Jesus' Attitude Toward Sin
Text: Mark 3:1-6
Series: Restoration Sermons
Date:
Speaker: Ed Rangel
Location: Waupaca Church of Christ
Bible Version: NASB 1995
Sermon Type: Expository
Learning Objectives
By the close of this lesson the hearer should be able to:
- Explain the sermon's opening claim — what the portraits and sermons that emphasize only Christ's meekness and humility get wrong.
- Identify the four specific actions that constitute Christ's resistance to evil and explain what each reveals about his character.
- State the two forms of his condemnation of sin — causing others to stumble and pretense — and identify the specific texts.
- Explain what Mark 3:5 reveals about the emotional life of Christ — why the indignation is not a contradiction of his character.
- State the conclusion the sermon draws and explain why it is the point the entire outline has been building toward.
Thesis
The Christ of the Gospels is not the passive, mournful figure that a certain tradition of piety has constructed. He resisted evil actively, condemned sin publicly, denounced hypocrisy with more severity than any other sin, and felt genuine indignation at the hardness of heart that preferred a man's continued suffering to the violation of a legal technicality. He hated sin — not abstractly, but specifically — because he loved the man that sin was destroying. The greatest attainment available to a human being is to become like this Christ.
Burden
"Pictures of Jesus with a sad, solemn face and sermons emphasizing his meekness and humility do not correctly represent him; he has other phases of character." The burden is to present the complete Christ — not to correct his meekness and humility, which are real, but to add the other phases that the same Gospels record: his resistance, his condemnation, his denunciation, his anger. The person who knows only a gentle Jesus has not yet encountered the Christ of Mark 3.
Introduction
"He entered again into a synagogue; and a man was there whose hand was withered. They were watching Him to see if He would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him... He said to the man, 'Stretch out your hand.' And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately began conspiring with the Herodians against Him, as to how they might destroy Him" (Mark 3:1, 5, 6). The Pharisees came to watch for an accusation; Christ healed the man and looked at them "with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart." The anger and the grief arrived together — the anger at what they were doing, the grief at what it revealed about who they were.
This is not the portrait of a person who is passively tolerant of sin. This is a person whose emotional response to sin was specific, proportioned, and rooted in love for the person that sin was destroying. The Pharisees preferred that the man's hand remain withered than that their legal position be vindicated by a healing they could not control. Christ's anger was the anger of someone who loved the man and found their preference intolerable.
I. Jesus' Resistance to Evil
Christ did not simply decline to sin — he actively resisted the pressure to sin.
His temptations (Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-12). The forty days in the wilderness were not a formality. The Adversary brought three specific temptations — each addressed to a genuine point of vulnerability: the hunger of the body, the desire to prove divine protection, and the ambition to rule. Christ met each one with the text of Scripture, directly and without negotiation. "No one is safe who dallies with temptation." The willingness to entertain a temptation — to consider it at length, to weigh its advantages, to enjoy the consideration even while declining the act — is not resistance; it is the beginning of compliance.
His cleansing of the temple (John 2:13-17). "He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables." This is not the action of a person who is temperamentally incapable of resistance. The scourge was deliberate; the action was controlled; the purpose was clear. The commercial exploitation of the temple's approach — the system that taxed the worshipper's access to God — provoked a response that was physical, disruptive, and unambiguous.
His second cleansing of the temple (Matt. 21:12-13). Three years later, near the end of his ministry, he did it again. The same exploitation had resumed; the same action followed. The resistance to this particular form of evil was not a single episode of momentary anger — it was a consistent response to a consistent wrong.
II. His Condemnation of Sin
Christ did not merely resist sin in his own person — he condemned it explicitly and publicly in the lives of those around him.
Condemnation of those causing others to stumble (Luke 17:2). "It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble." The severity of the image is deliberate. The person whose behavior leads another person into sin — through their example, their teaching, their influence — has committed a sin that Christ describes with the most concrete possible image of violent judgment.
Warning against pretense (Luke 20:45-47). "Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, who devour widows' houses, and for appearance's sake offer long prayers. These will receive greater condemnation." The warning is public — given "in the hearing of all the people." The combination of religious display and financial exploitation is exactly what Christ condemns: the long prayer that is an advertisement, the front seat that is a performance, the widow's house that is consumed under cover of the reputation earned by both.
