Marcos 3:5

Vainly Jesus "looked around" for someone who would respond to His question (cf. Mark 3:34; Mark 5:32; Mark 10:23; Mark 11:11). This expression is unique to the second Gospel. Evidently Peter remembered Jesus’ looks around and communicated these to Mark as significant indications of His looking for the proper response from people.

This is the only place in the New Testament where a writer explicitly stated that Jesus was angry. This was a case of righteous indignation in the presence of unrepentant evil. This is also the only account of this miracle that records Jesus’ compassion for the objects of His anger. The tenses of the Greek verbs indicate that Jesus was angry momentarily (aorist tense), but His attitude of compassion was persistent (present tense). References to Jesus’ emotions are peculiar to Mark’s Gospel. They show His humanity.

"Jesus’ action was perfectly consistent with His love and mercy. As a true man, Jesus experienced normal human emotions, among them anger as well as grief at obstinate sin. In His reaction to the sullen refusal of the Pharisees to respond to the truth, the incarnate Christ revealed the character of our holy God." [Note: Hiebert, p. 81.]

"Their opposition rested on a fundamental misunderstanding-an inability, or refusal, to see that Jesus was God’s eschatological agent and that his sovereign freedom with regard to law and custom sprang from that fact." [Note: D. E. Nineham, Saint Mark, p. 110.]

Since Jesus did not use anything but His word to heal the man, His enemies could not charge Him with performing work on the Sabbath. Jesus’ beneficent creative work on this occasion recalls His work in creating the cosmos (Genesis 1). The Pharisees should have made the connection and worshipped Jesus as God.

"Thus when Jesus as Son of Man declares himself to be master of the Sabbath . . . he presumes the very authority by which the Sabbath was instituted by the Creator.

"This sovereign disposition toward the Sabbath is typical of Jesus’ challenges to the rabbinic tradition as a whole. Such challenges are found primarily at the outset and conclusion of Mark, as if to signify that from beginning to end the antidote to the ’leaven of the Pharisees’ (Mark 8:15) is the exousia [authority] of Jesus. He violates laws of purity by touching and cleansing a leper (Mark 1:40-45) and by association with sinners and tax collectors (Mark 2:13-17). He places in question the issue of purification by violating food prohibitions in fasting (Mark 2:18-22) and by eating with unwashed hands (Mark 7:1-23). He contravenes marriage laws in his teaching on divorce (Mark 10:1-12), and he openly denounces the scribes (Mark 12:38-40). In the question on the son of David he tacitly assumes supremacy over Israel’s greatest king who, according to 2 Samuel 7:14, would be the progenitor of the Messiah (Mark 12:35-37)." [Note: Edwards, p. 225.]