“And He Had Compassion for Them”
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
7/22/18
30The
apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught.
31He
said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a
while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. 32And
they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.
33Now
many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from
all the towns and arrived ahead of them. 34As he went ashore, he saw
a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep
without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.
53When
they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. 54When
they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, 55and
rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever
they heard he was. 56And wherever he went, into villages or cities
or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they
might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed. (NRSV)
In reading a
commentary on this passage last week, I came across something that made a lot
of sense to me. Douglas John Hall says that there are two “fundamental questions” percolating through all the rhetoric characterizing
today’s “global religious striving: (1) How does your God view the world?—the
basic theological question; and (2) How does your God ask you to view the world?—the basic ethical question.”1
“Ethics flow from theology,” says
Hall. How we interact with the world is a dead give-away of our understanding
of God.
If we imagine God as angry,
vengeful, and mollified only through violent sacrifice, then competitive, exploitative,
suspicious, winner-take-all relationships with each other will be the
God-ordained norm. We’ll be quick to blame others for their own suffering,
because God punishes all wrong-doing and rewards all right-doing. And when we
do admit wrong, we’ll expect our priests to serve as intermediaries between us
and our saber-toothed deities. So, kill the lamb, burn the calf, sacrifice the
virgin. Inflict suffering so that our
god’s bitter vengeance toward us will be drowned in the blood of someone else! When following the gods of
retribution, compassion is not only unnecessary, it’s a character flaw.
If, however,
we truly see God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, then, says Hall, compassion is
“the essence of the One who created us.”2 If God is as full of
compassion and mercy as Jesus is, if God is bigger than our own prejudices,
fears, and hurts, if God truly outshines our agony, we will have access to reasons
and resources for living as signs of grace, for entering the world’s brokenness
and sharing the wholeness of the kingdom of God.
Entering the world’s
brokenness can be exhausting. That’s why, when the disciples return from their
mission trip, Jesus takes them away to a deserted place. He knows that they
need sabbath time. They need rest and healing just like the people they’ve helped,
but the world just presses back in on them with all its fears, and tears, and desperate
hopes. And when it does, Jesus digs deep. He gets up and meets the world’s suffering
head-on once again. “He [has] compassion for them, for they [are] like sheep
without a shepherd.”
The rest of
today’s text is more of the same – Jesus showing compassion to people who are
sick, lonely, and lost.
Abraham Joshua
Heschel was one of the foremost Jewish scholars of the 20th century.
Read through even a few of his quotations, and one encounters the deep and
timeless wisdom of the man and his faith. One may also understand how Jesus,
raised in the often-violent tradition of first-century Judaism, embodied an ethic
of compassion and justice. Heschel says that, “To the prophet…God does not
reveal himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate
relation to the world.…Moved and affected by what happens in the world…God is
concerned about the world and shares its fate. Indeed, this is the essence of
God’s moral nature; [God’s] willingness to be intimately involved in [human]
history.”3
As God
Incarnate, Jesus personifies an ethic of proactive compassion. Showing compassion,
then, defines us as Jesus-followers. Now, there’s a familiar, Bible-Belt
codeword that’s supposed to define us, but it’s been completely hollowed out
and emptied of its radical substance: “A personal relationship with Jesus
Christ” has been reduced to a kind of status symbol, a secret handshake,
something to distinguish those who are in from those who aren’t.
Let’s put some
things together here: We claim personal relationship with Jesus. We also claim
that Jesus is the incarnation of God. If Abraham Heschel articulates faithfully
the wisdom of the prophets, and I believe he does, then God’s essence is defined
by a relationship of intimate, shared suffering in and for the Creation. So,
the salvation associated with a
“personal relationship with Jesus” cannot be a selfish, I-got-mine endeavor. The subsequent ethic never offers anything
more than lifeless platitudes in the face of human suffering.
It
was meant to be.
Everything
happens for a reason.
God
needed another angel in heaven. I just hope she had a personal relationship
with Jesus. Please pass the doughnuts.
Salvation is
light years beyond all that. We demonstrate the true depth of our personal
relationship with Jesus not in our confidence about what will happen after
death, but in our confidence in what we can do and endure in this life
for others. Living as Jesus-followers means living as vessels of healing love
and reconciling grace. That makes our lives and our relationships microcosms of
God’s macrocosm of compassion. To have a “personal relationship with Jesus” means
one has accepted the call to live as grateful reflections of God’s relationship
with us, as signs of God’s eternal compassion for all Creation.
Learning to
trust that God is at work in the world, learning to trust that love is the creating
and concluding reality, learning to trust that entering the suffering around us leads to more significant and
longer-lasting change than causing
suffering—all of this begins with understanding God’s fundamental nature as compassion.
Look, I know
you hear this stuff every week, but to me, agape love and compassion lie at the
very heart of God and thus the gospel. I can tell inspiring stories and
illustrations. But the point is for you to live your own stories of faith. I
can get you to chuckle with a well-timed Bless
your heart. But the point is for you to discover your own abiding joy in
Christ. I can generate the dreaded comment, “nice sermon, Preacher” from four
out of ten worshipers. But the point is not to leave you satisfied. It’s to
make you hungry for more. If what a preacher says doesn’t make a listener want
to go out and experiment with compassion in the world, or at least a little
uneasy when he or she doesn’t do so, then we’re just entertainers.
It follows, then, that congregational
success isn’t about numbers of bodies in the pews, or the size of a budget, or an
attractive facility. The success of a congregation is seen in the desire of its
members to reach out in fearless love beyond
themselves because they know that they are expressions of a Creator whose fundamental
character is preemptive and unconditional compassion.
If we view God as compassionate,
and as our source of compassion, the Creation is a place that needs and
deserves our compassion response. There’s more suffering around us than any one
of us can enter, of course. But we’re disciples not saviors. We are called to
do only what we can do.
May we all, with fearless intent, share
the healing love and joy of Jesus.
1Douglas John Hall in his article, “Theological
Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common
Lectionary (Year B/Vol. 3), Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 2009.
p. 260.
2Ibid. p. 260.
3Ibid. p. 262.
Charge/Benediction:
You are being sent
out in the name of Jesus Christ.
May your faith be
unambiguous and fearlessly compassionate.
May you be the fringe
of Jesus’ cloak for those who suffer.
No comments:
Post a Comment