Caught in a Trap

The Gospels record many instances where the religious authorities of the day tried to test and trap Jesus into crossing the line.  They suspected that he was somehow a heretic, but he was popular with the people because he could heal people and because his message of the Kingdom what with the Beatitudes and the whole last being first thing tended to resonate with the people who felt the weight of oppression on their necks.  They knew they had to get him to say things that they could use to nail him (sorry for that pun).  These things had to be clear violations that everyone sort of had to understand and agree were bad news.  Sabbath breaking was apparently their best weapon, because Jesus and his disciples appeared to flaunt it on many occasions.  This turned out to be less than ideal though, because even in this Jesus used an appeal to the situation of the common people; namely that they did not always have the luxury not working on the Sabbath.  They had livestock that needed fed and tended, they had things that needed to be done, and they did not have the wealth to simply pay for others to do it so that they could keep the Sabbath.
The Pharisees technically caught Jesus breaking the Sabbath, but he used compassion to present them with a conundrum that they could not defeat and still seem like the good guys.  They could not very well say that they truly wished for their fellow humans to continue being blind or crippled in some way, just because it was the Sabbath.  They could not politically maintain a rigid interpretation of the Sabbath keeping standard without sacrificing the respect of the people.
This always happens to people who are trying to maintain standards (moral or cultural) that conflict with deeper ethical principles.  The ethical principles that Jesus was operating under were: love God, love others.  Pretty simple, but problematic for the Pharisees who were mostly willing to sacrifice the second principle in favor of the first, or what they thought was the first.  Jesus was making a connection though, between loving God and loving others, establishing that it is no longer a tenable position to love God kicking his children in the teeth and kneeling on their throats.
We see this sort of dissonance on the center stage of many of our cultural tragedies.  It is clear and visible that the hatred of LGBTQ people has become toxic, what happened in Orlando was perpetrated by a Muslim pledging himself to ISIS, because within that stream of fundamentalist religion Homosexuality is an affront to the will of Allah.  Honestly though, he very well could have been Christian, there is enough of that floating around our pond.  We are all quick to run up the rainbow flags this week, but last week we were all up in arms about transgender people going tinkle in the next stall and conflating homosexuality and transgender identity with pedophilia.  I'm not saying you can't still consider homosexuality to be a sin and also be sad about the victims in Orlando, I'm just pointing out that you need to take account of the dissonance that is created by your "biblical" interpretation which labels people as "abominations," and then wondering how anyone might be so misguided as to start mowing down the abominations.  You have dehumanized people, which is by the standards set forth in the sermon on the mount, tantamount to murdering them.  Eugene Peterson's Message translation of Matthew 5: 22, "The simple moral fact is that words kill."
Words like, "abomination," and "sinner," spoken without an offer of grace or love. Words like "judgment," and "repent," without the promise of forgiveness or the simple connection of relationship where that means something. Words that dehumanize others, lead to a toxicity in our culture that can and does manifest as violent acts.  The words of racism, discrimination, hatred and bigotry are demonic tools.  If you think you can use them and control them, as a certain Presidential candidate has been doing, you are fooling yourself.
The rhetoric that is used every day on the news is inflammatory, the political discourse has become toxic, and there are far too many people out there, poorly educated and psychologically unbalanced, who simply cannot sort that all out for themselves.  The demonic influence can come from ISIS or the Westboro Baptist Church, it can come from talking heads on the television or from that angry guy down at the VFW or the local bar.  Too often it can come from people in positions of authority, from Pastors, Imams, Congresspeople, leaders of the state, and often they don't even realize how toxic they are becoming.  As Goethe said through Mephistopheles: "Not even if he had them by the neck, I vow, would ere these people scent the devil!"
It would seem to me then, the Devil does have us by the neck, and indeed we don't scent it and seem hell bent on denying it even when our noses are being rubbed in it.  50 dead bodies gives us pause, but in a week we will be back to "normal" arguing about bathrooms again, and the demonic fingers will tighten just a bit more.