By Fr. Roy Cimagala *
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.
* Chaplain Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
