Jesus looked at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart. In Ezekiel 36:22ff, God speaks to the people of Israel through the prophet [Ezekiel], expressing sorrow at what had become of them. The children of Israel had constantly disgraced the name of the Lord their God by not living according to the terms of the covenant as they had agreed. God had had enough of them, and for the sake of God's holy name, God had made a decision to act. Among the things God was promising to do was to remove from the children of Israel their hearts of stone in order to replace them with hearts of flesh (cf. Ezekiel 36:26). Their hearts had become like stones: hard, devoid of life, and incapable of having any feeling. God intended to replace such hearts with hearts of flesh, that is, hearts that could bleed and feel pain (and thus sympathize with the pain of others). With such new, fleshy, and living hearts, God hoped that the community would once again honor the terms of the covenant they had made with God, and by doing so, restore to its glory the holy name of God. 
In the Gospel reading for today, we encounter a visibly angry Jesus. Jesus’ anger was directed at the blatant display of hardness of heart by the religious authorities. For despite the many times God had pleaded for tender hearts full of mercy, it was apparent that God’s pleas had fallen on deaf ears. Inside the Synagogue where Jesus had gone to worship, a man who had a shriveled hand was in attendance. When Jesus saw him, he had pity on him and was moved to restore him to wholeness. But before he could do that, he made a little “conversation” with the Pharisees who were closely monitoring every move Jesus was making. The Pharisees were particularly interested to see whether Jesus was going to breach the sacredness of both the Sabbath and the Synagogue by healing the man. Because of the hardness of their hearts, the Pharisees were not able to show any feelings of empathy towards the man. To them, it was far more important not to violate the holiness of the Sabbath (whatever that term meant to them) than to heal a fellow human being who had been bound by an illness his entire life. They could not understand why Jesus had to heal the man on a Sabbath. They had become so much concerned with their rituals and religious observances that they had forgotten about God's law: the law of love. 
While Jesus’ anger was prompted by the closed mind-set of the Pharisees, he was moved to heal the man out of love. He did not walk into the trap the Pharisees were setting for him, as they so thought. For Jesus himself was an upholder of the law (otherwise he would not have been in the Synagogue on a Sabbath). However, he understood better than the Pharisees the essence of the Sabbath: celebrating life. He healed the man because he understood that the Sabbath rest was instituted by God to celebrate fullness of life.