before their eyes. The first, the well-known event which occurred during David’s flight from Saul (1 Sam. xxi. l-6); his claiming and obtaining the show-bread from the High priest, would naturally carry much weight with them whom Christ was seeking to convince, David being counted the great pattern and example of O. T. holiness: “Will ye affirm that they did wrong,—David who in that necessity claimed, or the priest who gave to him, the holy bread?” The second example came yet nearer home to the gainsayers, and was more convincing still, being no exceptional case, but grounded in the very constitution of the Levitical service: “Ye do yourselves practically acknowledge it right that the rest of the Sabbath should give place to a higher interest, to the service of the temple; that, as the lesser, it should be subordinated, and, where needful, offered up to this as the greater: the sacrifices, with all the laborious preparations which they require, do hot cease upon the Sabbath (Num 28:8-9); all which is needful for completing them is accomplished upon that day; yet no one accounts the priests to be therefore in any true sense violators of that holy day;^[2] rather would they be so, if they left these things undone.”^[3] And then, lest the Pharisees should retort, or in their hearts make exception, that the work referred to was done in the service of the temple, and was therefore permitted, while here there was no such serving of higher interests, He adds, ’’ But I say unto you, That in this place is One greater than the temple;” One whom therefore, by still better right, his servants may serve, and be guiltless.^[4] He contemplates his disciples as already the priests of the New Covenant, of which He is Himself the living Temple.^[5] It was in their needful service and ministration to Him, which so occupied them as that they had not time regularly to prepare food or to eat, that they were an hungred, and profaned, as their adversaries accounted it, the Sabbath. But if those who yet ministered in that temple which was but the shadow of the true, were thus privileged,—if, as every man’s conscience bore witness, they were blameless in such a profanation as this, and only seemingly transgressed the law, really to keep it, how much more those who ministered about the Temple not made with hands, the true Tabernacle, which the Lord had pitched and not man?^[6] But it is not enough to absolve his disciples of any fault in this matter; the malignant accusation must not pass without rebuke: these “judges of evil thoughts” shall be themselves judged. Therefore He continues: “But if ye had known what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless” If with all their searching into the Scripture, all their busy scrutiny of its letter, they had ever so entered into the spirit of that law, whereof they professed to be the jealous guardians and faithful interpreters, as to understand that Scripture, they would not have blamed them in whom no true blame can be found. The citation, now made for a second time by our Lord (cf. Mat 9:13), is from Hos 6:6, and leaves some ambiguity on the mind of an English reader; which would have been avoided by some such translation as this, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”^[7] The words are most memorable; they, contain one of those prophetic glimpses of the Gospel, one of those slights cast upon the law even during the time when the law was in force,^[8] an example of that “finding fault” on God’s part with that very thing which He had Himself established (Heb 8:8), whereby a witness was borne even to them that lived under it, that it was not the highest, God having some better and higher thing in reserve for his people (Jer 31:31-34). The prophet of the Old Covenant is here anticipating the great Apostle of the New, and saying in other words, but with as distinct a voice: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of Angels, and though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing” (1Co 13:1-3). He is declaring that what God longs for on the part of men is not the outward observance, the sacrifice in the letter, but the inward outpouring of love, that which the “sacrifice” symbolized, the giving up of self in the self-devotion of love (cf. Heb 10:5-10; Psa 51:16-17). This must underlie every outward sacrifice and service which is to have any value in his sight; and when the question arises between the form and the spirit; so that the one can only be preserved at the loss of the other, then the form must yield to the life, as the meaner to the more precious.^[9] But the application of the words in the present case still remains unsettled. For it either may be: “If you had truly understood what God asks of men, what service of theirs pleases Him best, you would have understood that my disciples were offering that, who in true love and pity for perishing souls had so laboured and toiled as to go without their necessary food, being thus obliged to satisfy the cravings of a present hunger;^[10] you would have owned that their loving transgression was better than many a man’s cold and heartless clinging to the letter of the commandment. “Or else the words may have more direct reference to the Pharisees themselves: “If you had understood the service wherein God delighted the most, you would have sought to please Him by meekness and by mercy,—by a charitable judgment of your brethren,—by that love out of a pure heart, which to Him is more than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices (Mark 12:33), rather than in the way of sharp and severe censure of your brethren” (Pro 17:15; Isa 5:23). In this way Olshausen,^[11] who adds: “This merciful love was just what was wanting in the fault-finding of the Pharisees. It was no true bettering of the disciples which they desired; no pure zeal for the cause of God urged them on. Rather sought they out of envy and an inner bitterness to bring something against the disciples; and, in fact, out of this did, in an apparent zeal for the Lord, persecute the Lord in his disciples. They ’condemned the guiltless; for the disciples had not out of ennui, for mere pastime’s sake, plucked the ears, but out of hunger (ver. 1). Their own they had forsaken, and they hungered now in their labour for the kingdom of God. They stood therefore in the same position as David the servant of God, who, in like manner, with them that were with him, hungered in the service of the Lord; as the priests, who in the temple must labour on the Sabbath, and so for the Lord’s sake seem to break the law of the Lord. While this was so, they also might without scruple eat of the show-bread of the Lord: what was God’s, that was theirs.”

