Of all of the qualities that the New Testomony ascribes to God, compassion is among the many most stunning.
Compassion has nothing to do with energy, with immortality or with immutability, which is what many individuals consider after they ponder God’s qualities. The Greek gods of fantasy who lived on Mt. Olympus had been outlined by many issues, however compassion was not excessive amongst them.
“For a lot of antiquity feeling the ache of others was thought to be a weak point,” John Dickson, a professor of biblical research and public Christianity at Wheaton School, instructed me. This involves full flowering within the Stoics, he mentioned, “on the grounds that this concerned permitting an exterior issue — the feelings or plight of one other — to regulate your individual internal life.”
Compassion, then again, is central to the Christian understanding of God. Compassion implies the capability to enter into locations of ache, to “weep with those who weep,” in keeping with the Apostle Paul, who was central each to the early conception of Christianity and to the thought of its underpinning in compassion.
Within the Hebrew Scriptures, we’re instructed many instances that God is compassionate. It’s on the middle of the Jewish conception of God. However for Christians, there may be an incarnational expression of that compassion. The embodiment of God in Jesus — the deity made flesh, dwelling amongst us — signifies that God each suffered and, crucially, suffered with others in a manner that was a seismic break with all that got here earlier than. Within the Gospels, we repeatedly learn of the compassion of Jesus for these struggling bodily and emotionally, for these “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
When a person bothered with leprosy got here to Jesus, begging on his knees to be healed, we’re told that Jesus, “moved with compassion, stretched out his hand and touched him, and mentioned to him, ‘I’m prepared; be cleansed.’” And he was.
That is a rare scene. These with leprosy had been thought-about not simply unclean, bodily and spiritually, however loathsome. Every thing they touched was viewed as defiled. They had been usually solid out from their villages, quarantined “exterior the camp.” Within the phrases of the famed Nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon, “They had been to all intents and functions, lifeless to all of the enjoyments of life, lifeless to all of the endearments and society of their mates.”
Individuals would keep away from contact with these bothered with leprosy. They had been seen by many as the item of divine punishment, the illness understood to be a visual mark of impurity. But within the account in Mark, Jesus not solely heals the person with leprosy; he additionally touches him. In doing so, Jesus defied Levitical regulation. He himself turned “unclean.” And he supplied human contact to an individual whom no different human would contact — and who had very seemingly not been touched in a really very long time.
Jesus’ contact was not crucial for him to heal the person of leprosy, however the contact might have been essential to heal the person of emotions of disgrace and isolation, of rejection and detestation.
Kerry Dearborn, professor emerita of theology at Seattle Pacific College, instructed me her college students discovered essentially the most shifting examples of Jesus’ compassion to be his responses to outsiders, particularly these deemed unworthy, unclean or unfit. “In taking up their ‘outsider standing’ with them,” Dr. Dearborn instructed me, “he mirrored his deep love and solidarity with them, and his willingness to undergo with them.” Jesus not solely healed them, she mentioned; he additionally took on their alienation.
Within the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, we’re instructed that Lazarus, the brother of Mary of Bethany and Martha, and a buddy of Jesus’ whom he beloved, was sick. By the point Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had died and had been entombed for 4 days. Each sisters had been grieving. Mary, when she noticed Jesus, fell at his toes weeping. “Lord, in case you had been right here, my brother wouldn’t have died,” she mentioned. We’re instructed Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”
“The place have you ever laid him?” he requested.
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied. And in keeping with verse 35, “Jesus wept.”
“Jesus wept” is the shortest verse within the Bible and in addition “essentially the most profound and highly effective,” the artist Makoto Fujimura instructed me. For him, these are “crucial two phrases within the Bible.”
And understandably so. Earlier in John 11, we’re instructed that Jesus knew he was going to lift Lazarus from the lifeless, which he did. So Jesus wasn’t weeping as a result of he wouldn’t see Lazarus once more; it was as a result of he was coming into into the struggling of Mary and Martha. Jesus was current with them of their grief, even to the purpose of tears, all of the whereas understanding that their grief would quickly be allayed.
My daughter Christine Wehner, who initially instructed to me that Jesus’ compassion can be a worthwhile matter to discover, instructed me, “Jesus wept as a result of Mary was earlier than him and her coronary heart was breaking — and consequently, his coronary heart broke, too.” The Psalms tell us that God is “near the brokenhearted”; on this case, Christine mentioned, “Jesus doesn’t simply take care of the brokenhearted; he joins them. Their grief turns into his in a outstanding act of affection.”
“Jesus ushered in a compassion revolution,” Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church, instructed me. Earlier than Jesus, compassion was primarily considered a weak point, he mentioned.
“When Jesus says he’s with us, that’s not a metaphor or a trite provide of ‘ideas and prayers,’” the pastor mentioned. “He’s actually in it with us.”
Dr. Dudley identified that in his struggling, Job says to God, “Do you might have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a mortal sees?” In different phrases, Have you learnt how arduous it’s to be human? “Due to Christmas,” Dr. Dudley instructed me, “God can legitimately say sure in a manner no different god in some other faith can.”
Renée Notkin, colead pastor of Union Church in Seattle, instructed me that “our each day invitation in residing is to be with individuals of their tales. After I take time to hear deeply and to hear past the phrases spoken to a different particular person’s coronary heart story, am I in a position to start to cry with them? Not downside fixing and never saying, ‘I do know what you imply’; slightly merely weeping alongside in shared humanity.”
As a Christian, my religion is anchored within the particular person of Jesus, who gained my coronary heart way back. It could be not possible to know me with out taking that under consideration. However generally my religion dims; God appears distant, his methods confounding. “Religion steals upon you want dew,” the poet Christian Wiman has written. “Some days you wake and it’s there. And like dew, it will get burned off within the rising solar of tension, ambitions, distractions.” And the rising solar of grief and loss, too. These issues don’t essentially destroy religion; in some instances, for some individuals, they’ll even deepen it. However they all the time change it.
Throughout instances of sorrow and instances of tears, when it seems like we’re “being damaged on the wheels of residing,” in the words of Thornton Wilder, there may be nice consolation in believing God empathizes with our struggling, having entered into struggling himself. However we additionally want his emissaries. We want individuals who see us and know us, who enter our tales. By means of their compassion and love, we really feel, I really feel — even when solely partly — God’s compassion and love. That doesn’t remove the storms from inside or with out. Nevertheless it makes higher room for pleasure within the journey.
Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) — a senior fellow on the Trinity Discussion board who served within the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — is a contributing Opinion author and the creator of “The Death of Politics: The way to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”
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