Jesus answered a trap with a question from everyday life. The Pharisees had not asked for teaching; they asked "that they might accuse him" (Matthew 12:10). Gill explains that their rule allowed healing on the sabbath only when life was in danger, and they hoped to catch Jesus breaking it. So Jesus pointed to something they all did. Any one of them with a single sheep in a pit would lift it out, sabbath or not. Barnes notes that Jesus was showing them that the principle they already acted on applied with even more force to the man in front of them.

No Pharisee is recorded answering. Jesus drew the conclusion Himself: "How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days" (Matthew 12:12). Then He told the man, "Stretch forth thine hand," and "it was restored whole, like as the other" (Matthew 12:13). The Pharisees did not yield. They "went out, and held a council against him, how they might destroy him" (Matthew 12:14).

The sabbath was the seventh day, set apart as a day of rest. Gill explains how the Jewish teachers of that time applied it to healing. He quotes their rule that "Danger of life drives away the sabbath," which meant healing was allowed only when a life was at risk. A withered hand was not life-threatening, so by their rule it could wait.

Gill says lifting a sheep out of a pit was what was usually done among them, which no man would scruple to do. He also cites Maimonides, a medieval Jewish teacher, whose stricter rule said a beast in a ditch on the sabbath could be fed where it lay until the sabbath ended, or "bolsters and pillows may be brought" and put under it so it could climb out. Gill thinks that rule seems to have been made after Christ's time, in opposition to His saying. Jesus' words "lift it out" translate egerei, the ordinary Greek word for raising something up.

This question shows how Jesus reads the heart of God's law. The sabbath was given as a gift, and Jesus had just told these same men that God says, "I will have mercy, and not sacrifice" (Matthew 12:7). Their rules allowed mercy to a sheep but not to a man. Jesus' question exposes that the problem was not His healing but their hearts. Mark says He looked on them "with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts" (Mark 3:5).

Matthew follows this scene by quoting Isaiah's words about God's Servant: "A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench" (Matthew 12:20). The One who lifted a withered hand on the sabbath is the gentle Servant God promised. Matthew Henry draws a further picture from the healing: "By nature our hands are withered," and only Christ's grace can restore them.