The Covenant of Salt

In sharp contrast, Mark’s account is permeated with the cynicism of the religious authorities. The passage opens with the word “Again”, indicating that what follows is in some way a reiteration of the preceding narrative. Being so directed, we see that Chapter 2 concluded with the account of the confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees over the practice of his disciples “harvesting” and eating grain from a field on the Sabbath. And so as the narrative of Chapter 3 opens with Jesus walking into a synagogue on a Sabbath, we can anticipate that the reiterated subject will be Sabbath keeping. Though there was no formal worship service in this case, those elements will emerge as the story develops. But initially from the temporal perspective, the scene seems to quickly devolve into what we would normally call a set up. Mark tells us that Jesus saw a man with a withered hand and a group, whom we can conclude from what we already know were Pharisees, who were assembled to watch whether or not Jesus would give them grounds for accusation by healing the man on the Sabbath. Although that is all that is explicitly revealed in Mark’s account, there is a ton of unspoken understanding here that would have been abundantly clear to Jesus and that needs expression for our benefit. First off, as I’ve already alluded, there is every reason to believe that the man was not there due to happenstance. But rather that he had not only been brought by the Pharisees, but was for all effective purposes in their custody. They obviously cared not a whit for him. Like the woman caught in adultery of another instance, he only mattered to them as a pawn. Placing him squarely in front of Jesus’ view, they locked their murderous stare on him and wordless asked: “What are you going to do about it?” Zooming out and viewing this scene from the broad perspective of redemptive history reveals a most disturbing portrait. Here were the purported spiritual shepherds of God’s people, within His house, holding one of those people as an “offering” in challenging the incarnate God to uphold the perverted code they wickedly held to be His law. All for the purpose of expelling Him from what they considered their entitled domain, oppressive dominion over God’s people. If Nadab and Abihu deserved their punishment, and they certainly did, there can be no doubt of the righteous justice of a like response to these Jewish leaders’ brazen defiance that would have rendered them charred corpses, had that occurred. And most of us, if we are honest I think, would by nature be strongly inclined to vote for that kind of response if given the prerogative. But, (praise the Lord!), He is not like that part of us. How telling it is that the first thing he did upon recognizing the situation was remove the man from their clutches, saying to him, “Come here”. The Scripture does not tell us the positioning of the involved parties at this point, but I would venture that it is well within the spirit of the narrative to expect that Jesus reached out to receive him warmly and turned him around, with His arm firmly around his shoulder, to present him back toward them. He then challenged them, on the basis of reason and the true spirit of God’s law, to a right understanding of the then present situation, essentially telling them: “Here we all are together in God’s house on the Sabbath. I want to heal. You want to kill me and leave this man maimed. Who do you think is right?” Mark tells us that His good faith challenge was received solely with insolent silence. He looked each of them in the eye and saw nothing but hardness of heart. Clearly, it was not that they didn’t know what the answer to His question was, but that they didn’t care. Perhaps some readers have wondered in the past, as I have, about Jesus’ use of the term, “the gates of hell”, recorded in Matthew 16:18; what is meant by it, and what “the gates of hell” might actually look like. Based on what we’ve learned about the heart state of the Pharisees confronting Jesus that day, we might posit that the exercise of imagining what He saw in their eyes as he looked around the room might be an enlightening conceptualization; that the gates of hell were what was presented to him as he did so. And it angered Him. It was the very thing the power of which He had come to deliver his people from. And so saying to the man: “Stretch out your hand”, the righteous work of restoration was completed in the healing of his arm before their eyes. Having thus answered their wordless question, the flow of the interchange naturally went to back to them as his gaze wordless asked them: “What is your answer to this? At this display of God’s holy power will you repent in dust and ashes, or will you continue in willful bondage to your master Satan?” Once again, as we saw in the previous case of the healing of Jeroboam’s arm, we see confirmation of the teaching of Abraham in Luke 16:31, that the unregenerate heart is equally unresponsive to both God’s word and miraculous signs. Rejecting both in this case also, the Pharisees left more committed than ever to wield all levers of power at their disposal to effect his destruction. But we should not conclude our review before noting the very last scene; that of Jesus and the restored man standing together in God’s house on the Sabbath unmolested. The “gates of hell” had indeed not prevailed.