Obedience to the Smallest Part

Moses presents the Lord’s “statutes and decrees” to form over time a chosen people liberated to embrace a truly good life in the wise and loving plan of God.  Jesus Christ has come not to abolish this movement but to fulfill it.  In so doing, He Himself decrees:  “Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” 

To an outsider literally “unaccustomed” to Jewish belief and practice, such a proposal would seem a crushing burden, incapable of observance.  Even if we rightly see Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection as ushering in the “passing away” of “heaven and earth” as we have come to know them, thus freeing us from the plethora of ancillary Levitical precepts, it is well worth contemplating the joy---and even the necessity---of attentiveness to the “smallest part of a letter.”

As I have explained in previous meditations on this blog, the post-surgical therapeutic protocol for the on-going stabilization and healing of my jaw is complex, exacting, and repetitive.  Five times a day, I must unhook the rubber bands from my splint, do my specifically calibrated TMJ exercises, eat certain foods while avoiding others, ingest multiple medications and supplements, and follow a strict regimen of oral hygiene before anchoring my splint in place again with new rubber bands---all on a specified timetable.  The whole span of my waking life revolves unceasingly around this ritual.  I must think in advance of where I can and cannot go, and what provisions I must bring with me.

Included in my kit of medical obligations are two sets of orthodontic elastics labeled “A” and “C.”  The “A” rubber bands are 1/8 of an inch and hold the splint on my upper teeth; I must put two of these on, five times a day.  The “C” rubber bands are 3/16 of an inch and connect the splint to both the upper and lower teeth; I must put six of these on (initially it was eight), five times a day.  There are thirty separate hooks on the various brackets of the braces in my mouth, and the elastics must always be connected to specific hooks.  My informal calculations estimate that in the full nine months of my recovery, I will have performed approximately 44,400 hookings and unhookings of tiny stretchable circles over the metal and plastic in my mouth.  One spiritual result of this medical regimen is that I shall never read the Book of Leviticus in the same way again!

Without expecting it, I have developed a much greater sympathy for the Mosaic “statutes and decrees.”  They were, after all, intended not simply to restore a single injured part of one person’s body but to shape and transform a whole culture and allow for its survival over the course of centuries and millennia. In some respects, I have not only “gotten used to” my new and strange form of life; I have actually begun to interiorize its obligations in such a way that the observance of the doctor’s therapeutic plan for me really has become easy and prompt, if not yet always joyful.  How much more so must it be for the people the Lord first chose to be His own.

Although the Risen Christ has in the Paschal Mystery brought the law of Moses to its completion and liberated us from the onerous tangle of its prescriptions and proscriptions, He has nonetheless freed us for the Christian life of grace.  This new life entails---as St. Thérèse of Lisieux so delicately yet pointedly and exactingly puts it---“doing little things with great love.”  Hooking and unhooking---daily attaching ourselves to what saves and detaching ourselves from what damns---we are even more strictly obliged to follow the Way of the Cross, walking each step with the Lord through the little things.  Small as one of the thorns on His Head or as great as the span of His crucified and risen embrace of all things, our whole life is ultimately kept in His loving observance.  He remains forever the Alpha and Omega, both the Law’s beginning and its end.