The spirit of the law

This is my homily for this weekend, the 4th Sunday of Lent.  This year we are in Cycle B (the Mark / John cycle of readings), but because of RCIA, our parish is using the Cycle A readings for the Scrutiny Sundays.  So this homily refers to the story of the man born blind, and the Old Testament reading from 1 Samuel in which Samuel visits Jesse of Bethlehem and anoints David as king.

One way to engage with a Gospel incident or parable is to consider the characters, and decide which character is you.  For example, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, you may decide that you are the traveler who was beset by robbers.  Or you’re the Samaritan who comes to his aid.  Or perhaps the innkeeper who tends to his injuries.

Imagine my surprise and to realize that, in today’s miracle story, I seem to be one of the Pharisees. 

I’m a rule-follower.  Give me a law, a regulation, a corporate policy to observe, and chances are good that I’m going to observe it.  I’ve found that life is easier if I stay between the painted lines.  So by and large, that’s what I do: I follow the rules.  I don’t cheat on my taxes.  When I travel on business, I fly the company-preferred airlines and stay in the hotels my company wants me to stay in.  I take my meds every day.  When I was a kid, I brought a sack lunch to school every day; at lunchtime I never ate my dessert until I had first eaten my sandwich and apple, because my mother had drilled into me that those were the rules.  There were other kids at the lunch table who’d gleefully eat the cookies first and then decide if they were still hungry enough to eat the sandwich.  I was certain they were going to roast in hell. 

As adults, my wife Therese and I have purchased village vehicle stickers for every vehicle we’ve ever owned as residents of Arlington Heights.  We purchase them every year, like clockwork.  A couple of times, I’ve gone to the Village Hall on New Year’s Eve and waited in line to get the stickers in person, just to make sure they’d be on our windshields in time for the New Year.  So we were shocked to read in the newspaper a few years ago that our village board of trustees was considering doing away with the vehicle stickers.  The reason was that apparently thousands of Arlington Heights residents don’t bother to purchase them, seemingly with few or no consequences.  The story also reported that Buffalo Grove, Wheeling, Schaumburg and other nearby suburbs had discontinued their vehicle stickers, for the same reason.  I wasn’t sure whether I should feel outraged that there are so many vehicle sticker scofflaws, or foolish that I was enough of a sucker to keep paying for the stickers every year.

Whether I’m morally obligated to purchase vehicle stickers, which amount to a tax on each automobile, is an interesting question – it’s an example of the intersection of morality and the law.  We don’t have time to pursue the morality of vehicle stickers this morning, but those considerations of morality and the law bring us to our Gospel story.

In today’s episode, about the man born blind, Jesus performs a miracle that ignites a legal conflict between him and his enemies.  The Pharisees in today’s passage apparently were rule-followers.  They considered themselves the true arbiters of the Mosaic Law.  By their lights, this Jesus of Nazareth, in performing this miracle, had incidentally violated several provisions of the Law.  Yet how could anyone not from God perform such a wondrous sign?  The Gospel tells us that they were divided among themselves: they couldn’t reconcile this sign from Jesus with their understanding of the Law.

Caught in the middle of this conflict is the man born blind who now can see.  Throughout this episode, he clings with persistence, even in the face of intimidation by the enemies of Jesus, to the simple facts of his case: “he put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and now I can see.”  The Pharisees in the story can’t make that stubborn fact fit their interpretation of the Law.  Perhaps they should have viewed that difficulty as an invitation to revisit their understanding of the Law – as an opportunity to open their eyes, because one with authority over the Law was in their midst.  But instead they chose to cling to their blindness by making the stubborn fact go away – they ejected the man born blind from their midst.  They chose blindness over sight.

If you think that we don’t have choices today between seeing and blindness when it comes to morality and our laws, you probably just haven’t had a chance to think about it yet.  Here are a couple of quick examples that come to mind of conflict between the unjust letter of the law and the just spirit of the law. 

One of the Ten Commandments states, “Thou shalt not steal.”  Yet according to Catholic social teaching, if a person without any money is starving, or his children are starving, and nobody will give him food to eat, he may steal a loaf of bread from someone who has more than enough.  That theft of a loaf of bread would violate the letter of the law.  In colonial times, it may even have been a hanging offense.  But a starving man taking a loaf of bread would not violate the spirit of our moral law, for the spirit of that law is that God gave us the goods of the earth, including the grain that makes our bread, so that all may have enough to eat.  The true violator of the law is the one who has more than enough but refuses to share with those who don’t have enough.

Here’s a less hypothetical example: you probably have heard of the plight of the Dreamers – immigrants who were brought to this country illegally while they were young children by their parents.  It is generally acknowledged that Dreamers make positive contributions to our society.  It would be better for them and better for our society if they would be permitted to stay.  Yet the letter of our human law would state that they should be arrested and deported.  But the Catholic Church says that the letter of that law is unjust.  Our church says that would it be unjust and cruel to deport the Dreamers to a country of birth which they do not know and in which they may not have a family or friends or a support network of any kind.  Our bishops call on our president and lawmakers to rewrite our immigration laws to bring the letter of our human law into conformity with the spirit of our moral law, who is the Spirit of Jesus.

Finally, I’d note that Pope Francis has shown a number of times that he is more interested in the spirit of the law than the letter of the law, even when it comes to church law.  He made us sit up and think a couple of years ago when he released his document on the family, Amoris Laetitia, in which he stated that there can be circumstances in which someone who divorced and remarried without getting an annulment first may be allowed to receive communion.  We can’t go into all the details here, but suffice it to say that Francis doesn’t want his clergy to simply repeat the letter of church laws without having a sense of the spirit of God that underlies those laws. 

In all these examples, the just spirit of the law, which is the spirit of Jesus, in fact that same Holy Spirit which rushed upon David in our first reading, takes precedence over the letter of the law.  The laws and rules that guide our daily lives are so familiar to us, and following them is so habitual, that it can be difficult to discern whether or not they are just.  But when we become citizens of the kingdom of heaven, Jesus opens our eyes little by little, and bit by bit we learn to see through the letter of the law to see whether its spirit is the Spirit of Jesus.