St. Mark has alone preserved for us the weighty words which follow: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (ii. 27). The end for which the Sabbath was ordained was to bless man; the end for which man was created was not to observe the Sabbath. A principle is here laid down, which it is clearly impossible to confine to the Sabbath alone. Rather it must extend to the whole circle of outward ordinances. It does in fact say this, the law was made for man; not man for the law. Man is the end, and the ordinances of the law the means; not these the end, and man the means (cf. 2Ma 5:19; a remarkable parallel). Man was not made to the end that he might observe these; but these were given, that they might bless man, that they might train and discipline him till he should be ready to serve God from the free impulses of his spirit.^[12] And all this being so, “therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath.” Now to say here with Grotius, that “Son of man” has no wider and deeper meaning than “man” in the verse preceding, that the context will admit of no other, and to draw from these words that the Sabbath being made for man, man therefore can deal with the Sabbath as he will, is a serious error.^[13] For, in the first place, there is no one passage of the N. T. where “Son of man” (occurring as it does eighty-eight times) means other than the Messiah, the man in whom the idea of humanity was altogether fulfilled. And then secondly, among all the bold words with which St. Paul sets out man’s relations to the law, he never speaks of him, even after he is risen with Christ, as being its “lord;” so that an interpretation might well be suspicious, even if it had everything else to recommend it, which claimed this prerogative for him. “The redeemed man is not, indeed, under the law; he is released from its rule, so that it is henceforth with him, as a friendly companion, not over him, as an imperious schoolmaster.^[14] But for all this it is God’s law; and he, so long as he is still in the flesh, and therefore may continually need its restraints upon his flesh, never stands above it; rather, at the first moment of his falling away from the liberty of a service in Christ, will come under it anew. Even of the ceremonial law man is not lord, to loose himself from it, as upon the plea of insight into the deeper mysteries which it shadows forth: he must wait a loosing from it at those hands from which it first proceeded, and which first imposed it upon him. But the Son of man, who is also Son of God, He has power over all these outward ordinances: He Himself first gave them for the training of man, as a preparatory discipline; and when they have done their work, when this preparatory discipline is accomplished, He may remove them (Heb 9:11-15). “Made under the law” in his human nature (Gal 4:4), He is above the law, and lord of it, by fight of that other nature which is joined with his human. He therefore may pronounce when the shadow shall give place to the substance, when his people have so embraced the last that they may forego the first. And it was the sign and evidence that these outward ordinances had done their work, when He was come, in whom the highest gifts of God to men were imparted. The very fact that the highest was committed to Him involved his power over all lower forms of teaching. Christ is “the end of the law,”— in every way the end, as that to which it pointed, as that in which it is swallowed up; being Himself living law; yet not therefore in any true sense the destroyer of the law, as the adversaries charged Him with being, but its transformer and glorifier, changing it from law into liberty, from shadow to substance, from letter to spirit^[15] (Mat 5:17-18). To this our Lord’s clearing of his disciples, or rather of Himself in his disciples (for the accusation was truly against Him), the healing of the man with a withered hand is by St. Matthew, as we have seen, immediately attached, although St. Luke shows us that it did not find place till the following Sabbath. Like another healing, very similar in its circumstances, that of the woman with the spirit of infirmity (Luk 13:11), like that too of the demoniac at Capernaum (Mark 1:2-3), it was wrought in a synagogue. There, on the ensuing Sabbath, in “their synagogue,” the synagogue of those with whom He had thus disputed, He encountered “a man who had his hand withered;” his “right hand” as St. Luke tells us. The disease under which he laboured, and which probably extended throughout the whole arm, was one occasioned by a deficient absorption of nutriment in the limb; it was, in fact, a partial atrophy, showing itself in a gradual wasting of the size of the limb, with a loss of its powers of motion, and ending with its total death. When once thoroughly established, it is incurable by any art of man.^[16] The apparent variation in the different records of this miracle, that in St. Matthew the question proceeds from the Pharisees, in St. Mark and Luke from the Lord, is no real one; the reconciliation of the two accounts is easy. The Pharisees first ask Him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day?” He answers this question, as was often his custom (see Mat 21:24), by another question. That this is such another counter-question comes out most plainly in St. Luke: “I will ask you one thing. Is it lawful on the Sabbath days to do good or to do evil? to save life or destroy it?” With the same infinite wisdom which we admire in his answer to the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbour?” (Luk 10:29), He shifts the whole argument, lifts it up altogether into a higher region, where at once it is seen on which side is the right and the truth. They had put the alternative of doing or not doing; there might be a question here. But He shows that the alternative is, doing good or failing to do good,—which last He puts as identical with doing evil, the neglecting to save as equivalent with destroying (Pro 24:11-12). Here there could be no question; this under no circumstances could be right; it could never be good to sin. Therefore it is not merely allowable, but a duty, to do some things on the Sabbath.^[17] “Yea,” He goes on, “and things much less important and earnest than that which I am about to do, you would not yourselves leave undone. “Which of you would not draw your sheep from the pit into which it had fallen on the Sabbath? and shall not I, the true Shepherd, rescue a sheep of my fold, a man, that is far better than a sheep? Your own consciences tell you that such were a true Sabbath work; and how much worthier this! You have asked me, Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? I reply, It is lawful to do well on that day, and therefore to. heal. “They can answer Him nothing further, “they held their peace”

