WHEN Christ cured on a Sabbath a woman who had been crippled by an evil spirit for eighteen years, he was corrected by the synagogue leader for violating the law on the Sabbath. (cfr. Lk 13, 10-17) That was when Christ made the following clarification:
“Does not each one of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger and lead it out for watering? This daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now, ought she not to have been set free on the sabbath day from this bondage?”
I imagine that a simple exercise of common sense could easily see the point of Christ. But many times, we fall into the same predicament when we would just blindly follow the letter of the law without discerning the true spirit behind it.
Ideally, both the letter and the spirit of our laws should be in perfect harmony. But that is hardly the case in real life. The problem, of course, is that the articulation of our laws is conditioned and limited by our human powers that cannot fully capture the richness of human life, considering its spiritual and supernatural character that will always involve the intangibles and mysteries and the like.
That is the reason why we can go beyond, but not against, a particular law, when such law cannot fully express the concrete conditions of a particular case. This is when we can apply the principle of “epikeia.”
But first, we have to understand that our human laws are meant to lead us to our ultimate goal which is none other than to be with God, to be holy as God is holy, etc. Irrespective of their immediate temporal purpose, our laws should lead us little by little to become God’s image and likeness as we are meant to be. They in the end should serve the fundamental religious purpose of our life. That should always be the constant purpose of our laws.
All the other objectives of our laws, let alone their technical requirements, serve only as an occasion, a reason or motive for this ultimate purpose. Setting aside this ultimate purpose would empty our laws of their real legitimacy, making them rife for all kinds of manipulations and maneuverings by some shrewd men who may enjoy some power at a given moment.
We have to realize that it is Christ who ultimately gives the real meaning and purpose of our laws. We have to disabuse ourselves from the thought that our laws can be based only on our common sense, or on our own estimation of what is good and evil according to the values of practicality, convenience, etc., or on our traditions and culture, etc.
While these things have their legitimate role to play in our legal and judicial systems, we have to understand that they cannot be the primary and ultimate bases. It should be God, his laws and ways that should animate the way we make laws as well as the way we apply and live them. After all, being the Creator of all things, he is the one who establishes what is truly good and evil.
With the way today’s legal and juridical systems worldwide are drifting toward extreme positivism that simply bases itself on our perceptual experiences and people’s consensus and systematically shutting out any input from faith and divine revelation, we need to remind ourselves that God’s law is in fact the foundation, the inspiration and the perfection of our human laws./PN
