One Sabbath, when [Jesus] went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy. And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?" But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. And he said to them, "Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?" And they could not reply to these things." (Luke 14:1-6)

This sort of scene is not unfamiliar in the Gospel stories. Indeed, in Luke's narrative you get two such Sabbath controversies alongside each other, in chapters 13 & 14

What really struck me, as I read these two narratives side by side, was how Jesus really didn't engage at a theological level with his religious contemporaries at all.  Indeed, the truth is that Jesus almost never engaged in theological argument with anyone!  In scenes like the one above, Jesus' religious peers are focused on the religious issue of obedience to the law . Jesus seems to be more concerned with the needs of hurting people!

There was something remarkably secular - even irreligious - about Jesus and the way He conducted his ministry, and certainly that was the perception of the religious establishment of the time.