Mark 3:1 Commentary and Bible Study

The scene is Capernaum, the synagogue at Capernaum, that town of about 2000 people on the northern shore of the Lake of Tiberius. This incident shows the total necessity of faith. It is early at the beginning of Christ's ministry and yet even now he is being tracked and watched by the scribes and the Pharisees. Many of them come, there’s no doubt, from Jerusalem, and they’re watching him because John the Baptist has announced that Messiah is here. That announcement has been heard by vast crowds, and the religious leaders are monitoring the response of the people. Perhaps the majority of the population of Judah have heard the preaching of John the Baptist. They have been warned that the kingdom of God is coming – Messiah is here, the Lamb of God is here – and Christ then attracts the crowds also by his preaching, his healing, and his compassionate miracles. So now people press him and follow him wherever he goes. His preaching expounds the Scriptures of old, the Old Testament, but always his theme and his emphasis, the endpoint of his preaching, is repentance and remission of sins, or we might say conversion and the removal of sin. But of course the people have been wrongly taught by their clergy for years, and the expectation of the Jews is that they will all be blessed and accepted by God just because they are descended from Abraham, by virtue of their being special, and because they have been given the law and the ancient worship. This is how they saw it. All these things were taken not as lessons of the need of mercy and forgiveness, of a coming Saviour and a great sacrifice for sin, but these things were quite wrongly taken as indications that they already had the favour of God, and that this favour was cemented and guaranteed by their strict observance of all the ceremonial ritual. So they had turned salvation by grace, the free mercy of God, into a salvation of works, a salvation which they could earn and deserve. Their privileged racial standing together with their observance of the ritual of the law; these were the things which, in their estimation, guaranteed their acceptance with God. But Christ’s preaching, as that of John the Baptist, had cut right across this. Repentance and remission of sins, the object being union with God: to know him, to encounter him, to have a spiritual relationship with him that was real and deep and felt and living; all that was foreign to the scribes and Pharisees, the chief priests, the elders of the people. This was offensive material. It suggested there was much the matter with them and they were not there, and they were not accepted by God, and that's what Christ taught them. You remember when a leading Pharisee, Nicodemus, came to see Christ, perhaps to negotiate with him that he would work with them, O they thought, this would be a possibility: our running the temple and continuing as the leading clergy, but with Christ's miracles augmenting our rule and reign in the church – what an amalgamation that would be! But Christ said to him, kindly but firmly, Unless you are born again to a new experience of God, you are nowhere at all. That is the background. So they are watching him and they are looking for trouble. What sort of trouble? Well, he is being announced as Messiah. If they can hear from his lips, a claim that he is divine, then they have got him; they have caught him, they can put him on trial. But it went further than that. They were so infuriated by Christ and so hated him, that they would, if possible, have him assassinated. ‘He entered again into the synagogue’ – notice the word ‘again’; he had taught several times already previously in the synagogue at Capernaum – ‘and there was a man there which had a withered hand.’ The narrative is similar to the previous occasion Christ had gone into the synagogue at Capernaum – ‘and there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit’ (Mark 1:23). That too had been on a sabbath day (Mark 1:21); the scribes were now primed to attack him about the matter. This is immediately after another confrontation about the sabbath at the end of Mark 2. The Pharisees had challenged the disciples about plucking the ears of corn on the sabbath, and Christ had already answered them, but they wouldn't hear. They were more firmly attached to their man-made additions to the law than they were to the Scriptures themselves. Now, immediately after that, this further confrontation occurs. Here then is another man for whom the Sabbath was made. Matthew says, ‘And behold …’ It is almost as if the disciples looked round and said, ‘Who is he going to heal now? Oh that must be him – that man with the withered arm.’ Probably it was not just his hand that was withered, but the whole forearm – shrunken and withered, dried and inactive. He couldn't follow his craft; he couldn't earn his living; he couldn't support his family. This is going to be an occasion when Christ exposes the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees. The Lord Jesus is not afraid of them; he moves right into trouble, as it were.