Luke 14:5 Commentary and Bible Study

The lawyers and Pharisees: they hadn't said anything. But Luke presents him as answering their sullen silence, and their unspoken resentment, as if they had argued vigorously against him. The atmosphere was thick with antagonism, and this is an established pattern of behaviour with them. It would not have been hard to assess their mood. But it went further than that in this case, because the Lord could read their hearts. He is the Son of God and he is omniscient. He knew their thoughts, and he saw all the ugliness and unreasonableness, and cruelty of their attitude in this situation. He is going to raise this matter and expose their hypocrisy at once. So he asks them the question. It was similar to what he had said previously to the ruler of the synagogue in Luke 13:15, but with a slightly different application suited to the occasion. ‘You Pharisees have enough natural compassion in you to lift your dumb animal out of a pit, if it falls into it on the sabbath day. You are not so foolish as to misapply the law of Moses, and to think that God does not want you to relieve that poor animal as soon as you can. Your own act of kindness to a dumb animal condemns you for your perverse judgment regarding this poor man who is of far greater value than an animal. This sick man is here before me on the sabbath day, and I have the power to heal him. Should I do what you certainly do not do to your animal, and force him to wait until another day for healing? No, compassion does not delay unnecessarily; it acts immediately. You have completely misunderstood the sabbath commandment, and the real problem is your pride and opposition to me and my teaching. You are simply using the sabbath commandments as an excuse to attack me.’ This is the effect of the Lord’s words. As ever, the Son of God, who knows all things, cannot be bettered in debate or in any interaction of this sort. He did what human beings so often fail to do in debate, and won decisively, and brought his opponents to complete silence. But that did not cause them to become converted men and women. Their resentment was buried out of sight in their hearts, and there was more that needed to be said to them.