One Man's Web

A Turning Point

Mark 3:1-6

And he again entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. ²They watched (παρετήρουν) him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. ³And he says to the man who had the withered hand, 'Stand up here in the middle.' ⁴Then he says 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. ⁵And he looked around at them with anger; being grieved at their hardness of heart and he says to the man, 'Stretch out your hand.' And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored. ⁶The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how they might destroy him.

¹Καὶ εἰσῆλθεν πάλιν εἰς τὴν συναγωγήν. καὶ ἦν ἐκεῖ ἄνθρωπος ἐξηραμμένην ἔχων τὴν χεῖρα. ²καὶ παρετήρουν αὐτὸν εἰ τοῖς σάββασιν θεραπεύσει αὐτόν, ἵνα κατηγορήσωσιν αὐτοῦ. ³καὶ λέγει τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ τῷ τὴν ξηρὰν χεῖρα ἔχοντι· ἔγειρε εἰς τὸ μέσον. ⁴καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς· ἔξεστιν τοῖς σάββασιν ἀγαθὸν ποιῆσαι ἢ κακοποιῆσαι, ψυχὴν σῶσαι ἢ ἀποκτεῖναι; οἱ δὲ ἐσιώπων. ⁵καὶ περιβλεψάμενος αὐτοὺς μετ' ὀργῆς, συλλυπούμενος ἐπὶ τῇ πωρώσει τῆς καρδίας αὐτῶν λέγει τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ· ἔκτεινον τὴν χεῖρα. καὶ ἐξέτεινεν καὶ ἀπεκατεστάθη ἡ χεὶρ αὐτοῦ. ⁶Καὶ ἐξελθόντες οἱ Φαρισαῖοι εὐθὺς μετὰ τῶν Ἡρῳδιανῶν συμβούλιον ἐδίδουν κατ' αὐτοῦ ὅπως αὐτὸν ἀπολέσωσιν.

Translation Notes

Stand up here in the middle (vv3) The Greek says Arise into the middle, or midst. NRSV's Come forward, the Scholars Bible's  Get up here in front of everybody, both catch the sense of the command. But Stand up here in the middle also catches the sense of being seen by the crowd which always gathers around those who have for some reason of difference become noticed. Jesus is already in the middle, even if "at the front," and calls the man out of the crowd to join him. Coming out of the crowd into the middle is to enter the place of the scapegoat.  But in Mark's understanding, to be healed also means to come out of the crowd.

Also affecting this translation is the thought that Mark means us to remember the time the paralysed man was brought to Jesus for healing. (Mark 2:1-12) He uses the word egeire when he tells both men to stand up. The listener/reader is being told that we are still talking about healing and freedom from paralysis, and the same players are present: the paralysed and disempowered, the religious establishment, the crowd, and Jesus.

A Key Moment in Mark

The Basileia Culture of God has been announced; it is at hand. (Mark 1:14-15) The Holy One of God is among us. (Mark 1:24) The huios tou anthropou is here; (Mark 2:10, 28) and his healings point to the fulfilment of Creation. And at this very early point of Mark, he is rejected, and his death is decided. The disciples know nothing of this until Peter proclaims that Jesus is the Messiah, and recoils from the notion that the Messiah will be killed. That story in Mark 8:27-33 is also a central turning point in Mark, but Jesus' fate has been decided by Chapter 3 verse 6.

They Are Us

A key understanding of this passage is that "they," the people in the synagogue, are us, the wider circle of humanity around Jesus. What they did, we still do. If we do not understand and act on this, much of the good news of God is passing us unnoticed.

Our default psycho-social mindset, which we struggle to overcome (if we are aware of it,) is that the man with the withered hand, deserves his deformity, and deserves the loss of power and agency which that withering symbolises (and which is very real in a manual culture).  Our deep and enduring suspicion is that illness is a punishment, a consequence of bad choices made before God.¹   Even those of us who do not believe in God tend to blame the illness of others upon their lifestyle. As such, this man is "a scapegoat held in reserve" for the moment something alarms us and we need a place to direct our anger. All societies, every little town and village, and school, workplace, and church within them, have such people. In this text, the already alarmed Pharisees know of the man; they are watching to see if Jesus will heal him; he is being used; that is, sacrificed² to entrap Jesus.

What Jesus does in response, and on the Sabbath, that key identifier of being Jewish, is to give a sinner power and agency by restoring him to health. As he did with Levi (Mark 2:13-17), he again removes our scapegoats from us. When this happens—when those we love to hate suddenly receive the love that God has for them, it overturns the understanding on which we base our lives, which is that God has favourites; namely, us. If those we love to hate are also loved by God… who are we?! This profound identity crisis is at the base of why "they" seek to destroy Jesus at the end of this text.

But do we also seek to destroy him!? Is "they" really us? Hebrews 6:5-6 says that if we "have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away… [we] are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt." (NRSV) I have hated and judged and condemned, which is to say I am one of God's favourites, so I too have hammered in the nails.

Jesus Provokes the Pharisees

Sometimes we imagine Jesus being harassed by the Pharisees.  But Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath, (Mark 2:28) and rather than being harassed, he publicly provokes the Pharisees in this text. He makes the choice to heal the man. He could have healed the man on the next day, but chooses the Sabbath, and then does it in the most provocative way. We will see him not only argue for healing the man on the Sabbath, but unleash a devastating criticism of the Pharisee's actions.

He begins by saying: "Stand up here in the middle," which almost manufactures the classic scene of a scapegoating; the one about to be chosen as scapegoat has the crowd gather around them. Jesus is already in the middle, even if "in front of everybody,"³ and calls the man, the scapegoat in reserve, out of the crowd to join him. "Once a person is not 'lost in the crowd,' or undifferentiated from the crowd, they enter the place of either victim or servant of the crowd—and such servants are always liable to become victims."⁴ By the end of this pericope Jesus will not only have healed this man, but saved him from the crowd…leaving Jesus to be the victim.

Healing on the Sabbath

Sabbath healing is not in itself a problem. m.Yoma 8.6⁵ says "Any danger to life overrides the prohibitions of the Sabbath." Exactly what constituted danger to life was controversial, and many would have said Jesus could have waited until the next day. Alison suggests that in normal circumstances

even if you do have strictures about things happening on certain days, if something obviously good, like someone getting cured from a visible affliction, happens on such a day, you shrug and find wiggle-room to accommodate it and be pleased.⁶

But in Mark, things are not normal. What constitutes correct Sabbath keeping has become an identity marker and rallying point for the conservative custodians of the day, whose power/authority was deeply challenged by Jesus. As in so many of today's social battles over gender, sexuality, abortion, and race, the point of argument is usually tangential to the real issue, which is who controls society.

Everyone is silent

In Mark 3:1-6, everyone is silent. (vv4) "They," in verse 2, obviously refers first of all to the Pharisees who have followed Jesus into the synagogue from the grain-fields. But Mark does not name them until the end, because he requires triple service of the word "they." "They" are the Pharisees of Mark's time, the synagogues (and churches) of Mark's time, and us. When the paralysed man was healed⁷ in Mark 2:1-12 there was acclamation, but here… there is only silence. No acclamation, no confusion, no questions. Why is this larger congregation silent?

It is because the crowd understands what has happened.

First, these Pharisees have been silenced and (therefore) humiliated. Jesus has made powerful enemies who must in some way surpass him or lose their standing and power in the community. He is in a place of danger.

Second, although we latecomers to Israel, ignorant of our Old Testament, do not easily see it, Mark frames the argument so that his first listeners are reminded of Moses and Pharaoh⁸ . Moses put before Israel the choice between good and evil (cf Deuteronomy 30:15.) God took Israel out of Egypt with a mighty arm and stretched out hand (cf Psalm 136:10-12) overcoming Pharaoh's hardness of heart. (cf Exodus 9:12) In an argument in which the Pharisees seek to use the Law of Moses to entrap Jesus, Jesus suggests to us that they are the hard-hearted Pharaohs of their time!⁹ Greek readers will already have noticed the word paretēroun which Marcus points out is used only twice in LXX, including where Psalm 36:2  says: "The sinner will watch for the righteous, and gnash his teeth upon him."  (παρατηρήσεται ὁ ἁμαρτωλὸς τὸν δίκαιον καὶ βρύξει ἐπ᾿ αὐτὸν τοὺς ὀδόντας αὐτοῦ) The Psalms were the hymnbook of Israel, and constantly sung, so this is unlikely to be an accidental correlation, but is an echo designed to be noticed. The Pharisees, who complained about Jesus eating with "sinners" in Mark 2:16, are themselves identified as sinners.¹⁰

As in Chapter 1:21-28 Mark has carefully placed the man with the unclean spirit in the centre of the story, and in the centre of the gathering¹¹ of God's people. This deliberate placement says that the gathered community is ill, for it has illness at its centre. In Chapter 1 the demon recognises the danger Jesus poses to the social system—"Have you come to destroy us?"—and now the Pharisees stand where he did. Indeed, they go out to destroy him, using the same word (apollumi) as the demon in Mark 1:24. They are identified with the demonic.

