Date: 6th June 2010 (Trinity 1)
Preacher:
Nikki Devitt
Churches:
Draycott
Readings and psalm:
1
Kings 17, 8-16
Psalm
146
Gal
1, 11-24
Lk
7, 11-17
Well it’s
been quite a harrowing week in the news.
We have heard
the account of the shootings in Cumbria, which are deeply shocking and evoke
our sympathy for the bereaved families and communities involved,
but there is almost a sense of voyeurism
as the media continue relentlessly to report it from every angle. Horrific as
it was, it was a rare event which arose in very specific circumstances,
and though we may feel the pain of the victims and their families, we are not
in a position to respond in any way, to alleviate their grief
, or to stop it happening again.
If we feel
compassion stirring in us because of someone else’s plight, we want to do
something to alleviate the suffering.
Our capacity
to understand the pain and suffering of another person, to put ourselves in
their shoes, and then respond is something very human…
and actually we’ll see in today’s gospel
story, that it’s not only human, but divine.
We join Jesus
near the beginning of his ministry. He’s visiting Nain, which is a small town
in Galilee. And as he and his disciples approach the town gates, they encounter
a funeral procession coming the other way. It’s not an unusual sight,
Death is
commonplace in this society.
There’s crowd
of mourners, following the funeral bier, and they’re all wailing loudly
(according to Jewish law the dead have to be buried within hours
of their dying, so we can imagine how raw the grief is). Among the mourners is
the mother of the deceased young man. This was her only son, and she has now
been doubly bereaved, because she is already a widow.
So not only has she now lost her family, she
has lost her status and her means of support. She has no status of her own as a
woman.
If she loses
her husband, her son will provide for her…but now she has lost her only son as
well. She is distraught, for the loss of her son, and with anxiety for her own
future.
And when
Jesus sees her, he is moved with compassion for her…
(the Greek word for moved with compassion. esplagcnisqh , comes from the word for bowels or
innards, a more accurate translation might be that when Jesus saw the woman,
his guts wrenched with compassion for her. It’s just the same word as is used
for the Good Samaritan being moved with pity for the half-dead traveller on the
road..it’s a visceral response, sharing someone else’s
suffering, and then spurring the person on to action to relieve the suffering )
…and Jesus
being stirred with such compassion, to everyone’s horror, then touches the
bier. According to the law, you don’t touch anything connected
with death: not the corpse, not the bier, not even the
bearers, because that would make you ritually unclean.)
But Jesus’
compassion transcends the law….and then we hear the words ‘Young Man, arise’,
and the boy is raised from the dead, and
Jesus hands him over to his mother…
with quite deliberate echoes of the story
of Elijah raising the widow’s son, as we heard in our OT reading …
This story
opens up in a practical way some of the teaching that Jesus has just given, in
his ‘Sermon on the Plain’.
..when he gave that upside-down code, which reverses the
wisdom of the world:
Blessed are
the poor, the hungry, those who weep, those who are
hated…
..Love your
enemies and do good to those who hate you;
give without expecting any return…summed
up in his key message
Be
compassionate as your Father is compassionate.
This is a
message which should have rung a bell with Jesus’ hearers, because
there is plenty in the Hebrew scriptures
about God being compassionate,
but in fact the Jews had not
shaped their social world according to compassion,
but rather on the command in Leviticus
‘Be Holy, as God is Holy’
Holiness in
this context meant observing the Purity laws, keeping away from everything, and
everyone, unclean,
and so the purity system grew up, which
identified some people as pure …and some people as impure, which depended partly on birth (non-Jews for
example)…and it depends partly on behaviour (tax-collectors and shepherds were
regarded as outcasts).
so, with this as background Jesus is
showing by his actions at the funeral in Nain, that his alternative
vision is to imitate God by being compassionate, rather than
holy,
so his compassion
overrides the purity code.
And Jesus repeatedly
challenges the accepted social mores of his society,
we can think
of lots more examples in his teaching and his ministry when compassion eclipses
the demands of the purity laws….the parables of the good Samaritan and the
prodigal son; the woman with the haemorrhage; the anointing of Jesus by the
sinful woman; the raising of Jairus’ daughter….and so on.
So this is
not just one-off, it’s a constant challenge from Jesus for people
to re-think their values.
And of course
we know that his behaviour antagonised the religious authorities, who were all
advocates of the purity system, and this ultimately contributed to his arrest.
So what does
this mean for us, who would be faithful to Jesus today?
Well we see
from Jesus that compassion is more than an individual action,.. Jesus shows it’s a core value for
the kingdom, it has to pervade our
community life.
So how can we, be
compassionate as our Father is compassionate?
Well, there
are different ways we can respond to human suffering.
·
Firstly,
We can give directly to those who are in immediate need and that’s very
necessary
·
But
we also need to challenge the assumptions of our society, as
Jesus did, if those assumptions are resulting in vulnerable people being
further disadvantaged.
·
Seeking
to change an unjust system is just as
much practising compassion, as is feeding the hungry
·
And
there are lots of ways we can do this, it may be lobbying politicians
about unjust taxes, or it might be supporting charities whose purpose is
explicitly to campaign for greater justice, (rather than just supporting
victims of injustice. ) (topically, we
might think of supporting the organisations campaigning to stop the Gaza
blockade…)
And so let’s
reflect in the coming week, on Compassion which is the dominant quality
of God, shown to us in Jesus.
We might
ponder on the words of today’s psalm:
‘Happy are
they whose hope is in the Lord their God,
who gives justice to those who are
oppressed
and food to those who hunger’
Let’s pray
that we, who are the community that mirrors God,
may truly come to embody, God’s
compassion.