Sermon

Splagchnizomai

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

I was having a conversation with one of you, not too long ago, about how Scriptural scholars figure out when a particular book of the bible, or passage within a biblical book, was most likely written. We talked about how some scholars consider word usage as a tool to assist them. An example in English could be the word, surf. Used to describe waves that break onto a beach, the word has been in English usage for centuries. But if the word surf appears in some text just before the word, board, we could begin to narrow the timeframe to probably the middle portion of the 20th century or later. And if the word surf appears as a verb before the phrase, the Internet, we could narrow its usage still further to sometime within the last 15 years or so. As far as English is concerned, surf is now just as likely to refer to a way of manipulating electronic media as it is a way of describing the movement of the ocean.

Point is, words and their meaning evolve over time. For geeky wordsmiths like me, (and probably only for us geeky wordsmiths like me!), this is pretty cool stuff. But for the faithful, who hear today’s gospel passage, the evolution of a particular Greek word tells us something stunning about Jesus, and by extension, about God’s deepest desire for humankind.

We are early in the gospel of Luke. Jesus is teaching and healing his way through Galilee when he enters the city of Nain. There he and his disciples encounter a funeral procession – a man has died leaving his widowed mother without anyone to care for her. In that patriarchal culture, women past childbearing age were economic liabilities. Every society has had its throw-aways and in first century Galilee, widows with no sons to provide for them, were chief among the throw-aways. And Luke tells us that Jesus had compassion for her. Well, that’s the English translation anyway. Thing is, we typically define compassion as an emotional response to something sad. Your child doesn’t make the cut for varsity football or win the audition for the school play and you feel compassion. It’s steamy hot summer day and from the comfort of your air conditioned car, you see the line up of hungry people outside the community kitchen waiting to eat. You feel compassion. It’s an important human response, but experiencing it doesn’t necessarily change either the sad condition or the person who experiences the emotion. There’s a perfectly good Greek word for this kind of compassion – eleos -- but that’s not the word Luke used.

The word that Luke used was splagchnizomai [1] . Its root word in older Greek usage refers to a sacrificial rite where the heart of the victim was ripped out of the body. It was never used in the pre-Christian Greek world to mean mercy or compassion as it came to mean in the later Jewish-Christian writings.[2]

In other words, Jesus didn’t feel compassion for the grieving mother. He felt his heart being ripped out. Luke, writing to a Greek-speaking audience, turns the original meaning of the word on its ear! Instead of the heart coming out of the sacrificial victim to appease an angry god, God’s heart – incarnate in Jesus Christ – went out to the victim. Reviving the dead son was far more than Jesus being at the right place at the right time to do his good deed for the day. This was more than Jesus imitating the prophet Elijah who raised the son of the widow of Zarephath, as we heard in our first lesson today. This was even more than Jesus foreshadowing his own resurrection. This was the Son of God subverting the natural order of things.

And part of that “natural order,” was a cultural system that ensured an underclass of people. In a rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal, honor-bound system, those who were at the top of the food chain stood upon the shoulders of those at the bottom of the food chain. Those who were in position of privilege enjoyed their privilege only through the efforts of the unprivileged.  I have no doubt that the citizens of the village of Nain felt compassion for the grieving mother who would be left with no means of economic support, but there would have been nothing in that compassion that would have changed one iota of the system that ensured her poverty.

We have long recognized the “upside-downedness” of the Gospel. The Prince of Peace is born in a stable and the first people to whom his birth is revealed are a bunch of low-life shepherds. Earlier, his mother praises a God who casts down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly. He calls his disciples not from the ranks of learned scribes or rabbis, but from Galilean fishermen. He wades into all manner of unclean situations with utter impunity and restores to health and wholeness those who were defiled, who were intentionally excluded from the religious and spiritual life of their communities. His parables routinely exalt the humble at the expense of the mighty. We know that.

It’s just that today’s gospel passage kicks that knowledge up a notch. In restoring the man to life that day in the city of Nain, Jesus served notice to the culture of victimage – a culture that was alive and well in 1st century Palestine, and no less so today in our complex, interconnected, global village. Jesus’s raising the dead man back to life demonstrated that in God’s economy there are no throw-aways. In God’s economy, it’s not okay for some to be hungry so that others may have an abundance of food. In the culture of God, splagchnizomai is the defining principle. Compassion must be more than a fleeting emotion, then back to business as usual. It must expose the systemic components that create scapegoats -- scapegoats that draw our attention and energy away from the root causes of victimage, and waste the energy we might otherwise put into creating a more equitable world. Compassion, in the culture of God, is transformative in the here and now precisely because it subverts the status quo. Compassion, in the Culture of God, rips the heart out of injustice.

[1] That's pronounced splonch-NIZ-uh-my.  You can Google it here and read more about it.

[2] Paul Neuchterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Proper 5, Year C, 2007.

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral