Seven outstanding incidents here reveal the ever-hardening purpose of the leaders against Jesus.  First comes another clash in the temple.  Their ideas of what was proper on the Sabbath day receive a shock because a man enslaved by disease for years was healed with a word from Jesus’ lips.  Could there be a finer use of a Sabbath day!  We can either think them really shocked, or hunting for a religious chance to fight Him.  Jesus’ reply seems so to enrage that a passion to kill Him grips them.  It is notable that they had no doubt of the extent of Jesus’ claim; “He called God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.”  On these two things, His use of the Sabbath, and His claim of divinity, is based the aggressive campaign begun that day.

The incident draws from Him the marvellous words preserved by John in his fifth chapter.  In support of His claim He quietly brings forward five witnesses, John His herald, His own miraculous acts, His Father, the Scriptures entrusted to their care, and Moses, the founder of the nation.  That was a great line of testimony.  This first thought of killing Him seems to have been a burst of hot, passionate rage, but gradually we shall find it cooled into a hardened, deliberate purpose.

At once Jesus returns to the northern province.  And now they begin to follow Him up, and spy upon His movements and words.  In Capernaum, His northern headquarters, a man apparently at unrest in soul about his sins, and palsied in body, is first assured of forgiveness, and then made bodily whole.  Their criticism of His forgiving sins is silenced by the power evidenced in the bodily healing.  But their plan of campaign is now begun in earnest, and is evident at once.  Later criticism of His personal conduct and habits with the despised classes is mingled with an attempt to work upon His disciples and undermine their loyalty.  The Sabbath question comes up again through the disciples satisfying their hunger in the grain fields, and brings from Jesus the keen comment that man wasn’t made for the Sabbath, but to be helped through that day, and then the statement that must have angered them further that He was “Lord of the Sabbath.”

Another Sabbath day in the synagogue they were on hand to see if He would heal a certain man with a whithered hand whom they had gotten track of, “that they might accuse Him.”  They were spying out evidence for the use of the Jerusalem leaders.  To His grief they harden their hearts against His plea for saving a man, a life, as against a tradition.  And as the man with full heart and full eyes finds his chance of earning a living restored, they rush out, and with the fire spitting from their eyes, and teeth gritting, they plan to get their political enemies, the Herodians, to help them kill Jesus.  A number of these incidents give rise to these passionate outbursts to kill, which seem to cool off, but to leave the remnants that hardened into the cool purpose most to be dreaded.