by CCW | 10 July 2016 15:00
Compassion. It is a rich and wonderful word and one which is frequently bandied about in the therapeutic culture of our world and day. What does it mean? Literally, it is about suffering with others or at least being able to identify with the sufferings of others. The word is used a number of times in the Gospels where it takes on a much more radical meaning than its use in our contemporary culture. In the Gospels the word is used entirely with respect to human redemption. As such it extends beyond any worldly sense of sentimental kindness. It speaks to the radical healing and restoration of our wounded and broken humanity. It is really about “the quality of mercy which is not strained”, as Portia puts it in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. In other words, it is not limited or constrained by the finite world of our everyday experiences, our experience of suffering and pain. No. This mercy seasons or perfects human justice and human care. How? Because compassion in the Christian perspective cannot be understood apart from the passion of Christ.
Compassion belongs to the idea of redemptive suffering. What is that about? Simply this. God and God alone can bring good out of evil, out of our evil. That, too, by the way, is why Jesus can command us to love our enemies as we heard last week. Compassion belongs to the radical goodness of God which is greater than all and every evil. To let that idea take a hold of our minds and souls changes us and allows us to face the hard and harsh realities of a world of suffering, both our own and that of others.
Christ is said to “have compassion” or says himself that “I have compassion” a number of times in the Gospels, sometimes in relation to the healing of infirmities or illnesses, sometimes in relation to the raising of the dead, as in the story of the widow of Nain where Christ’s compassion upon seeing her leads to the restoration of her only son, and sometimes in relation to our humanity collectively speaking as in the stories of the feeding of the multitudes in the wilderness. Yet, most importantly, the word is used to establish an ethic of compassion for us in the powerful parable of the Good Samaritan.
The certain Samaritan, when he sees the man who was robbed and wounded and lying half dead on the roadside, “had compassion on him” and goes to him, unlike the others who saw and passed by. Instead, the Samaritan “bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine” and “took care of him”. The parable is the answer to the question, “who is my neighbour?” Jesus asks the lawyer, who “thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” “He that showed mercy on him”, he is compelled to reply, to which Jesus says to him and to us, “Go and do thou likewise”. The story is particularly powerful because it is a parable about our humanity wounded and broken because of sin, lying half dead on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, symbolic of the heavenly and the earthly cities respectively. Compassion addresses the human condition. It is ultimately about divine grace perfecting human actions.
Here this morning we have Mark’s account of one of the feedings of the multitudes in the wilderness, the feeding of the four thousand. The operative word is compassion. “I have compassion”, Jesus says, “on the multitude”. The actual feeding is profoundly and inescapably sacramental. It is impossible to read the story without having in mind the actions of Christ at the Last Supper “on the night in which he was betrayed”. In other words, the compassion of Christ can only be understood through the passion of Christ, meaning his death and resurrection for us. Through his death and resurrection, he provides the sacramental means of our abiding in his healing and restoring love.
This deeper sense of compassion challenges the rather more shallow sense of compassion in our culture with its abhorrence of pain and suffering even to the extent of contemplating the end of suffering by ending the life of the sufferer. Such is the intent of “physician assisted dying” now legalised by the Supreme Court of Canada. The majority of Canadians, it seems, supports this idea and practice, as no doubt do many of you. It is largely about control and choice and comfort, especially for a generation for whom those are the primary considerations. And yet there is and there can be no theological warrant for the deliberate and intentional taking of life – leaving aside the concepts of judicial and military killing about which there has always been question and debate.
I serve, by the way, if you can believe it, on a Diocesan Task Force on Physician Assisted Dying and have commented on documents produced by our national church on this question, documents which recognise the ethical and theological problems with the question from the Christian perspective as well as the existential dilemmas that belong to end of life issues pastorally and practically. There is, I think, some ambiguity and confusion in our church about what is meant by compassion in a Christian understanding, the very term which is highlighted in our Gospel and which cannot be understood apart from the passion of Christ.
This does not mean that life should be endlessly and needlessly prolonged but it does mean that there is a difference between the easing of death and the active taking of life. This is a moral and ethical distinction which is of the greatest significance. Why? Because it has to do with human agency. The so-called ‘right to die’, I think, is a contradiction, as do other ethicists and philosophers. It is like saying, ‘I don’t exist’, but the premise behind the right to die legislation is the radical autonomy of the individual, and as such God is certainly not in the picture. This autonomy seeks to compel paradoxically the autonomous wills of others to take away life, making others the agents of your ceasing to live, asking others in effect to do, I am sorry to say, murder. Such are the realities and the confusions of our post-Christian world, the realities and the confusions which the Christian Church confronts and counters.
There are times when all of us want to die or want others to die and in ways that are perfectly reasonable and understandable. We often pray that someone’s suffering not be unduly prolonged, praying for death, in other words. But that is different from actively taking away life, from directly causing death. There are quite proper and reasonable questions about extraordinary measures and about the reasonableness of refusing certain treatments; in short, about letting go and letting death happen. That is really about placing ourselves and one another in the care of Christ, in the compassion that goes beyond the limits and scope of human actions. It is about recognizing our mortality as part and parcel of our humanity. But it is not the whole story.
For even more, compassion in the Christian sense looks to Jesus whose passion and resurrection open us out to our communion with God, to something more beyond “the grave, and gate of death”, to the idea of our fellowship with God and with one another. That can only happen through Christ whose passion changes the nature of death itself from being the terminus, the dead end of existence, to becoming the transitus, the way to eternal life. There is more to our humanity than death and dying. Suffering is inescapably part of the way.
The easing of suffering is the compassion that belongs to that way. The cross is central to our Christian understanding and identity in Christ. It is the symbol of the doctrine of redemptive suffering, the idea that God and God alone can make something good out of the evil of human suffering. It means that our humanity in the Christian understanding finds its truth and fulfillment in God. We have an end with God, the God who provides for us in the wilderness of our lives here and now in his body the Church.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity VII, 2016
Christ Church & St. George’s
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/07/10/sermon-for-the-seventh-sunday-after-trinity-4/
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