And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.
Compassion. Such a rich and powerful word, and, however much it has been hi-jacked by the therapy culture and greatly reduced in its meaning and truth, it still retains a hold on our hearts and minds. Its deeper meaning is here for us to reclaim without which it becomes the kindness that kills.
Today’s Gospel shows us that compassion belongs to the spiritual pattern of death and resurrection. This Gospel story, along with the passage from Ephesians, makes it clear that compassion is nothing less than Christ in us. It is about our being “strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.” It is nothing less than our “being rooted and grounded in love,” knowing nothing less than “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” This is deep love.
The word compassion in Greek refers to the innermost being of a person, to the core of our being as it were, “the inner man,” the inner you. Luke uses the construction of ‘he saw, he had compassion’ three times: first, here in the story of the Widow of Nain; secondly, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan; and, thirdly, in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Both the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Prodigal Son in his return to the Father are really about the movement of Christ’s love in us. But here we have an event where the Lord sees and has compassion. Matthew and Mark use it too in relation to Jesus “seeing the crowds and having compassion on them” because “they are like sheep without a shepherd.” The compassion of Christ, too, is used about Jesus seeing the crowd in the wilderness without food. Seeing them and having compassion on them leads to feeding them. The deeper theological sensibility is about our inward relation to God in Christ and through that to our care for one another. Without the first, our relation to God in Christ, I fear the second risks becoming the cover for the agendas of expediency and convenience; the kindness that kills, quite literally in terms of the so-called right to die via the complicity and agency of the medical profession, for example.
We may all want to die someday. There is nothing wrong in wanting to die especially in the Christian understanding of things. But it is quite another thing to cause one’s death or to be the agent of another’s death. These are some of the ethical dilemmas which arise in our technocratic culture where we have the means and power to do many things but lack the ethical wisdom to know when and where not to exercise such power. The larger question is about the good which is rooted and grounded in God and in his goodness.
I have had the occasion this past week in the School Chapel to wrestle with the figure of Job. I have been exploring the questions which God puts to our humanity, first, in the story of the Fall in Genesis, secondly, in the same questions which God puts to Cain in the story of Cain and Abel, and thirdly, God’s thunderous questions to Job out of the whirlwind. The Book of Job is a most intriguing and a most instructive book. It provides the strong counter to the ways in which we try to reduce God to our finite and limited reasoning, trying to make God accountable to us. This is the danger of Milton’s theodicy along with Leibniz’s famous phrase “this is the best of all possible worlds” which Voltaire even more famously satirizes in Candide. It can easily become a justification for ignoring all forms of human suffering and injustice or for getting rid of suffering through the expediency of removing the sufferer. “Justify[ing] the wayes of God to men,” as Milton puts it, runs the risk of collapsing God into our petty little systems of thought rather than being open to the grandeur of the mystery of God. But does not the idea of God’s compassion run the same risk in the sense of attributing to God human emotions and feelings and making God accountable to our cares and concerns?
It does, but what the Gospel shows are the lessons which counter that risk. They are the lessons which Job learns. They show us the greater goodness of God despite our sufferings and sorrows. Job is the Old Testament figure of Jesus par excellence, we might say, the best man in the worst of misfortunes. He wants to know why he is suffering, to be sure, but as the poet, novelist, and theologian, G.K. Chesterton, rightly intuits, Job is driven by a strong commitment to the goodness of God. He is convinced that God can convince him about his absolute goodness. In other words, Job refuses all and every account that would reduce God to our level. He seeks to know. The poetic and philosophic marvel of the Book of Job is that God answers Job’s questions but only with greater questions, questions which open Job out to what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “God’s grandeur” despite his sufferings. Indeed, we might say that God makes something good out of our sufferings by elevating us to his goodness and to the goodness and wonder of his creation. God’s torrent of questions to Job are captured in the first question. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth. Tell me, if you have understanding.” God’s questions call us to account. They place us in the company of the angels. “Where were you … when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”
We only come to understanding through being opened to the mystery of God himself, first and foremost, without which the mystery of God for us risks being lost. The Book of Job counters the perspective, ancient and contemporary, that if you do good you will be rewarded materially with worldly prosperity and that if you are suffering the loss of material things, it is because you are bad. As if to say that the rich are good because they are rich; and the poor are bad because they are poor! This is nonsense and does no justice to the complexities of human experience. It is a narrow and limited viewpoint which only leads to hypocrisy and endless self-justifications and to a real ignoring of one another and our world.
The compassion of God towards Job, if I may put it that way, is that God honours Job in his passionate commitment to God’s goodness. Job’s beautiful answer to the thundering torrent of God’s questions to him about the wonder of creation is to say “I have uttered what I did not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” This is the necessary self-critique of our reason and our presumption, not unlike Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex or Plato’s Symposium, at once critiques of the partial forms of our knowing and testaments to eros, the passionate desire to know.
Compassion is about the eros of God in us, the inner drive to know and to honour the goodness of God and his goodness in creation including his goodness in human lives. Christ sees the widow in her grief and sorrow at the loss of her only son, the grief and sorrow, too, of the whole community of Nain. He has compassion. He takes her grief and sorrow into his heart where he holds eternal concourse with the Father in the bond of the Spirit. There is resurrection; the son is returned to his mother.
Our lives are grounded in the life of God, in the patterns of death and resurrection, in our constantly learning the limitations of our thinking and our doing and so to our being opened to the grandeur and wonder of God’s grace and truth as the abiding principle of our lives. What the compassion of Christ shows us is the divine regard for the absolute goodness of all things, for his goodness in creation and in creation restored, redemption. It is all about how we are recalled to God in Christ and about his love in us, not in a flight from suffering, but in discovering God’s goodness even in our suffering.
Christ’s compassion counters our fears and anxieties. Hopkins’ poem, “God’s Grandeur,” comments on our misuse of creation. The world “is seared with trade, bleared, smeared/ with toil;/ And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.” We know about our disconnect from the natural world; “the soil/ is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.” It is a telling indictment, much like his poem “Binsey Poplars” about clear-cutting, about how “we end her when we seek to mend her,” meaning nature. But as with Job and the widow and people of Nain, we are awakened to the glory of God, to the deep compassion of God which is his essential goodness. Hopkins says that “for all this,” for all that belongs to human folly and human suffering, “nature is never spent.” He has a hold of what Job learns about the grandeur of God. For “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things” and all “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
The compassion of Christ roots us and grounds us in the love of Christ. Such is the greater vision of the breadth, the length, the depth and the height of God’s love even in the midst of “the bent world” of human suffering.
And when he saw her, he had compassion on her.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVI (Octave of Michaelmas)
2019