“The Miracle of Compassion”
Luke 7:11-17
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
1/3/16
As
Jesus and his followers approach Nain, they converge with a funeral procession.
A young man has he died before his time. Sadder still, he has died before his
mother’s time. Already widowed, the woman now has no son. In the first century,
a good horse or ox holds more value than a man-less woman beyond child-bearing
years. Seeing this woman buried in a kind of living death, Jesus is helpless to
feel anything but compassion for her.
Now, a critical distinction: Compassion and pity are not the
same thing. Pity just stands there wringing its hands saying, “There but for
the grace of God go I.” Translation: “I sure am glad that’s not me.”
Pity
distances us from suffering. Because compassion means to suffer with another, true compassion is pitiless.
Jesus
incarnates God’s eternal compassion for the relentless suffering of humankind. In
Jesus, God suffers with those who have had their voices silenced and their
faces hidden, those who have had their very humanity stripped from them. God
even suffers with those who, by their own foolishness, make life difficult for
themselves and others. To show compassion is
to follow Jesus. It is to Love neighbor, and so, by definition, it is to Love
God.
This story in Luke 7 is not about the resurrection of human
flesh and bone. It is about the (and I use this word very carefully and deliberately
during the Christmas season) re-incarnating
miracle of compassion. Compassion reaffirms the holiness of a creature, and thus
of the creation. Without compassion, communities become nothing more than
crowds of self-serving competitors. When compassion dies, we all die; and our
widowed, childless spirit mourns.
In Jesus, God enters the living death of compassionless-ness.
Jesus touches our coffins, lays a re-animating hand upon us, and calls us to new
life. And when we rise, he returns us not just to our moms, but to that most
creative and redeeming work of the Holy Feminine. He returns us to the Mothering work of compassion.
It
was the summer of 2002. The youth mission trip to West Virginia was very much
like the ASP trips we have taken the last few years. Most of the kids were from
comfortable homes with families as stable as our fast-paced, over-committed,
entertainment-driven society tends to allow. One of the kids, I’ll call him
Brian, was a typical American church kid. He and his two younger sisters went
to church as frequently as their parents had the energy and desire to get them
there. And Brian found church tolerable enough because of a few friends. There
was plenty of pizza, too. The adult advisors thought a couple of boxes of
Domino’s made everything cool.
In
West Virginia, things began to change for Brian.
On this trip, each work crew was a random mix of kids from
different churches. Brian’s group was assigned to work on a home that had been
damaged by a flash flood. Brian knew only one of the kids in his group, but he
quickly made friends with the others as they cleaned debris from the yard, dug post
holes for a new deck, and splashed white paint on the old clapboard siding.
For
lunch each day, the group gathered on the screened-in front porch and ate with Miss
Vera, the woman who owned the house. Miss Vera was a widow of very modest means,
and though all her children were still alive, her nearest child lived four
hours away.
Miss
Vera welcomed the work crew like she was welcoming her own children home. She showed
deep and genuine interest in each of them. She asked about their families,
their hobbies, their favorite subjects in school. When Brian told Miss Vera
about his mom and dad, his sisters, and his life back in north Alabama, he felt this lady listening to him. It was
like she intended to write his biography.
At lunch on Thursday, the group gathered on the front porch.
As they talked and laughed over their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
thunder began to roll across the mountain tops and tumble down through the
narrow hollows. As it crept closer, the kids kept talking and laughing, but Brian
noticed that Miss Vera had gotten silent. Her mind had drifted far beyond the
front porch.
“Miss Vera?” said Brian. “Are you okay?”
The
others looked at the woman and saw the deep-creased tension on her face
“I’m okay, Honey,” she said.
Brian looked in the direction of the thunder and said, “Are
you remembering the storm?”
Miss Vera looked at Brian and smiled.
“Yes, Baby,” she said. “It happens every time the sky clouds
up.”
Miss Vera opened the gates of her memory and shared her story.
Deep in the tight folds of those steep, rugged mountains, the world had gone
black. Then came the rain on the metal roof, the shearing wind, the creek out
back swelling into an avalanche of water, rocks, trees, and earth. It all
became one terrifying roar.
“The
world was so dark and so loud,” she said. “It was like death. For a while, I felt
all alone in this whole earth.”
When
Miss Vera finished her story, Brian felt a bug crawling across his cheek. He
reached up to brush it off and was stunned to discover not a bug, but a tear. Embarrassed
at first, he began to realize something. He began to realize that he was
actually feeling what someone else felt. Miss Vera’ story had drawn him into
her experience, and her experience had drawn from his own heart, from his own
sixteen-year-old eye, a tear. Brian also realized that when he felt this
woman’s anguish, a new liveliness stirred within him.
Some of the other kids looked like they were feeling what he
felt. Others looked like they were trying to hide their own embarrassment. And
Brian felt that, as well.
What was happening? Why were all these people having this
kind of effect on him?
Jesus “came forward and touched the [coffin], and the
bearers stood still. And he said, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’ The dead man
sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.”
The miracle of compassion is the miracle of new life. It heals the death within us. It
revives us that we might live in the invigorating grace of the kingdom of God
even here, even now.
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