Checks and Balances

Monday of the Twenty third Week in Ordinary Time
Readings for Monday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time[1]

Reading 1, 1 Cor 5:1-8 Responsorial Psalm, Ps 5:5-6, 7, 12 Gospel, Lk 6:6-11

Reflection:

Jesus continues to heal all those sick or suffering who are brought to him and have faith; today it is the man with the withered hand. In spite of the clear trap by his enemies, Jesus performs the cure in apparent violation of the laws about doing anything that could be construed as work on the Sabbath. At least in the eyes of the Scribes and Pharisees present, healing the sick fell into this category. Why else would the scripture say, after he performed this miraculous work, would they have been enraged. Perhaps it was because, Jesus first interpreted their Laws somewhat differently than they had intended.

Let’s look at the logic from their side:

Healing must be work.
Work is prohibited by Mosaic Law on the Sabbath.
Healing is therefore prohibited on the Sabbath.

It was simple. The Pharisees were scrupulous about the Law and its observance. They had already encountered this man before and new he had different views about the Law (his disciples picked grain and ate it on the Sabbath!). Here they were in very solid ground, in the Synagogue, on the Sabbath. What does Jesus do? He uses different irrefutable logic;

“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?”

They were trapped. Jesus had reinterpreted the act of healing from “work” to “good” and they could not contradict him. But they didn’t have to like it.

In addition to what we see in the Gospel relative to legal issues, Paul in his First letter to the Corinthians is dealing with a problem that may actually be related. It seems that the members of the Church of Corinth have a situation where they have been taking the Lord’s law of love in a direction distinctly different from what Jesus intended. They were tolerating, even boasting about laxity of some moral virtue. Today we see Paul reining them in and correcting them.

It is this combination of points that is important to us. Jesus has the authority to interpret the Law of Moses because he is the Only Son of God, who gave Moses the law in the first place and knows the original intent. That does not mean that anyone can simply interpret what Jesus says any way they like it. What happened in Corinth all those years ago is a perfect example. Someone in Corinth who was part of the Christian community there apparently took a real shine to his stepmother and started carrying on a physical relationship with her. They justified it using as support the love and compassion the Lord taught. Left uncorrected, that group would have found a very easy road to the land of the dead.

We have seen, are seeing, examples of that same practice today. Without allegiance to a central authority, small Christian communities can interpret Holy Scripture any way they want. They can take the smallest fragment and claim that they are “following what the bible teaches”. Without standards and safeguards the permutations are endless. It is a very dangerous situation for all of Christianity and it is just a miracle that more situations like Waco, Texas and the Mormons standards of polygamy have not occurred (The good news in the case of the Mormons is at least they do not claim to be Christian.).

We are not saying that all those who do not give allegiance to the Catholic Church are immoral or that they do not accomplish good things, we simply see the huge danger in operating outside the authority of a central structure which has checks and balances to insure that a prayerful response is given to interpretation and implementation of Christ’s teaching. Let us pray, today, on the 5th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, that the unity of all Christians may once more be achieved.

Pax

[1] Note; I have discovered that the link to the readings for the day go away when the USCCB Calendar drops the month in which the reading took place (this means that, for archival or reference purposes, the readings are not easily found. I also discovered that I cannot simply copy the readings from that site since they are protected by copy write. While I have written to the ICEL for permission to publish the full text, the best I am able to do for now is give the citations from the lectionary for later use.