THE PROCRUSTEAN BED

THE PROCRUSTEAN BED
Homily for Tues of the 2nd Week in Ordinary Time, 17 Jan 2023,
Memorial of the holy Martyr St. Titus Brandsma, Mk 2:23-28
The Pharisees in today’s Gospel remind me of the Greek mythological character named Procrustes. He was a bed maker who made his bed first and then forced his prospective clients to fit into it. If they were too big for his bed, he solved the problem by simple chopping down the would-be clients’ body parts that did not fit. If they were too short, he simply tied both head and limbs and pulled them from both ends in order to fit his bed.
It is a ridiculous story, of course. But that is precisely Jesus’ point in today’s Gospel about the Pharisees’ reaction to the disciples picking a few ears of corn on a Sabbath, because they were hungry. The disciples were questioned for violating the no-work law on Sabbath day because they did some harvesting. And the common sense answer of Jesus to them was, “Because they were hungry”. I imagine Jesus sarcastically asking, “I suppose your Sabbath is not going to be restful if you are hungry, no?” And he gave the example of David and his men.
Jesus concludes with a principle which he draws from the story of creation: “The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. That is why the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” You can change the word Sabbath here and replace it with the Law, or Science, or Medicine, or even the State and the effect is the same.
Titus Brandsma landed in the concentration camp in Dachau and was eventually executed through lethal injection because he openly opposed the Nazi ideology of Hitler. His version of Jesus’ saying about Sabbath would have been: “The State was made for people, not people for the state.” Nazism imposed the “subordination of the individual to the state and the necessity of strict obedience to leaders.” It emphasized the inequality of individuals and “races” and “the right of the strong to rule the weak.”
I know that some people react