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 a 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.