Jesus looked at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart. In Ezekiel 36:22ff, God speaks to the people of Israel through the prophet [Ezekiel], expressing sorrow at what had become of them. The children of Israel had constantly disgraced the name of their God by not living to the terms of the covenant as they had agreed. God had had enough of them, and for the sake of God's holy name, God had made a decision to act. Among the things God was promising to do was to remove the people’s hearts of stone in order to replace them with hearts of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26), for their hearts had become like stones, hard and incapable of any feeling. God intended to replace such hearts with ones that could bleed, hearts that could feel pain (and thus sympathize with the pain of others). With such new hearts, God hoped that the community would once again honor the terms of the covenant they had made with God, and God's holy name would be restored to its former glory.
In our Gospel reading today, we encounter a very angry Jesus. Jesus’ anger was directed at the blatant display of hardness of heart. For despite the many times God had pleaded for tender hearts full of mercy, it was apparent that the pleas fell on deaf ears. Inside a Synagogue where Jesus had gone for worship, there happened to be present a man who had a shriveled hand. When Jesus saw him, he had pity on him and was moved to restore him to wholeness. But before he could do that, he made a little “conversation” with the Pharisees who were closely monitoring every move Jesus was making. The Pharisees were particularly interested to see whether Jesus was going to breach the sacredness of both the Sabbath and the Synagogue by healing the man. Because of the hardness of their hearts, they were not able to show any feelings of empathy towards the man. To them, it was far more important not to violate the holiness of the Sabbath than to heal a fellow human being. They could not understand why Jesus had to heal the man on a Sabbath. They had become so much concerned with their rituals and religious observances that they had forgotten about God's law: the law of love.
While Jesus’ anger was prompted by the closed mind-set of the Pharisees, he was moved to heal the man out of love. He did not walk in to the trap the Pharisees were setting for him, as they so thought. For Jesus himself was an upholder of the law (otherwise he would not have been in the Synagogue on a Sabbath). However, he understood better than the Pharisees the essence of the Sabbath.