Too much of a good thing

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 1-6) recounts another clash between Jesus and the Pharisees. Buried as they always were in their own perfectionism, the Pharisees had lost the capacity to see that it is the higher laws that bring life to the lower laws, and that even they made exceptions in certain cases of necessity. Not even they attained the rigorist standards they hurled at the feet of Jesus.

But there are arguably two striking and distinct matters that make this particular gospel different from other similar incidents. In the first case, it is easy to miss the irony of Jesus’ question: is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?  After all, why does He not ask the more immediate and the more practical question: is it possible heal on the Sabbath (or indeed on any other day)? Simply because the possibility of His doing so is beyond doubt. How many miracles has he already worked by this point in his mission? Too many to be counted or even recounted in all the books of the world, according to St John. The possibility, then, is beyond doubt, not only in Jesus’ eyes but even in the eyes of the Pharisees too. Thus, in one fell swoop, Jesus confronts their hardness of heart by assuming they accept His power and gives them a chance to step back from their own rigorist perversity. What else could we ask of a Saviour but that He not fail to confront us in our waywardness? If Jesus dialogues with sinners – and let us understand this correctly: the Pharisees were sinners like everyone else – He always stands ready with the surgeon’s scalpel, ready to cut out from their hearts the poison of sin. If Jesus skewers the Pharisees’ hypocrisy in this conversation, it is only in the interests of healing their hearts.

The second striking detail in their gospel vignette is the illness from which the man is suffering. Dropsy is an outdated medical concept. Nowadays we would see this not as an illness in itself, but as a symptom: the symptom of oedema. Jesus cures the man, and in that instant, we see again the power of the Saviour to heal physical ills. Yet what is the spiritual meaning of dropsy? In the ancient world, oedema was considered a sign or symbol of wealth and ambition. Oedema can be associated paradoxically with great thirst, even though the body becomes swollen with fluid retention. We can note here the appropriateness of Jesus’ challenge about rescuing an animal that has fallen down a well. The man with the dropsy is almost literally stranded in the well of his own body.

But we might discern something else in the condition of dropsy: the dangerous excess of any good quality, or rather the presence of some good quality in the wrong place. After all, water is vital to life, as virtue is vital to our spiritual good. Yet, water needs to be held by the body in a particular way. Oedema holds the fluid in all the wrong places. In like manner, all the virtues need to be exercised under the guidance of prudence, even in most cases the virtue of love, although, in the end, it is the virtue of love which gives even prudence its overall direction, even as prudence dictates how love is expressed. What unites them in the Christian soul is an overarching wisdom, the gift of the Holy Spirit by which the Lord directs His children by the highest principles of insight and the deepest forces of His love. Only the lover sings, says St Augustine, but in a way only the lover sees.

The person with spiritual dropsy, however, is the one who turns love into sentimentality or prudence into undue caution. Spiritual oedema is the imposture of spiritual good by excess. Spiritual oedema would turn faith into credulity, hope into presumption, mercy into corrosive permissiveness, and generosity into thoughtless extravagance. Under the influence of spiritual oedema, obedience becomes servility, zeal becomes fanaticism, modesty becomes prudishness, and fraternal correction becomes censoriousness. In all these distortions, the true nature of virtue seems to escape the soul more and more until it can offer only a parody of what it is as a Christian to be remade in the image and likeness of the Son. Now, we are called to the good, but only the good of which man is capable with the grace of God. Furthermore, God calls us to Himself but according to our different measures as individuals, for who we are or can be is already His work, reflecting in myriad ways the infinite distinctions of His Eternal Beauty. Even if we are all called to resemble Him, we do so in our own way, not as clones in a robotic army of uniform perfectionism.

In the end, Jesus cures the man with the dropsy, reminding his Pharisee listeners that even they would rescue an animal from a well on the Sabbath. Who, then, is the rescuer if not Jesus Himself - Jesus in whose grace we are all made partakers, as St Paul tells the Philippians today?

And it is my prayer for you, says St Paul, that your love may abound more and more, with all knowledge and all discernment.

Let us love to excess, he might have added, but let us be the excess that we alone are called to.