This question finishes the argument Jesus began with the sheep. If it is right to rescue an animal on the sabbath, how much more a human being? The answer is so plain that Jesus states it without waiting: "Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days." Barnes explains "better" as "Of more consequence, or value." He adds that the idea of doing good on the sabbath "was universally allowed by the Jews in the abstract," so the healing Jesus was about to perform was, "by their own confession, lawful." Gill reasons the same way: if a beast may be helped out of a ditch, then it must be right to restore to a man the use of his hand.

Jesus answered His own question: "Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days" (Matthew 12:12). He then proved it in action. He said to the man, "Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it forth; and it was restored whole, like as the other" (Matthew 12:13). The Pharisees answered with a plot, not a word: they "held a council against him, how they might destroy him" (Matthew 12:14). Mark adds that when Jesus asked His question, "they held their peace" (Mark 3:4).

The word "better" translates diapherei, which Thayer defines as "to differ from one, i.e. to excel, surpass one." Jesus is not just saying a man is different from a sheep, but that a man is worth far more. The phrase "to do well" is kalos poiein, literally "to do good," which is how the ESV renders it.

Gill says lifting a sheep out of a pit on the sabbath was what was usually done among them. He also records a later, stricter rule that a beast fallen into a ditch might only be fed or helped out with bolsters and pillows, a rule he thinks was made after Christ's time. Jesus turned their own practice into an argument from the lesser to the greater.

Jesus' question reveals how God values people. A person is worth more than a sheep, and God's law was never meant to stop anyone from doing good to a person in need. Jesus says the same thing elsewhere when He asks His hearers, "Are ye not much better than they?" about the birds their heavenly Father feeds (Matthew 6:26).

The question also shows who Jesus is. Just before this, He said, "the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day" (Matthew 12:8). Barnes sees the healing as a display of power that supported that claim. The Lord of the sabbath used the sabbath to restore a man, showing that God's rest and God's mercy belong together.