NOTES for Luk 13:10-17

The Jews who grumbled because Christ healed on the Sabbath believed that salvation and healing—expressions of the Creator's mercy towards people—could wait one more day, until the time when the law permitted something to be done. ‘Come to be healed on working days, not on the Sabbath,’ the synagogue leader tells the people. The Lord rebukes him for his hypocrisy and gives an important example. When observing the law might cause the Jews themselves a loss, they allow immediate help to be given to suffering livestock—an ox or a donkey dying of thirst or fallen into a pit. Yet the motive for this permission is not so much mercy towards oxen and donkeys as concern for their own property.

That is why it is so difficult for the Jews to agree with Jesus, whose chief motive for healing is compassionate love for a human being. From their point of view, no one will be any worse off if a person suffers for one more day. From Christ's point of view, both that person and God Himself will be worse off. Of course, the healing of the bent-over woman in the synagogue is an exceptional event. Nevertheless, Christ's words establish for all His disciples the unconditional priority of God's motive—mercy—over everything else.