The Complexity of Compassion

Luke 10:25-37

Rev. Jeanne Thomas

World Communion Sunday, October 05, 2008

Of all the parables in the Bible, the parable of the Good Samaritan is probably the best known to us. In fact, the words “Good Samaritan” are synonymous with showing compassion, and across the country hospitals, helping groups, civic awards, and even wholesale clubs and trailer parks are named in honor of this anonymous man.

We know this parable calls us to be a good neighbor, regardless of race or gender, social status or religious persuasion. And typically we enter this story from the standpoint of one of the travelers en route to Jericho, and consider how we might respond to the man left to die on the side of the road. Hopefully, we would have fared better than either the Priest or the Levite and at least called 911 from our cell phone as we drove past.

But this morning I’d like to reenter the parable through the lens of another character: the lawyer, and the one to whom Jesus told the parable in the first place. The lawyer had engaged Jesus in theological debate, undoubtedly because he was used to being the authority on Jewish law and wanted to prove his superior knowledge. And he hoped to trap Jesus by asking him what he must do to inherit eternal life. But as usual, Jesus didn’t fall for the bait. Instead, Jesus turned the question back onto the lawyer and asked him to supply the answer. “What does the law say?” he asks. And the lawyer recites the words every faithful Jew knew by heart: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” “You have answered correctly,” Jesus responds. “Now do this and you will live.”

But getting the words right isn’t the same as living them out—and both Jesus and the lawyer know it. And so the lawyer continues the debate. “Who IS my neighbor?” he asks. Does it stop with the neighbor across the street from me, or does it mean everyone in my zip code? Is it the child in the TV commercial who I can feed for $10 a month? Or the man at Suburban station with a sign around his neck purporting to be homeless? Is it the radical Shiite Muslim in Iran, or just my fellow Presbyterians? Who exactly IS my neighbor, anyway?

What makes this parable of the Good Samaritan so memorable is that we all ask ourselves that very question. We are all given the opportunity to help others. And those opportunities are so vast and so frequent that we simply can’t help everyone we see or hear about. So we contrive some means to evaluate who we should help and who we should pass by and why. We weigh our options and the possible recipients of our compassion and gauge just how neighborly we really want to be.

But Jesus knew that by asking him to define WHO his neighbor was, the lawyer had missed the whole point of the command to love our neighbor as ourselves. For the decision to offer compassion isn’t a moral exercise in determining who is worthy or not to receive it. It isn’t about scrutinizing the situation and analyzing the risk. It’s about giving mercy in response to the mercy God first showed us by sending us a Savior.

Sue Monk Kidd once wrote in Weavings, “When I was about twelve I went to a nursing home with a youth group from my church. Frankly, I was there under duress. My mother hadn’t heard my pleas that I be spared the unjust sentence of visiting a nursing home when my friends were enjoying the last day of summer vacation at the swimming pool. Smarting from the inequity, I stood before this ancient-looking woman, holding a bouquet of crepe paper flowers. Everything about her saddened me—the worn face, the lopsided grin, the crocheted lavender cap she wore. I thrust the bouquet at her, not wanting to get too close. She looked at me, a look that pierced me to the marrow of my bones. Then she spoke the words I haven’t forgotten for 30 years: ‘You didn’t want to come, did you, child?’

The words stunned me. They were too painful, too naked in their honesty. ‘Oh yes I wanted to come,’ I lied.

A smile lifted one side of her mouth. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You can’t force the heart.’” (Weavings, November/December 1990, p.20)

This is what Jesus was telling the lawyer—and us—in this parable. Genuine compassion doesn’t happen simply by knowing the letter of the law, or hearing a sermon on love, or writing a check each month. The kind of compassion Jesus talks about is much more complex than that. In fact, it is interesting to look at the way Jesus constructs this story. If you look at the syntax used to describe the indifference of the Levite and priest, their actions are recounted in simple, straightforward, declarative sentences: They came along, they saw, they passed by. But the actions of the Samaritan are described using compound sentences and lengthy clauses. In word and in action, the simplicity of indifference is contrasted with the complexity of compassion.

The truth is, it gets complicated when we try to live out this commandment to love our neighbor. Giving mercy isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It requires our ability to position ourselves in the place of another; to see their situation from their perspective. Or as Frederick Buechner puts it, “compassion is the capacity to feel what it’s like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is for you, too.” (Wishful Thinking, p.15).

Tom Sutherland was an American hostage who was held captive in Lebanon. For six years and eight months he had no fresh air and saw no sunshine. Three-fourths of the time he was chained and shackled. During most of his captivity, he was allowed to use the bathroom only once a day.

Over the course of his imprisonment, he was watched by 45 guards—young men whom at first he despised. But as the years rolled by, he realized that these young men were as scared and imprisoned as he was—chained by an authoritarian and controlling ideology that stifled their freedom. All of a sudden, when Sutherland looked at his guards, he saw himself. He realized that they shared the same brokenness and vulnerability of being human, and he began to feel compassion for them. His hatred was replaced with friendship, and he offered them his knowledge and love by teaching them to read, and teaching them health and nutrition. Captor and captive discovered a shared humanity—and a shared suffering, and mercy was born. (adapted from Lectionary Homiletics, July 2001, p.22)

When the Samaritan saw the victim’s suffering he immediately identified with it and was “moved with pity,” or in the Greek, literally “his heart melted within him.” He knew what it was like to be despised and rejected by Jew and Gentile, to be an outsider, and he immediately shared in his suffering. His God-drenched heart touched the stranger and any pain or prejudice, estrangement or brokenness, or fear or judgment he felt were washed away by gentle streams of grace.

And that, Jesus says, is what a neighbor is and does.

St. Teresa of Avila lived by this mandate:

“Christ has no body now on earth but yours; no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which He is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless now.”

As we come to the Table this day, may we be reminded of the One who was despised and rejected for us, and go and do likewise. Amen.

Gracious and loving God, you have told us that to inherit eternal life, we must be for others what you have been for us…a vehicle of mercy and grace. So as we drink the cup and eat the bread this day, fill us to overflowing, that our very lives might be lived in response to your life first poured out for us. For you are the Lord and Savior of us all, in all and through all, and it is for your sake that we pray. Amen.