Gospel of Luke. William Barclay

in order to keep these rules and regulations.

      Note two things. First, for the scribes and Pharisees these rules were a matter of life and death; to break one of them was deadly sin. Second, only people desperately in earnest would ever have tried to keep them, for they must have made life supremely uncomfortable. It was only the best people who would even make the attempt.

      Jesus had no use for rules and regulations like that. For him, the cry of human need superseded all such things. But to the scribes and Pharisees he was a law-breaker, a bad man who broke the law and taught others to do the same. That is why they set themselves against him and in the end brought about his death. The tragedy of the life of Jesus was that those who were most in earnest about their religion drove him to the cross. It was the irony of things that the best people of the day in the end were responsible for his crucifixion.

      From this time on there was to be no rest for him. Always he was to be under the scrutiny of hostile and critical eyes. The opposition had crystallized and there was but one end.