"Stretch out Your Hand!" Echo and Metalepsis in Mark's Sabbath Healing Controversy (Essay‪)‬

(1) And he went in again into the synagogue. And a man was there having the hand withered. (2) And they were watching him, whether on the Sabbaths he would heal him, so that they might accuse him. (3) And he says to the man with the withered hand, "Arise into the midst" (4) And he says to them, "Is it authorized on the Sabbaths to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" But they were silent. (5) And looking around at them with anger, co-aggrieved [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] at the hardness of their heart, he says to the man, "Stretch out your hand." And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored. (6) And going out the Pharisees immediately gave counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. (Mark 3:1-6; my literal translation). (1) Traditional preaching typically presents Mark 3:1-6--probably the first extant Sabbath healing controversy story--as articulating conflict between a new religion of grace and freedom (Christianity) and an old religion of hide-bound legalisms (proto-Judaism). Modern critical scholarship largely treats it in a similarly antinomian and supersessionist fashion, leaving unresolved a host of exegetical issues, including (a) the meaning of the withered hand; (b) the insistence on healing an ostensibly chronic, nonlethal affliction on the Sabbath; (c) the escalation, in Jesus' central challenge, of the classic choice between "life and death" (cf. Deut 30:15-19) to one between "saving life and killing" (especially perplexing in view of the ailment ostensibly at issue), and of that between "good and evil" to one between "doing good or doing evil" (especially provocative in a Sabbath context, where choices are conventionally framed in terms of "doing" versus "not doing"); (d) the adveraries' silent response to a provocation that is so clearly open to counterattack (see, e.g., Luke 13:14); and (e) numerous peculiarities in Mark's Greek usage not easily explainable as Semitism, Latinism or other interlanguage phenomena--especially the odd reference to Jesus as a "co-aggrieved" party.