Mark 3:5

Mark 3:5

Our Lord goes into the synagogue at Capernaum, where He had already wrought more than one miracle, and there He finds an object for His healing power in a poor man with a withered hand; and also a little knot of His enemies. The scribes and Pharisees expect Christ to heal the man. So much had they learned of His tenderness and of His power. But their belief that He could work a miracle did not carry them one step towards a recognition of Him as sent by God. They have no eye for the miracle, because they expect that He is going to break the Sabbath. There is nothing so blind as formal religionism. The poor man's infirmity did not touch their hearts with one little throb of compassion. They had rather that he had gone crippled all his days than that one of their rabbinical Sabbath restrictions should be violated. There is nothing so cruel as formal religionism. Our Lord reduces them all to silence and perplexity by His question, sharp, penetrating, unexpected, "Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath day, or to do evil? You are ready to blame Me as breaking your Sabbatarian regulations if I heal this man. What if I do not heal him? Will that be doing nothing? Will not that be a worse breach of the Sabbath day than if I heal him?" He takes the question altogether out of the region of pedantic rabbinism, and bases His vindication upon the two great principles that mercy and help hallow any day, and that not to do good when we can is to do harm; and not to save life is to kill. They are silenced. His arrow touches them; they do not speak because they cannot answer, and they will not yield. There is a struggle going on in them, which Christ sees, and He fixes them with that steadfast look of His, of which our Evangelist is the only one who tells us what it expressed, and by what it was occasioned. "He looked round about on them with anger, being grieved."

I. Consider, first, the solemn fact of Christ's anger. It is the only occasion, so far as I remember, upon which that emotion is attributed to Him. Once and once only, the flash came out of the clear sky of that meek and gentle heart. He was once angry, and we may learn the lesson of the possibilities that lay slumbering in His love. He was only once angry, and we may learn the lesson that His perfect and Divine charity is not easily provoked. Christ's anger was part of the perfection of His manhood. The man that cannot be angry at evil lacks enthusiasm for good. The nature that is incapable of being touched with generous and righteous indignation is so, generally, either because it lacks fire and emotion altogether, or because its vigour has been dissolved into a lazy indifference, and easy good nature which it mistakes for love. It is one of the strengths of man that he shall be able to glow with indignation at evil.

II. Look at the compassion which goes with our Lord's anger here. "Being grieved for the hardness of their hearts." The somewhat singular word rendered here "grieved" may either simply imply that this sorrow co-existed with the anger, or it may describe the sorrow as being sympathy or compassion. I am disposed to take it in the latter application; and so the lesson that we gather from these words is the blessed thought that Christ's wrath was all blended with compassion and sympathetic sorrow. The scribes and Pharisees had very little notion that there was anything about them to compassionate. But the thing which in the sight of God makes the true evil of men's condition is not their circumstances, but their sins. The one thing to weep for when we look at the world is not its misfortunes, but its wickedness. Men are divided into two classes in their way of looking at wickedness in this world one set rigid and stern, and crackling into wrath; the other set placid and good-natured, and ready to weep over it as a calamity and misfortune and the like, but afraid or unwilling to say, "These poor creatures are to be blamed as well as pitied." We have to make an effort to keep in the centre, and never to look round in anger, unsoftened by pity, nor in pity, enfeebled by being separated from righteous indignation.

III. Note the occasion for both the sorrow and the anger. "Being grieved for the hardness of their hearts." And what was hardening their hearts? It was He! Why were their hearts being hardened? Because they were looking at Him, His graciousness, His goodness, and His power, and were steeling themselves against Him, opposing to His grace and tenderness their own obstinate determination. Nothing so tends to harden a man's heart to the Gospel of Jesus Christ as religious formalism.

A. Maclaren, Christian Commonwealth,Oct. 23rd, 1884.

References: Mark 3:5. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxxii., No. 1893; J. S. Exell, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 374; J. J. Goadby, Ibid.,vol. xvii., p. 200; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 226; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 539; B. F. Westcott, Expositor,3rd series, vol. v., p. 461.