Mark - Lesson 4...Continued from page 4

2.  What was Jesus’ reaction to the man’s plight, and how did He address the accusing thoughts of the Pharisees (v. 3, 4)?

NOTES:  Although the niv and nlt have Jesus saying, “stand up front,” the Greek phrase means to stand in the middle of everyone. Nowhere in this story did the man ask to be healed, and certainly he could have been healed the next day.  But rabbinic law (their own tradition) had so twisted the idea of working on the Sabbath that they said healing was only allowed if a life was actually in danger; the real issue wasn’t even compassion for a man who had suffered for years and had no hope, but for Jesus to further demonstrate the validity of His message and claims.[ii]

3.  What was Jesus’ two-fold response to these people?  What happened to the man, and what was the Pharisees’ reaction to this (v. 5, 6)?

4.  Jesus had three emotional reactions toward this situation.  The first was compassion to save this man suffering and ostracism.  Jesus’ use of “to save life or to kill” could be expanded “to save from danger, loss, and destruction, or to destroy either physically or morally, to deprive of spiritual life leading eternal misery in hell,”  maybe implying there was more at stake for this man than they knew from their limited viewpoint.  The second reaction was anger, which in Greek means not an outburst of wrath, but as a state of mind.  This is the only place in the Gospels where this word is used to describe Jesus.[iii] It is interesting that Aristotle said that this type of anger “is desire with grief,”[iv] for Jesus’ anger soon turned to grief, which means to be afflicted, grieved for another person, similar to the Greek word for sympathy, to feel pain together with another.  These men were on thin ice with Jesus, but we see that He chose to show grief and sorrow over their hardened hearts as He looked right through them, silencing them.