NOTES for Luk 6:1-11
The fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecy turns out to be no simple matter for Jesus. People in Israel are so blinkered by their ideas of what is pious and what is not that they deny miracles the right to take place on the Sabbath. To preserve their own ideas, they are ready to refuse to consider even doing good, even saving, as something pleasing to God. They insist on their position even when Jesus shows them that not doing good is doing evil, and not saving means destruction; in that case God turns out to be a god of evil and destruction. And when Jesus, healing the man with the withered hand, shows them what the works of God are like in this world, they fly into a rage.
And have we not become hardened in our own "piety"? Have we not stopped distinguishing salvation from destruction? Have we not forgotten that God does not desire the death of the sinner?