Mark's Jesus makes one final, and prescient, dig at the Pharisees. The word apokteinai (is it lawful…to kill) is used by Mark in 6:19, 8:31, 12:5, and 14:1. Each of these is a reference to a political execution.¹²

Jesus and Mark place before us two immiscible ways of discipleship, and the crowd know it. If the way of Jesus is correct, then everything, not just the disciplines of the Pharisees, is upset. We humans read such moments instinctively, knowing without knowing. At such a flash-point,  none of us want to draw attention to ourselves by acclaiming Jesus, or by defending the Pharisees because, in their moment of weakness, the crowd is as likely to turn on them as upon Jesus. Each person in the crowed knows that at this moment of crisis they are at risk, and so remains silent, like the Pharisees. And the Pharisees, with no answer to Jesus' criticism, knowing the danger they are in, de-escalate the situation by leaving immediately.¹³ They go out and they initiate one of the rituals we use to keep ourselves safe when we realise that things are delicately poised and could erupt against us. This particular ritual for avoiding community violence is called "How can we get rid of this person quietly?" but is in the end simply a scapegoating. The ancient patterns of scapegoating and violence show up in the Pharisee's response. They go to their rivals, the Herodians, and create a unity by planning together to destroy Jesus.¹⁴ The scapegoat is chosen, not by a mob in an un-reasoned moment, but by careful reasoned planning. Scapegoating is done in austere suits as much as in heated rage, and although they have limited the violence which will follow, they have followed the old pattern: Like Caiphas, they have decided "that it is better ...  to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed" (John 11:50).

And Jesus knows what has happened.  NRSV says in Mark 3:7 that he "departed with his disciples to the lake," but anechōrēsen is mostly used in the New Testament in the context of an escape.¹⁵   In 3:7, Jesus prudently removes himself from the situation.

Anger and Grief

Jesus is both angered and grieving in this pericope. Froemming says

Sabbath at the time of Jesus had been turned into the service of the Roman Empire through focusing on prohibition and ritual sacrifice over concern for the well-being of one’s neighbour.¹⁶

Jesus' response is that Sabbath is the time for healing. Sabbath should be a taste of the Basileia which is at hand. So how could one not be angry at  the hardness of heart which forms a murderous alliance with the empire's most blatant supporters? He is angered, as we should be, for not to be angry is not to care for those who suffer.

But how can we not also weep for those who have tried so hard to serve God, and yet can be so adrift that they will form a murderous alliance with the empire's most blatant supporters? The answer, of course, is: We can very easily fail to weep for them! Typically we do not weep for those folk. We demonise them. In showing us the stark choices to which we are called, Mark often sails very close to such behaviour himself. Unfortunately, I need little encouragement to go further. Which means I step back into the ways of empire.

Andrea Prior (January 2025)

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1. A restatement of the struggles of Job. See also in John, "who sinned, this man or his parents?" (John 9:1)

2. He has become an object of exploitation for the purposes of others.

3. So Scholars Bible.

4. See above: "Mark 1-3: Introducing the Crowd."

5. Levine, JANT "Mark 3:1-6."  See also https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Yoma.8.6. (Retrieved 30/1/2025)

6. Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Kindle Edition,  Loc 348 of 3757, on Mark 3:1-6

7. For some of those present, a withered hand probably had overtones of paralysis about it. In 1 Kings 13:4, "Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar, saying, ‘Seize him!’ But the hand that he stretched out against him withered so that he could not draw it back to himself."

8. Marcus suggests there is probably a pun in the back of Mark's mind given that Pharaō and Pharisaios have some similarity in the Greek, see pp253

9. See, briefly, Alison Joy of Being Wrong pp85, or in more detail, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: (p. 348-349). This latter is in the section "Mark 3:1-6" beginning loc 348 of the eBook.

10. Marcus, pp252

11. The word synagogue is derived from the Greek work synagein, to gather together.

12. I owe this insight to Ched Myers.

13. In John 13:30, Judas "went out immediately": exēlthen euthus. Long before him, Mark uses the same stark departure from Jesus: kai exelthontes hoi Pharisaioi euthus.

14. Reflecting on the sudden friendship of Herod and Pilate in Luke 23:12, Hamerton-Kelly says "Leaders who otherwise would have been in competition with one another act in concert against him," and this is equally true here in Mark 3.

15. Cf Matthew 2, 14, 22, 4:12, 12:15 etc

16. Froemming, Kindle Edition, "Mark 2" loc 1243 of 2557