Compassion and mercy transcend the law

 

Jesus was having a Sabbath dinner with His biggest critics, the Pharisees.  Their main goal, as always, was to trap Him into breaking some law, to find out what else He was doing wrong.  And so they sat Jesus, the compassionate healer, behind a man afflicted with dropsy, known today as “edema.”   Would Jesus break the law and heal him, they wondered?  Would this be another chance to note an infraction of the rules by Jesus? (Luke 14:1-6)

Pulmonary edema, a condition brought on by heart failure, is the excess collection of watery fluid in the lungs.  The fluid collects in the many air sacs of the lung, making it difficult to breathe.  When the heart is not able to pump blood to the body efficiently, the amount of blood staying in the veins that take blood through the lungs to the left side of the heart increases.  As the pressure in these blood vessels increases, fluid is pushed into the air spaces in the lungs.  This fluid reduces normal oxygen movement through the lungs, which can lead to shortness of breath, and if untreated can lead to death.

A couple of years ago, I took a nasty fall while at work.  I bruised some ribs and experienced a severe shortness of breath for several weeks, having to recover at home, limiting my movements.  As I read the symptoms of “dropsy” as described above, it hit very close to what I felt those two weeks immediately after my fall.

So I can imagine the poor man with dropsy to be suffering from the symptoms just described.  I can imagine the Lord gazing at him with compassion, and then turning to the Pharisees reclining at table, and asking them, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?”  After the question, Luke writes, “. . . they remained silent.  He took the man, healed him, and dismissed him.”

Jesus answered His own question by healing the man.  The silence of the Pharisees confirmed that Jesus had communicated His position to them decisively; just as He concisely and pointedly stated it in Mark’s Gospel:  "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).  This turn of events reversed the situation, so that the Pharisees were now trapped, not Jesus.   They were caught in a dilemma, silent because they were unable to answer the Lord’s question.  If they said ‘Yes,’ they would seem to their followers to be lax in their strict interpretation of the law and to compromise their demand that others follow the letter of the law.  If they said ‘No,’ they feared their followers would accuse them of being cruel to the man in contrast to Jesus who was moved by compassion to mercifully cure him.  The Pharisees were frozen in legalism.  In this incident, their small-mindedness is confronted with the large-hearted love of God.

The point of the story, I think, is to realize that compassion and mercy transcend the law and fulfill it.  By His action, Jesus declared this to be the standard underlying the very purpose of the law.  In contrast to the Pharisaic vision of subservience to it, Our Lord provided a vision entirely different, giving priority over the law to the compassion and mercy which He gave and asked others to give throughout His public ministry.

I believe a major part of our mission today as Christians is to ardently pray and, wherever we can, to work for those who suffer greatly in our world: for the victims of global inequality and poverty, for example, or the victims of human trafficking and drug trafficking, of abuse to the earth and to the ecology of the human mind and heart, and of the victims of war.

Like the man with dropsy, we need to see them all with the compassionate eye of Jesus and to creatively develop ways to help them as much as we can with His merciful hand.  This gospel doesn’t ask whether something is legal or illegal.  It speaks to us as obedient sons and daughters of God Who is love, who want to follow in Our Lord’s footsteps, and so to be loving, caring, merciful, and forgiving—which is what God’s law in both the Old and New Testament is all about.