The person who sees a fire and does not warn the people near it is a party to what the fire does. The silence that permits danger is not innocence; it is participation by omission.
III. Jesus' Denunciation of Hypocrisy
Of all the forms of sin that Christ confronted, hypocrisy received the most severe condemnation.
He fearlessly condemned the scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 23:13, 15, 23, 25, 27, 29). The seven woes of Matthew 23 are the most sustained and specific condemnation in all the Gospels — and every one of them is addressed to religious leaders in the temple, in public, by name of category. "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" Six times that exact phrase; the seventh woe also addressed to them. The fearlessness is remarkable: the scribes and Pharisees were the religious authorities of his day; he condemned them in their own house.
He denounced pretense in religion (Mark 7:9-13). "Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men." The tradition of Corban — the practice of declaring property dedicated to God in order to avoid the obligation of caring for one's parents — was a legal fiction that violated the fifth commandment while maintaining the appearance of religious devotion. Christ named it as hypocrisy and identified the pattern: "thus invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down."
Jesus hated sham. The person who performs religion without being religious — who uses the forms of devotion to manage appearances rather than to honor God — was the specific object of Christ's most severe condemnation. Only hypocrites received his most pointed denunciation. He spoke to sinners, ate with them, and extended mercy to them; he spoke to the self-righteous performer of religion with the language of judgment.
IV. Jesus' Indignation
The most directly relevant text: Mark 3:5.
"After looking around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, He said to the man, 'Stretch out your hand'" (Mark 3:5). The verse preserves the coexistence of two emotions in the same moment: anger and grief. The anger was directed at the Pharisees who were watching to accuse rather than to worship; the grief was at the hardness of heart that their watching revealed. The two emotions were not in conflict — the anger was the expression of the grief; Christ was angry because he was grieved.
"Be angry, and yet do not sin" (Eph. 4:26). The instruction affirms that anger is not inherently sinful — the question is what produces the anger and what the anger produces. Christ's anger in Mark 3 was not the anger of wounded pride, of personal offense, of frustrated desire. It was the anger of a person who loved the man with the withered hand and found, in the Pharisees' calculation, the will to leave the man suffering rather than be inconvenienced.
Nothing stirred his soul to righteous indignation but sin. Not poverty, not political injustice, not the social disruptions of the Roman occupation — all of these he addressed with the gospel rather than with anger. But sin — the specific destruction of the person that sin produces — stirred the indignation that Mark 3:5 records.
Jesus hated sin because it ruined man whom he loved. The logic is the logic of love: the person who loves another person hates what destroys that person. Christ's love for man was not sentimental; it was the love that went to the cross. The same love produced the anger of Mark 3:5.
George Matheson said: "There are times I do well to be angry, but I have mistaken the times." Not so with Jesus. Every instance of his anger was correctly placed — the temple cleansing, the woes against the Pharisees, the indignation at the hardness of heart before the withered man. He never mistook the time.
Application
The portrait of Christ that this sermon develops is both a correction and a commission.
The correction: the person whose Jesus is always gentle, always tolerant, always mildly accepting of whatever condition the person is in, has not yet read Mark 3 carefully enough. The Christ who calls us to take up the cross and follow him is the Christ who overturned the tables and called the Pharisees hypocrites to their faces. Both are the same person.
The commission: the conclusion of the outline is the sermon's destination. "The greatest possible attainment a man can make in this world is to become like Christ." Not the partial Christ of the gentleness sermons — but the whole Christ: his resistance to evil, his condemnation of sin, his denunciation of hypocrisy, his righteous indignation at the destruction that sin works in the people he loves. To become like this Christ is the highest aspiration available.
Conclusion
"The greatest possible attainment a man can make in this world is to become like Christ." The Christ this sermon has described — who resisted temptation without dallying, who drove the exploiters from his Father's house, who warned against pretense, who denounced the hypocrite in the house of God, who was angry and grieved at hardness of heart, who healed the man and looked on the Pharisees who wished he hadn't — this is the one worth becoming like. The imitation of Christ is not the cultivation of mournfulness; it is the formation of a person who loves what Christ loves and hates what Christ hates.
