Luke sets the two Sabbath collisions side by side and preserves the concrete detail: the disciples plucked ears of grain, “rubbing them in their hands” (6:1). The rubbing is the point of the objection: in the tradition's categories of forbidden Sabbath labor (thirty-nine of them, listed in Mishnah Shabbat 7:2), plucking counted as reaping and rubbing out the kernels as threshing. Deuteronomy 23:25 expressly permits eating from a neighbor's standing grain, so theft was never the charge; the developing oral law's categories were. The full exposition is in this site's Matthew 12 note.

In the withered-hand scene that follows, the watchers stand on a real distinction of their own law: mortal danger overrides the Sabbath (Mishnah Yoma 8:6), but a chronic condition can wait a day. Jesus heals by a word, an act no category of labor can name, and puts the question that reframes the day itself: “Is it lawful on the sabbath days to do good, or to do evil? to save life, or to destroy it?”