“Then” —that is, “when He had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts (Mark 3:5),—saith He to the man, Stretch forth thy hand.” The existence of grief and anger together in the same heart is no contradiction. Indeed, with Him who was at once perfect love and perfect holiness, grief for the sinner must ever have gone hand in hand with anger against the sin; and this anger, which with us is ever in danger of becoming a turbid thing, of passing into anger against the man, who is God’s creature, instead of being anger against the sin, which is the devil’s corruption of God’s creature,—with Him was perfectly pure; for it is not the agitation of the waters, but the sediment at the bottom, which troubles and defiles them, and where no sediment is, no impurity will follow on their agitation. This important notice of the anger with which the Lord looked round on these evil men we owe to St. Mark alone, who has so often preserved for us a record of the passing lights and shadows which swept over the countenance of the Lord. The man obeyed the word, which was a word of power; he stretched forth his hand, “and it was restored^[18] whole like as the other.” Hereupon the madness of Christ’s enemies rises to the highest pitch. He had broken their traditions; He had put them to silence and to shame before all the people. Wounded pride, disappointed malice, rancorous despite, were mingled with and exasperated their other feelings of ill-will toward Him. “They were filled with madness;” and in their blind hate they snatch at any weapon whereby they may hope to destroy Him. They do not shrink from joining league with the Herodians, the Romanizing party in the land,—attached to Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, who was only kept on his throne by Roman influence,—if between them they may bring to nothing this new power which seems equally to threaten both. So, on a later occasion (Mat 22:16), the same parties combine together to ensnare Him. For thus it is with the sinful world: it lays aside for the moment its mutual jealousies and enmities, to join in a common conspiracy against the truth. It is no longer a kingdom divided against itself, when the kingdom of light is to be opposed. Herod and Pilate can be friends together, if it be for the destroying of the Christ (Luk 23:12). He meanwhile, aware of their machinations, withdraws Himself from their malice to his safer retirements in the immediate neighbourhood of the sea of Galilee (Mark 3:7).

