Mark 3

Synagogues were to be places of meeting together to hear God's Word, places of singing and prayer, places where people who could not go to the temple could still meet with God. One day we will meet with God in heaven. It is our understanding that all will be well when we meet with Him there. Here on earth our meetings are marred with the marks of misery from this present age. A man with a withered hand carried around with him such a mark of misery. He could not get rid of that fact, even when he went into the synagogue. It was a story that others could see. There are some stains of sin or trouble that are harder for people to notice. Some who came to the synagogue on that Sabbath day came with evil intentions concerning the Son of God, for they hoped to use His deeds of mercy and restoration to accuse Him.

Jesus knew what they were thinking, and He understood the way that they had perverted the Sabbath commandment, creating all kinds of categories of prohibited activities that they had deemed to be too close to work for a person to be able to engage in them. One of the prohibited activities was performing a healing. Yet our participation in meeting with God on the Sabbath is an anticipation of the removal of all pain and misery in our meeting with God in the place of full Sabbath rest. There was no word from the Bible against healing on any day. Of all days to heal, the Sabbath was the most appropriate one. We should expect to people to be helped by meeting in the presence of God. We are longing for the day when both our healing and our enjoyment of God's presence with us will be complete. For this reason Jesus openly did what was good in the synagogue, on the Sabbath, in front of everyone. His enemies soon organized another meeting, not a meeting to save life, but a meeting with a design to kill the Lord of life.

Despite His enemies, the Lord continued to attract large crowds coming from all kinds of places. The success of Jesus in addressing human misery was simply overwhelming, and people came to him as they heard the news of what he was doing. Diseased and oppressed people crowded around Him with the hope of relief from their afflictions. It was not His intention to do all of this work of displaying the kingdom of heaven alone. As did Moses in the days of the beginning of the Law, Jesus chose disciples who would carry out the work as his ambassadors, sending them forth to preach and to heal. He chose the twelve for this special position. He still had men outside His disciples who were against Him, but it would be one of the twelve who would eventually be His betrayer, joining with those outsiders in their efforts to silence the Son of God.

Some within Jesus' own family seemed greatly perplexed as to what was happening to Him. The outside enemies among the Pharisees made the suggestion that His undeniable powers came from some evil source, from Satan himself, the prince of demons. This is instructive, since there seemed to be no controversy here about whether Jesus was performing miracles and casting out demons, only how He was doing this. Their solution was to identify Him with evil rather than righteousness, probably because His power was so clear, as was His opposition to the Pharisaic way of outward holiness. His answer to this attack was simply to point out the fact that it could not credibly be maintained that the miracles that He was performing were on the same side as the demonic, since He was freeing people from demonic bondage. Satan does not fight against Satan. Jesus was fighting against Satan, and He was winning. For Jesus to accomplish these great things, He needed to be stronger than Satan. Jesus then identifies the true source of His power in His warning to His detractors. His was the power of God the Holy Spirit, and to speak against His works as Satanic was dangerous blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

Yet His own family who He had grown up with remained concerned and confused. This suggests that His behavior and following were entirely different than what they had seen in the past. They wanted to get Him away from the crowds, since there were reports that He could not even eat because of the seemingly continual presence of those who were petitioning Him for help. When His mother and brothers came seeking Him, He would not stop what He was doing to go with them. He was not under their authority.

Instead He affirmed the fascinating fact that those who would hear His Word and do His will were His true family. Jesus was the center of a whole new way of life. He gathered those who wanted to meet with God. He was bringing together something of a new synagogue. He taught and they listened. This is what we do to this day. The Lord is gathering His people through His apostolic church. The Word of Christ is proclaimed. Great deeds of mercy are displayed through sacrificial and faithful living, and the family of Jesus Christ is made known as those who once lived to do their own will, now give themselves over to a life of doing the will of God.

It was of utmost importance that our Lord would lead the way for us in this new gathering of worshipers. They were not a synagogue of Satan to be sure. They were a synagogue of suffering servants, men and women, together with their households, serving the powerful Healer who suffered first and suffered best for us before we ever did anything for Him. He calls us forward now in the light of the cross, not to make atonement for others – only His sinless blood could do that, but to display the power of Christ's atoning sacrifice in our own lives of suffering service to the weak and the oppressed.