Invitation
The Christ who was angry at sin because sin ruined the man he loved is the same Christ who died for that man's sin. The anger and the cross are the same love operating at different points. The indignation of Mark 3:5 and the prayer of Luke 23:34 ("Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing") come from the same source.
Believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Repent. Confess his name. Be baptized for the remission of your sins (Acts 2:38). Enter the life of the one who hates what sin does to you — and who gave his life so that what sin does to you does not have the last word.
Word Study
| English Term | Greek Term | Basic Meaning | Usage in This Sermon | Sermon Significance | Key Texts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anger / Indignation | orgē | Settled wrath — the anger that results from a considered judgment, not a momentary reaction. Distinct from thymos (passionate, impulsive anger). | Used in Mark 3:5: "looking around at them with anger (met' orgēs)." | The word for Christ's anger is the deliberate, settled variety — not a flash of temper but a response to what has been observed and evaluated. The anger is appropriate to the object: hardness of heart that prefers a man's suffering to an inconvenient healing. | Mark 3:5; Eph. 4:26 |
| Hardness of heart | pōrōsis | Callousness, petrification — from pōros, a stone or callus. The condition of a heart that has hardened against what it should feel. | Used in Mark 3:5 for what Christ was grieved about: "grieved at their hardness of heart." | The word describes a progressive condition: repeated refusal to respond to the truth produces a callousness that eventually makes response impossible. The Pharisees' hardness of heart was not original — it was the product of repeatedly refusing the evidence they had seen. | Mark 3:5 |
| Woe / Denouncement | ouai | An exclamation of grief and warning — expressing both lament and judgment. | Used in Matt. 23 for each of the seven woes against the scribes and Pharisees. | The word is not primarily an expression of anger — it is an expression of grief that carries the weight of judgment. The "woe" is what you say about a person whose condition is lamentable and whose judgment is certain. Christ's denunciation of hypocrisy is characterized by this compound of grief and warning. | Matt. 23:13, 15, 23 |
| Hypocrite | hypokritēs | An actor, a performer — one who plays a role rather than being what the role represents. | Used throughout Matt. 23 for the scribes and Pharisees whose outward religious performance did not correspond to their inward reality. | The theatrical origin of the word reveals the structure of the sin: the hypocrite is performing religion for an audience rather than practicing it before God. The performance is convincing enough to deceive the human observers; it does not deceive God. | Matt. 23:13; Mark 7:6 |
Scripture Interlock Table
| Theme | Boles' Outline | Supporting Scripture |
|---|---|---|
| Christ healed on Sabbath — and the anger that followed | Text | Mark 3:1-6 |
| Temptations in the wilderness — resistance to evil | I.1 | Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-12 |
| First cleansing of the temple | I.3 | John 2:13-17 |
| Second cleansing of the temple | I.4 | Matt. 21:12-13 |
| "Better a millstone than causing a little one to stumble" | II.1 | Luke 17:2 |
| Warning against the scribes' pretense | II.2 | Luke 20:45-47 |
| Seven woes to scribes and Pharisees | III.1 | Matt. 23:13-29 |
| "Tradition of men invalidating word of God" — Corban | III.2 | Mark 7:9-13 |
| "Be angry and sin not" — righteous indignation affirmed | IV.2 | Eph. 4:26 |
| Baptism for remission — entry into the life of the one who hates sin | Invit. | Acts 2:38 |
---
Converted from H. Leo Boles, Outline 155. Primary text: Mark 3:1-6 (stated by Boles). OCR corrections: "ATIITUDE" → "ATTITUDE"; "emphasfr.-ing" → "emphasizing"; "Oily hypocrits" → "Only hypocrites"; "condeinnation" → "condemnation"; "UI." → "III." Doctrinal audit: Christ's anger in Mark 3:5 developed from the text — met' orgēs (with anger) + syllypoumenos (being grieved) are both present simultaneously, establishing that the indignation is the expression of grief, not the absence of it; the seven woes in Matt. 23 developed as public, named condemnation of the religious leadership — not softened; the distinction between Christ's treatment of sinners (mercy) and hypocrites (condemnation) developed carefully; the conclusion ("greatest attainment is to become like Christ") developed as the full Christ, not only the gentle Christ; invitation retains full obedient response (Acts 2:38).
