by CCW | 23 September 2012 16:00
We have seen this picture far too many times. It is the picture of the weeping widow and the grieving mother. Almost every day and for far, far too many years, we have had to contemplate the spectacles of unbearable griefs and unspeakable sorrows: mothers and wives weeping for the loss of their children and husbands obliterated and destroyed in acts of calculated yet mindless violence in the troubled war zones of our world and day, in Kabul, in Aleppo, in Benghazi, to name but a few. Such pictures have become the commonplaces of our culture and, paradoxically, the commentary upon our capacity for compassion.
We have, I fear, become too accustomed to such sights. Grief has become politicized; our emotions have become the battleground for competing political causes. The real casualty is compassion. Compassion has been killed in us. How can it be made to live in us again? That is the purpose of this Gospel story.
It is all about the compassion of Christ, not only for the widow of grief and the mother of sorrow, but also for the whole of our humanity even in the bitter anger of our sorrows and frustrations. When compassion is killed in us, as I fear it so easily is, then we are doubly dead, even thrice dead – dead to one another, dead to ourselves and most assuredly, dead to God.
“The Lord saw her”. Everything begins from that look of Christ. What kind of a look is it? “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”. His look is his gaze of compassion upon the sorrows of our humanity in the concrete reality of this woman’s seemingly inconsolable grief. She has lost everything – her husband and now her only son. She is utterly bereft. Perhaps, just perhaps, our insensitive hearts can begin to sense the absolute depth of her loss. Jesus looks upon her with the eyes of compassion.
“Salvation begins by our being seen by Jesus, by his turning toward us his compassionate eyes”. But what does that compassion mean? It is a strong word, not a word for our contemporary political games which play with our emotions and mess with our minds. No. Here is a word which speaks to the innermost principle of our being as humans, a word which, in the gospels, suggests that core principle of our identity where we are recalled to the God in whose image we are made. Compassion is about more than just a feeling for others, an emotion which can be manipulated and abused.
The word refers to the inmost principle of personal identity. Jesus’ looking with compassion means that he takes the grief of this woman into himself, into the inner recesses of his being where in his humanity heholds converse with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Therein lies healing and salvation, hope and resurrection. For these are the things which flow out from Christ’s look of compassionate regard. “Young man, I say unto thee arise” and “he delivered him to his mother”. Death and resurrection. Out of the compassionate gaze of Christ comes hope and resurrection. His look changes everything. It changes, too, how we look upon the seemingly hopeless and depressingly horrible sorrows and griefs of our world and day.
In this gospel story, we discover the hope that conquers despair. In this gospel story, we discover the compassion that patiently perseveres when all seems lost and gone. We are meant to look upon one another through the eyes of Christ who looks upon all of us compassionately. It does not mean that we can always change things ourselves; it means only that we remain open to the transforming grace of God even in the face of the seemingly intractable problems of the world.
Our compassion has to be about placing one another in the compassion of Christ. It means to acknowledge a reality far greater than ourselves and our world; that reality is grace. In the compassionate look of Christ, we see how God looks upon our humanity. We are called to place one another in the heart of Christ, the heart which holds the whole of the sorrowing world before the Father in love. There and only there is compassion.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVI, September 23rd, 2012
AMD Service of the Deaf
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/09/23/sermon-for-the-sixteenth-sunday-after-trinity-200pm-service-for-the-atlantic-ministry-of-the-deaf/
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