Footnotes

[1] The cures recorded are seven in. number, namely, that of the demoniac in the synagogue of Capernaum (Mark 1:21); that of Simon’s wife’s mother (Mark 1:29); of the impotent man at Bethesda (John 5:9); of. this man with a withered hand; of the man born blind (John 9:14); of the woman with a spirit of infirmity (Luk 13:14); of the man who had a dropsy (Luk 14:1). We have a general intimation of many more, as at Mark 1:34; and the “one work” to which our Lord, alludes, John 7:21-23, is perhaps no recorded miracle, but one which is only referred to there.

[2] They had themselves a maxim to the same effect: Ministerium pellit sabbatum.

[3] It is the same argument which He pursues John 7:22-23, There He says, "For the sake of circumcision you do yourselves violate the Sabbath. Rather than not keep Moses’ commandment, which requires the child to be circumcised upon the eighth day, you will, if that day fall upon a Sabbath, accomplish all the work of circumcision upon that. You make, that is, the Sabbath, which is lower, give place to circumcision, which is higher, and therein you have right. But the cures which I accomplish are greater than circumcision itself: that is but receiving the seal of the covenant upon a single member; my cures are a making the entire man (ὅλος ἄνθρωπος) whole. Shall not the Sabbath then by much better right give place to these works of mine?"

[4] Cocceius gives admirably the meaning here: Hoc argumentum urget contra tacitam exceptionem, nempe, discipulos Christi in agro non in templis fecisse opus non sacerdotale. Christus ostendit majorem templo hie esse, significans se Dominum templi esse, Mal 3:1; Jer 11:15.Quemadmodum igitur sacerdotes licite fecerunt opera, quae pertinebant ad cultum Dei ceremonialem; ita discipuli Christi licite fecerunt ilia quae necesse erat facere, ut servirent ipsi vero templo et Domino templi. The argument is not affected by admitting μεῖζον instead μεῖζων into the text, as Lachmann and the best critical editions have done: compare Mat 12:42, ἰδοὺ πλεῖον Σολομῶντος ὧδε.

[5] Irenaeus (Con. Haer. iv. 8, 3): Per legis verba suos discipulos excusans, et significans licere sacerdotibus libere agere.... Sacerdotes autem sunt omnes Domini Apostoli, qui neque. agros neque domos haereditant hie, sed semper altari et Deo serviunt.

[6] Irenaeus (Con. Haer. iv. 8, 3): Per legis verba suos discipulos excusans, et significans licere sacerdotibus libere agere.... Sacerdotes autem sunt omnes Domini Apostoli, qui neque. agros neque domos haereditant hie, sed semper altari et Deo serviunt.

[7] In the LXX, Ἔλεος θέλω‚ ἢ θυσίαν‚ καὶ ἐπίγνωσιν Θεοῦ‚ ἢ ὁλοκαυτώματα.

[8] Among those slights, the words, “Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should riot live” (Eze 20:25), are often enumerated; by Melancthon, by Reineccius (Deus ne suae quidern legi hunc honorem tribuit, quod mereatur vitam aeternam), and by many more; but this erroneously. Depreciating words are spoken of the Old Covenant; yet this is ever relatively, and only in comparison with the New; never this absolute blame (Vitringa, Obss. Sao. vol. i. p. 265; præcepta non bona, ἐν ἐμϕάσει, in quibus nihil inerat boni). The verse is to be explained by the verse ensuing, with which it stands in intimate connexion. The “I gave” here, is but the παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὁ Θεὸς of Rom 1:26; cf. Acts 7:42; 2Th 2:11. ’These “statutes that were not good” were the heathen abominations to which God gave them over.

