This is Work?

So I was looking at the Gospel reading for today:

On a certain sabbath Jesus went into the synagogue and taught, and there was a man there whose right hand was withered.The scribes and the Pharisees watched him closely to see if he would cure on the sabbath so that they might discover a reason to accuse him. But he realized their intentions and said to the man with the withered hand, “Come up and stand before us.” And he rose and stood there. Then Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?”
Looking around at them all, he then said to him, “Stretch out your hand.”
He did so and his hand was restored. But they became enraged and discussed together what they might do to Jesus.

What I find particularly quirky about this reading is that the priests are trying to catch Jesus breaking the Sabbath by curing people. Now my understanding has always been that it is supposed to be a day of rest from labor, so the priests must have seen Christ's healings as some form of work. It isn't unusual for Christ physically to do something in the process of healing, like apply mud to a blind man's eyes to restore sight. It isn't implausible to imagine this as some kind of "work," since there is a physical aspect to it. In the reading above, however, Christ doesn't "do" anything at all other than tell another person to stretch his hand (and if merely issuing and obeying commands was a problem they would have been enraged when he asked the person with the withered hand to come forward).
If you wanted to take this to another level, though, you could bring in source theory of the Old Testament. it's perhaps worth noting that the creation story which involves God making man out of clay through a physical process is considered to be from the older, Yahwist tradition, whereas the version of creation where God merely speaks and creation orders itself to His will is often attributed to the priestly tradition (which is also, I might add, concerned with the aforementioned Sabbath). If you consider it from this angle, it makes more sense why the command would be work, since God spends most of Genesis 1 telling creation what to do, and Genesis 2:2 says God "rested from all the work he had undertaken."