Jesus asked this to explain and defend what He had just done. His critics had stayed silent rather than answer whether healing on the sabbath was lawful (Luke 14:4). Now He pointed to something they themselves would do without a second thought: pull an animal out of a pit on the sabbath. Barnes sums up the point: "If it was lawful to save an ox on the Sabbath, it was also to save the life of a man." The question let their own practice answer their objection.

"And they could not answer him again to these things" (Luke 14:6). The answer was obvious, and they had nothing to say against it. Gill says His reasoning "shut up" their mouths. Jesus then turned to teach the guests about choosing the lowest seat (Luke 14:7-11).

The KJV, following the Textus Receptus (the Greek text behind the KJV), reads "an ass or an ox." Other Greek texts, such as Westcott-Hort and the SBL edition, read "a son or an ox," which is why the ESV says "son." Either way, the point is the same: something precious has fallen into danger.

Gill reasons that if an animal "just ready to be drowned" would be pulled out, "it must be much more right and necessary to cure a man," and he points to the same kind of reasoning in Matthew 12:11 and Luke 13:15.

This question shows that God's commands and God's mercy belong together. The lawyers and Pharisees would have rescued their own animal without hesitation, yet they watched to see if Jesus would heal a suffering man. Matthew Henry calls this "an evidence of their hypocrisy": their fault-finding did not come from any real regard for the sabbath.

Jesus uses the same kind of question in Luke 13:15, where He asks whether each of them does not loose an ox or ass to lead it to water on the sabbath. In both places He argues from lesser to greater: if an animal is worth rescuing, how much more a person. Matthew 12:12 states the conclusion openly: "How much then is a man better than a sheep?"