John 7:22

“This is why I tell you that Moses has given you circumcision, not that it is of Moses but of the fathers, and on the Sabbath you circumcise a man. If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath, so that the Law of Moses may not be broken, are you hotly angry with me because I made a man totally whole on the Sabbath day?”

‘This is why I tell you' refers back to the previous verse. The literal Greek is ‘This is why Moses --', but we must read in ‘I tell you' in order to understand the sense.

He is informing them that He has told them that Moses gave them a law of circumcision, which involved breaking the Sabbath, in order to demonstrate that the Sabbath law should be interpreted to allow for activities related to God (such as healing and its consequences).

So Jesus is now challenging their view of the Sabbath. Moses gave them circumcision, He says, (although, He adds, it was in fact practised by the fathers long before Moses), and in order to keep the law of Moses they would circumcise a man on the Sabbath, because it had to be done on the eighth day. They thus saw circumcision as overriding the Sabbath. Was it then right to circumcise a man on the Sabbath, but wrong to make him whole?

In the Mishnah Shabbath John 18:3; John 19:1 and Nedarim John 3:11 all hold that the command to circumcise overrides the command to observe the Sabbath in order that the Law be kept. (The Mishnah was Jewish oral law gathered together by 200 AD by Rabbi Judah the Prince).

Again they were seen as not being honest with the law of Moses. It is clear that the arguments against Him had included that of healing a man on the Sabbath and His telling the man to take his mattress home. The Pharisees allowed minimum emergency assistance on the Sabbath in health matters in as far as it was necessary to save life, but what Jesus had done went beyond that in their eyes. He had made a man whole by the power of God and then told him to take home his invalid mattress. But, asks Jesus, was this really less important than the carrying out of circumcision?

They were in fact so tied down by their views on circumcision that they would probably have said, yes. This too was evidence of their blindness. But Jesus was saying that ceremonial rites can never be more important than mercy and compassion.

We note here that the basis of the argument demands an exact knowledge of Jewish Law. Once again we are in the atmosphere of Palestine.