“And when the Lord saw her he had compassion on her”
It is a phrase that Luke especially uses. It connects the idea of seeing and then acting, yet acting in a very important way. Acting with compassion. A powerful word, it has been co-opted by the contemporary therapeutic culture in ways that overlook its more radical meaning and character. Compassion is not something that we have of ourselves or simply from ourselves in the Christian understanding. It is something given by God, something alive and at work in us through grace.
That is the lesson of the Parable of the Good Samaritan where the phrase is used about the “certain Samaritan”. Priest and Levite see and pass by the man wounded and half-dead lying on the roadside. So do most of us in relation to the heart-rending sorrows and sufferings of so many in our world, even in our own communities. It is not just that we are cold-hearted and mean-spirited though sadly enough that is only too often present in us. More significantly, I think, there is an implicit recognition of the limits of human charity, a recognition that we can’t solve or even begin to think we can help everybody who is in need. There are inescapably finite limits to human charity. Undeniably so.
But that doesn’t provide an excuse to do nothing. Quite the opposite. “The poor you have with you always,” Jesus reminds us, “and you can do for them what you will.” Something remains for us to do. We are compelled to acts of charity by the compassion of Christ. “Go and do thou likewise”, Jesus says to the lawyer about the actions of the “certain Samaritan” who saw and had compassion on the man wounded and lying half-dead on the roadside, half-way between Jerusalem and Jericho, the heavenly and the earthly cities respectively. In the radical understanding of the Parable, Christ is the Good Samaritan, the one in whom the love of God and the love of neighbour, meaning our humanity, is most fully and completely realized. It is not so in us except we are in Christ; he in us and we in him. In Christ, God sees us and has compassion on us, seeing Christ in us; in Christ, we see and act with compassion towards one another, albeit in limited ways, yet seeing Christ in one another.
Compassion in the Christian understanding cannot be understood apart from the passion of Christ. It belongs, in other words, to the equally radical Christian teaching of redemptive suffering. It means that God and God alone can make something good out of human evil and out of the limits, too, of human love and compassion. Ultimately, our acts of compassion are “rooted and grounded”, “comprehended”, we might say, in the deep love of God for our humanity. Such is the profound mystery of God, the mystery which surrounds and shapes our souls and lives.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan presents us with the Christian ethic of compassion by way of a story, an illustration of how we are to act out of what we have been to see and hear, and, more literally, out of what we have been given to read in the Word of God by the Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. But beyond parable and interpretation, there are the actions of Jesus Christ himself, actions which reveal his compassion upon the multitude stranded in the wilderness who have nothing to eat, for instance, and his compassion in this morning’s gospel for the widow of Nain. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.”
It is, I think, a most poignant and moving scene, and yet, a very ordinary and human story that is constantly repeated throughout our world every day. It is about loss and sorrow, about death and despair, on the one hand; but, on the other hand, it is about the divine encounter with our wounded and broken hearts of sorrow that results in transformation, in a kind of resurrection and restoration. It arises out of compassion, the compassion of Christ which has its ultimate meaning in the passion of Christ.
Christ comes to a little community called Nain. He meets a funeral procession on their way to the grave. They carry the dead body of a young man, “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow”, as Luke tells us. She is a woman who has lost everything; first, her husband, and now, her son, her only son as the text emphasizes, calling our attention to her desperate state. In a remarkable economy of words, Luke tells us that when Jesus saw her, “he had compassion on her”. Everything follows from that look of compassion. What does it mean? How does it connect to his passion? It means, I suggest, that he identifies with the sufferings of the woman and, by extension, with the sufferings of our broken and fallen humanity. He takes us into his heart, as it were, into the inmost core of his being, into his essential identity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The passion of Christ, his suffering and death on the cross, is the ultimate expression of the compassion of God realised in the body of our humanity.
It changes how we see things and how we act towards one another. Jesus says to her, “weep not.” He means ‘do not keep on weeping’; don’t let this sorrow define you and destroy you. It is not everything. God is able to make something good out of the sorrows of our lives, even out of our death and dying. That is quite powerful. He bids the young man arise and he returns him to his mother. There is restoration. It signifies the wholeness, the salvation that Jesus seeks for our humanity. We find our truth in God and only through him with one another. All because of compassion. The compassion of Christ challenges our compassion towards those in need now and always, both present and far away. It is the burden of our prayers and the burden of our care.
We have as a Parish made a contribution to the relief of those afflicted by the Edgehill Fire. It cannot fix everything but it belongs to us to act out of the compassion of Christ even in our poor ways. It belongs to how we look upon one another – not in judgment but with care and concern; in short with compassion. “Go and do likewise,” the compassion of Christ moving in you and in our life together. All because of how he looks on us.
“And when the Lord saw her he had compassion on her”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVI, 2016