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5. καὶ ἔλεγεν. Marking a weighty addition to the subject, see Luk 5:36. The following utterance is one of Christ’s great intimations of Christian freedom from mere legalism.
κύριος … καὶ τοῦ σαββάτου. ‘Lord even of the Sabbath,’ though you regard the Sabbath as the most important command of the whole Law. In St Mark we have further, “the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”
This was one of no less than six great occasions on which the fury of the Pharisees had been excited by the open manner in which our Lord set aside as frivolous and unauthoritative the burdens which the Oral Law had attached to the Sabbath. The other instances are the healing of the cripple at Bethesda (Joh 5:1-16); the healing of the withered hand (Luk 6:1-11); of the blind man at Siloam (Joh 9:1-41); of the paralytic woman (Luk 13:14-17); and of the man with the dropsy (Luk 14:1-6). In laying His axe at the root of a proud and ignorant Sabbatarianism, He was laying His axe at the root of all that “miserable micrology” which they had been accustomed to take for religious life. They had turned the Sabbath from a holy delight into a revolting bondage. The Apocryphal Gospels are following a true tradition in the prominence which they give to Sabbath healing, as a charge against Him on His trial before the Sanhedrin.
In the famous Cambridge Manuscript (D), the Codex Bezae, there is here added the following passage: τῇ αὐτῇ ἡμέρᾳ θεασάμενός τινα ἐργαζόμενον τῷ σαββάτῳ εἶπεν αὐτῷ· ἄνθρωπε εἰ μὲν οἶδας τί ποιεῖς μακάριος εἶ· εἰ δὲ μὴ οἶδας ἐπικατάρατος καὶ παραβάτης εἶ τοῦ νόμου. “On the same day, observing one working on the Sabbath, He said to him O man, if indeed thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed: but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed, and a transgressor of the Law.” This very remarkable addition cannot be accepted as genuine on the authority of a single MS., and can only be regarded as one of the agrapha dogmata, or ‘unrecorded traditional sayings’ of our Lord. The meaning of the story is that ‘if thy work is of faith,—if thou art thoroughly persuaded in thy own mind—thou art acting with true insight; but if thy work is not of faith, it is sin.’ See Rom 14:22-23; 1Co 8:1. What renders the incident improbable is that no Jew would dare openly to violate the Law by working on the Sabbath, an act which rendered him legally liable to be stoned. The anecdote, as Grotius thought, may have been written in the margin by some follower of Marcion, who rejected the inspiration of the Old Testament.