“Heart of Com-passion”
November 9, 2003
Last Sunday we began
our four-week sermon series with the first word that we, the church, are to
embody as Christ’s disciples, which is community. As a special community, the church at its
best is one that follows the apostles teaching, shares its possessions and
money with those in need, prayers together, serves one another, fellowships
together, and worships together. All of
these are vitally important to the health and well being of the church, and yet
if we leave the church with only these things to do, then we leave out one of
the most important ways in which we embody the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And so this leads us to our second word for
this week – compassion. The special
community we call the church is called to be a church with a heart of
compassion.
Compassion is
more than just something we are to embody in our communal heart. In its most intimate expression and meaning,
compassion is something each one of us is to embody in our own heart as
well.
In our text
for this morning, Jesus encounters a man who is in desperate need of
healing. Leprosy was a big deal in first
century Palestine. Yet the diagnosis was
about as general as it could be.
Basically any condition of the skin considered abnormal, any rash, any
area of dry skin, any physical discoloration was considered leprosy. Yet to be called a leper was vastly more
devastating. Leviticus 13:45-46 gives instructions
for dealing with someone who has leprosy.
“The person
who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his
head be disheveled, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean,
Unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as
long as he has the disease. He shall
live alone, and his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”
Leprosy was a
social death sentence in which the leper was completely cut off and cast out of
society. A leper was physically
designated with his torn clothes and disheveled hair. He was socially ostracized from his family,
friends, and community. He was
economically devastated in the loss of his job or business, and he was
religiously excluded from participating in communal worship and rituals. In all respects, the leper was left to haunt
the edges of the community that we could no longer be a part of, cursed by the
loss of his own humanity.
But the leper
in our story crosses the distance that he is supposed to observe and approaches
Jesus, kneels before him, and begs him saying, “If you choose, you can make me
clean.” Moved with compassion, Jesus
puts himself at risk of having to join the leper colony himself and does the
unthinkable: he touches the leper saying, “I do choose. Be made clean.”
Jesus’ act of
compassion was more than just a private blessing, but a restoration of human
relationship, striking a blow at the forces that cripples, alienates, and
destroys human life. With a simple
touch, Jesus shattered the prison walls that surrounded the man, and stood in
the midst of this man’s hell and restored his humanity with the simple power of
human touch. With a simple touch, Jesus
liberated this man from the prison of social and religious exclusion and
rejection, and economic devastation, and gifted him with that which should
never have been taken in the first place – his humanity.
Jesus
self-less act of compassion is an important lesson for all of us who follow in
his footsteps of ministry. This story
reminds us that Jesus did not minister long distance, beyond arms length, safe
from all that plagued the lives of those he would help. His work of forgiving put him in solidarity
with sinners, his work of lifting up placed him among the fallen, his words of
encouragement were given to the hopeless, and his healing brought him in
contact with the diseased.
Jesus’ will
to heal and his touching the untouchable offer us a model for the ministry of
healing we are to engage in as Christian people, a ministry of healing
characterized by compassion and a deepest desire to restore the humanity of the
least, the lost, and the left out; of the sick, dying, and diseased, to mend
the fabric of human relationship, and to embody in our own lives the very heart
of Christ.
But we can
never forget that true Christ-like compassion is costly and dangerous for us,
because it requires us to walk into the private suffering and personal prisons
of those who suffer. It requires us to
literally suffer with those who are in need.
Compassion is not pity, and it’s not just sympathy, compassion is
empathy – the taking on of another’s feelings as if they are our own.
True Christ-like compassion requires us
to move from our safe, comfortable world and enter into the world of the
suffering, to cross the tracks and touch a life so different from our own. Compassion is not easy, in fact it can be
downright painful, because it forces us to see the inhumanity of the world in
which we live. It forces us to confront
the poverty of the world, the exploitation of people, the destruction of human
dignity through drugs, alcohol, and abuse.
It forces us to touch the untouchables of our society, the AIDS patient,
the pregnant teenager, the troublemaker, the gang-banger, the prisoner, and the
mental patient. It forces us to
sacrifice a part of ourselves for the sake of another, to feel within us the
pain and suffering of another, and to take upon ourselves the cross of Christ
for the other.
To truly
embody Christ-like compassion is a risky calling, but it’s a calling we cannot
refuse to follow, because at it’s very core is the heart of the Gospel. For when we, the church, embody the heart of
the Gospel, we become the church with the heart of Christ. Amen.