Sermon

Compassion

 by The Rev. Joe Behen, Clergy Assistant

In today’s gospel passage, Mark is careful to show that Jesus teaches and later feeds this crowd out of compassion. He is moved by his passion. It causes him to change direction, from seeking rest for his followers, to caring for a crowd of lost people. I’d like to talk this morning about our passions. What moves us, makes us want to change directions. Behind this question, however, is a more basic one: why do we want what we want?

We often hear and are asked to believe that we are responsible for our actions only, and not our passions – that morality is about what we do, not about what we want, what moves us. We are told that the mind needs to be trained to control the crude desires of the body. Those physical desires simply are what they are. But to hold this position assumes that we are free from outside influence in our decisions. And I don’t think I’m out on a limb in saying that all of us are affected and influenced by others.

A Roman Catholic priest tells the story of a group young men in a Big Brother program in Jamaica, all 18 to 19 years old. One day he brought them to visit their new little brothers at a home for boys who were orphaned, or who were from abusive homes. During a soccer match they all played in, one young man named Fabian came to this priest distraught over an interaction with his new little brother. Apparently, when Fabian’s little brother scored a goal, he came towards Fabian smiling, and Fabian “lifted his hand to clap him on the shoulder. But the young boy immediately flinched, and then cowered away from Fabian. Fabian was stunned. ‘I wasn’t going to hurt him,” he said. “What did he pull away for? I wasn’t going to hurt him.’” After some reflection with the priest who tells this story, Fabian came to realize “that every time someone had raised a hand to that little boy, he had been struck.”

Later on, Fabian told the priest that he had felt something after that interaction. He said that he felt moved. After that time, a change came over him. He was noticeably more committed to his little brother’s well being than the other big brothers were to their own. He truly had been moved by compassion to a gut level response that changed him.

Now, if desire and bodily reactions simply are what they are, then all we can say about the response of Fabian’s little brother is simply that it was inappropriate. But in his world, experience had taught him that it was right. He had learned that a raised hand meant pain, and his body responded in accord. The same sort of thing can be said of Fabian, though his part is more complex. He had been taught by others to value human life. His experience had reinforced this teaching, and by his participation in a Big Brother program, it seems that he had submitted to this good on some level. But now, through the gut level experience of compassion, he had been claimed by it.

“As Jesus went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” The word in Mark that is translated here as compassion actually refers to the inner parts of the body, the heart and, crudely, the guts. A more precise translation then, might read, “Jesus was moved in his heart, moved in his gut.” In other words, Jesus felt a change in his body in response to the need of others, and this change within his body produced an outward change in direction.

In the last twenty years, advancements in science regarding the workings of the human body, have begun to challenge the understanding that the mind is over and against matter, that the human spirit is something that must control the human body. Science has also shown that the work of both Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas on the passions is much closer to reality than previously thought. The human body and mind are drawn together, in the same direction, as it turns out, by our being drawn to another person. In the words of ethicist Simon Harak, “habitual interaction with the other changes the organism itself, even in its physicality.” [Harak, G. Simon, S.J. Virtuous Passions: The Formation of Christian Character (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1993) p. 19]  We see evidence of this in the need that infants have for the voice and the touch of another person. In other words, “we as individuals can become organically whole precisely through interrelationships.” Through relationships our body, mind, and spirit together make us who we are, and through these interactions we come to desire the things that we desire.

It seems like this is very close to Jesus’ understanding as well. Throughout the gospels, he and his disciples live and move among masses of people for whom he is said here to have compassion. They went out of their way to place themselves among these people, to live with them and their needs close at hand. As we have seen, Jesus was moved in his gut by these interactions. But one had to be following him closely to experience the same compassion.

Frederick Buchner has described compassion as, “the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it’s like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge,” he says, “that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy for you too.” [Buechner, Frederick. Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2004) p. 65]  This is what Fabian experienced. His little brother’s well-being was tied up with his own. Compassion, then, can be said to be “the bridge from sympathy to action.” [Donahue, John R. and Harrington, Daniel J. Sacra Pagina: The Gospel of Mark (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002) p. 205]  Compassion, then, is the product of following Jesus. He stands among us today, asking one thing of us - that we would follow him.

- Follow him among the hungry, the lonely, the sick, and the prisoner.
- Follow him among the marginalized, the helpless, the victim, and the outcast.

And as their needs become enmeshed with our own, he promises, our passions will be formed such that we will want more closely what Jesus wants. This following of Jesus will claim us from within our own body, from our gut. It will become quite simply, who we are.

May we all be renewed this day in our following of Christ.

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral