The story of Jesus healing the man with a withered hand appears in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, largely following the same narrative arc in each case, though punctuated by the occasional deviance. As Jan van Orley’s etching reminds us, all three Gospels render the story within the context of Jesus’s attitude towards the Sabbath. A synagogue setting adds dramatic intensity to the Gospels’ account of this debate over the interpretation of the Law. Jesus uses his encounter with the afflicted man as an opportunity to reiterate how mercy, not rule-following, is at the heart of the Law.

The gospel accounts relay very little information about the man with a withered hand, apart from the fact that he was Jewish and attended synagogue on the Sabbath, as was the custom. His name is omitted; he does not utter a word; and he is not commended for his bravery or his faith like the recipients of some other miracles (e.g. Matthew 9:20–22; Mark 10:46–52; Luke 17:11–19).

Within his cultural context, the man’s withered hand would have had an impact on his ability to earn a living, and perhaps have led him to be judged inferior. Jesus’s command to the individual to ‘stand up in front of everyone’ could be interpreted as cruel; the man may have cowered from the eyes of those swarming around his body.

Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib’s illuminations of Matthew’s Gospel provide a welcome opportunity to think about the man behind the healing, as they seem to draw on the second-century tradition that the man was a stonemason. At least here, he is presented with agency, and as much more than an illustrative pretext for religious debate.

Jesus’s second command to the man recorded in the Gospels is ‘stretch out your hand’ (Matthew 12:13; Mark 3:5; Luke 6:10). The man obeys: ‘[h]e stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored’ (Mark 3:5). It is unclear whether this command actuated the miracle, or whether it was merely the revealing of the miracle, but it is interesting to note that in a healing of a man with leprosy earlier in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 8:3; Mark 1:4; Luke 5:13), it is Jesus who stretches his hand out to heal, whereas here, it is the man who carries out the action. Jesus subverts his audience’s expectations—perhaps especially the expectations of those who hoped to catch him out.

Jesus’s command to the man to stretch out his hand is laden with theological significance. This same command was uttered by God to Moses in Exodus 14: ‘stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground’ (v.16). Moses obeyed and the seas parted. The stretching of the hand was a powerful act that saw the Israelites freed from their Egyptian enemies who had bound them by impossible workloads in slavery (Deuteronomy 5:15).

Within the context of a Sabbath debate in the Gospels, the allusion to the Exodus story serves as a reminder that restoration to wholeness is a distinguishing feature of the Sabbath and was the precise reason for which it was created. When God ordains the Sabbath in Deuteronomy 5:12–15, he says: ‘[r]emember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm’. It may appear that Jesus is rewriting the Sabbath laws. But—in common with later Jewish Mishnaic interpretation of the first and second centuries—he is in fact reminding this group of his opponents of the original call for Sabbath, which was an alternative socioeconomic order, grounded in justice, mercy, and human freedom (see, e.g. Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 128b).

When read as an interpretation of the healing of the man with the withered hand, Hendrik Goltzius’s The Artist’s Right Hand visualizes a return to physical wholeness, much like a biological Sabbath. We can imagine the man slowly flexing his hand, exploring the renewed strength and ability flowing through the wrist to the palm, from the palm to the fingertips. The restoration is almost audible as bones, muscles, and veins reconnect and recalibrate. Goltzius’s hand is powerful and vital (something an artist would especially appreciate and value), as it savours every tantalizing, liberating new movement of the Sabbath healing.

References

Lowery, Richard H. 2012. Sabbath and Jubilee (St Louis: Chalice Press)

Queller, Kurt. 2010. ‘“Stretch Out Your Hand!”: Echo and Metalepsis in Mark’s Sabbath Healing Controversy’, Journal of Biblical Literature 129.4: 737–58