The talk today is about what Jesus seems to have meant by “compassion”. But as we know there is an immediate problem for any of us in any of the helping professions, dealing often with people in pain and stress. “Compassion” has problems for teachers, lawyers, doctors and nurses, counsellors, ministers… and so on… where it is necessary to have protocols, boundaries, and to know how to maintain objectivity… for the sake of the practitioner as much as for the client or patient. My own view is that, first, we do need to understand how Jesus saw “compassion”, and then to work out our own response to this in our own situations, as we are able.
Last week we heard how this Jewish man emerged in Galilee,
writes Mark, proclaiming the good news of
God. And we are asking, what is this
Good News? why is it Good News?
Moreover, we are asking this partly from the perspective of our senior
years, which some of us know a lot about – the years when we have learned to be
inwardly suspicious of candy-floss faith and things that don’t add up, and
believing six impossible things before breakfast.
Jesus, wrote Marcus Borg, was unimpressed with any religion
of fulfilling obligations and measuring up.
He showed rather… a life of relationship with God… a life
centred in God. This life, Jesus
showed, is deeply sustained by prayer.
Now, we find, repeatedly in the gospel records, Jesus showed
and taught compassion. This is an important word, and we need to be
clear what Jesus meant by it. He would frequently
have heard this word, compassion, in the Hebrew of the synagogue and the
scriptures of his people[1]. There are various Hebrew words more or less
meaning compassion, but the interesting one is racham, because this is also the word meaning “womb”, or “bowels”. Hebrew anatomy was not up to much at times, but
they were sure that our very deepest reactions, from anger to compassion, were
seated in the lower abdomen. Jesus shared
that culture and understanding. Moreover,
in the Greek of the Christian scriptures, for instance at the point where the
Good Samaritan comes across the wounded traveller, we are told he had compassion – and that Greek word
also[2] means
the gut, the viscera, the inward parts.
So, what is having compassion…? In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son, when
the young man returns home, Jesus says his father saw him from afar and had compassion, and ran… The essential thing for the father is
that it is now beyond blame, let alone punishment. That is not what the older brother thinks,
but the father will take upon himself what his son is suffering, including his
guilt, he will bear his son’s burden.
That is compassion. The English
word is from Latin and literally means to suffer with. It does not mean saying, “I know exactly how
you’re feeling”, because we don’t and we can’t.
It certainly doesn’t mean feeling sorry for someone. To have compassion is to bear pain. This father never felt inwardly, “I’m glad it
wasn’t me”… he wished it had been him instead.
I am sure you recognise compassion, then. We may be able to do precisely nothing
– that is frequently, if not usually the case.
But we see the pain and we are hurt too.
To be human is never to be weatherproof, and to be a disciple of Jesus
is never to be safe. To be capable of
compassion then does mean that we have lowered our self-protective mechanisms, we
have come to terms with pain and mortality and a deeply unfair world. All of this is a product of the prayer of
silence and stillness, as Jesus showed.
[1]
eg. I Kings 8:50; II Kings 13:23; Psalm
103:13. Hosea 1:6 where his wife Gomer’s
child is named Lo-Ruchamah, “Not
Pitied” – the name is a form of racham.
[2] τα
σπλαγχνα (splagchna) = heart and
bowels… innards.
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