[9] Exactly in obedience to this precept, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice,” and with a true insight into the law of love, as the highest law of all, those holy men have acted, that in great needs have sold the most sacred vessels of the Church for the redemption of captives, or for the saving in some great famine lives which otherwise would have perished.

[10] So Maldonatus: Hoc est quod Apostolos maxime excusabat, quod in praedicando et faciendis miracuiis adeo fuissent occupati, ut nec parare cibum nec capere possent.

[11] In like manner Wolf (Curae, in loc.): Non dubitaverim verba haec opponi judicio Pharisaeorum iminiti et rigido, de discipulis tanquam violatoribus sabbati, rato.

[12] Even in the Talmud it was said, "The Sabbath is in your hands, not you in the hands of the Sabbath; for it is written, The Lord hath. given you the Sabbath, Exo 16:29; Eze 20:12. "

[13] Cocceius answers well: Non sequitur; Hominis causá factum est sabbatum: Ergo homo est dominus sabbati. Sed bene sequitur: Ergo is, cujus est homo, et qui propter hominem venit in mundum, quique omnem potestatem in coelo et terrâ possidet, in hominis salutem et bonum est et Dominus sabbati. Ce Dominus sabbati non esset, nisi esset supremus νομοθέτης, et nisi ad ipsius gloriam pertineret sabbati institutio, et ejus usus ad salutem hominis.

[14] He is not, to use Augustine’s fine distinction, sub lege, but cum lege and in lege.

[15] Augustine (Serin, cxxxvi. 3): Dominus sabbatum solvebat: sed non ideo reus. Quid est quod dixi, sabbatum solvebat? Lux ipse venerat, umbras removebat. Sabbatum enim a Domino Deo praeceptum est, ab ipso Christo praeceptum, qui cum Patre erat, quando lex ilia dabatur: ab ipso praeceptum est, sed in umbrâ futuri.

[16] See Winer, Realwörterbuch, s. v. In the apocryphal Gospel according to the Hebrews, in use among the Nazarenes and Ebionites, which consisted probably of our St. Matthew, with some extraneous additions, this man appeared as a mason, and thus addresses the Lord: Caementarius eram, manibus victum quaeritans: precor te, Jesu, ut mihi restituas sanitatem, ne turpiter mendicem cibos. The χεῖρα ἔχων ξηράν is = τὴν χεῖρα ἀδρανὴς ὤν of Philostratus (Vita Apollon. iii. 39), whom the Indian sages heal.

[17] Danzius (in Meuschen, N. T. ex Talm, illustr. p. 585): Immutat ergo beneficus Servator omnem controversiae statum, ac longe eundem rectius, quam fraudis isti artifices, proponit. The object of the interesting and learned Essay, Christi Curatio sabbathica vindicata ex legibus Judaicis, from which the above quotation is made, is to prove by extracts from their own books that the Jews were not at all so strict, as now, when they wanted to find an accusation against the Lord, they professed to be, in the matter of things permitted or prohibited on the Sabbath. He finds an indication of this (p. 607) in our Saviour’s words, “Thou hypocrite” addressed on one of these occasions to the ruler of the synagogue (Luk 13:15). Of course the great difficulty in judging whether he has made out his point, is to know how far the extracts in proof, confessedly from works of a later, often a far later, date than the time of Christ, do fairly represent the earlier Jewish canons. The fixity of Jewish tradition is much in favour of the supposition that they do; but there always remains something in these proofs, which causes them to fail absolutely to prove. In the apocryphal gospels, as for instance in the Evangelium Nicodemi (see Thilo, Codex Apocryphus, pp. 502, 558), it is very observable how prominent a place among the accusations brought against Christ on his trial, are the healings wrought upon the Sabbath.

[18] Ἀποκατεστάθη. Josephus (Antt. viii. 8, 5) uses the remarkable word ἀναζωπυρεῖν in relating the restoration of Jeroboam’s withered arm (1Ki 11:6).