My Mustache Didn’t Touch the Ground

A Tamil proverb speaks of a proud man who talked arrogantly and never did anything culturally inappropriate or crude. He was a proper gentleman, and everyone knew it. But one day, to his embarrassment, he accidentally tripped and fell. Immediately, he jumped up, straightened himself, and said, “But my mustache didn’t touch the ground.”

Some people find it difficult to apologize or say that they were wrong. Their pride gets in their way. In the process, they miss out on great things in life.

Once again, Jesus was in a synagogue on a sabbath. This time, the Pharisees joined with the supporters of Herod and his family, the Herodians, and brought a man with a withered hand to test Jesus if he would heal him on that sabbath so that they could accuse him of breaking the law, i.e., working on a sabbath (Mark 3:1–2). Knowing their hearts, the Lord Jesus asked the man with the withered hands to stand in the middle of the synagogue and asked the Pharisees and Herodians if it was permissible to do good or evil, to save life or kill on a sabbath (3:3–4a).

They knew the answer because their oral tradition taught that if a sheep fell into a pit on a sabbath, they could lift it out of the pit and save its life (Matt 12:11). This was after having a strict restriction of not building, burning, carrying, chain-stitching, combing, cooking, demolishing, dyeing, erasing, extinguishing, finishing, grinding, harvesting, kneading, knotting, marking, planting, plowing, reaping, selecting, sewing, shaping, shearing, sifting, skinning, slaughtering, smoothing, spinning, tanning, tearing, threshing, trapping, untying, warping, washing, weaving, winnowing, and writings – the 39 things they couldn’t do on a sabbath! Each of these had further subcategories. Washing, for example, included washing or bleaching a garment, removing any spot of stain from clothing, or wringing out a wet garment. Their sabbath laws covered a total of 200 pages! Yet, saving a sheep that fell into a pit was acceptable since doing good and saving a life were permissible on a sabbath. When Jesus asked if it was permissible to heal the sick man, they were silent (Mark 3:4b). They knew they were caught but were too proud to acknowledge it as so – “My mustache didn’t touch the ground.”

That brought an array of emotions in the Lord.

“Looking around at them in anger, overwhelmed by grief because of the callousness of their hearts, he said to the man: stretch out your hands. And he was healed” (3:5)

Instead of changing their mind, those who knew it was permissible to save a life but not to kill a life went out and planned together how they might hand Jesus over to destroy him (3:6)! There's a settled difference in their thoughts. Jesus had asked them about killing – apokteino – a life, and they planned to destroy – apoollumi – him. Whereas the first word was very specific to death, the second word was much broader, giving the impression that they might not have wanted him dead as much as destroyed, i.e., to ruin his reputation, destroy his fame, and remove his power. Seeing their calloused hearts, Jesus became angry and grieved.

Hatred can blind a soul. Their hatred for Jesus’s style of giving life on sabbaths was so blinding that they didn’t even want a person to be healed and have an abundance of life. It makes me wonder what I hate so much that it makes me blind to the truth.