Jesus Means Compassion.

 Jesus Means Compassion.

In my years as a Pastor I found I had to consistently remind people about one central thing: Jesus heals people because they suffer.  He does not ask why.  He does not take into account the person's lifestyle, or politics, or religion, age, or gender, behavior, or economic status.  Most come to him, but he also heals people at long distance based on others' word.  He considers only one thing: their suffering in that moment.

For Jesus, compassion depends purely on what a person has to deal with now.  Period.  Certainly they usually, but not always, must demonstrate some trust in him.  But Jesus addresses suffering in the moment for its own sake.

That sounds uncontroversial until we consider what Jesus' does not show any concern about.  He does not place blame.  In fact, when some of his disciples attempt to identify where the sin might lie that caused a person's illness, he rebukes them.  He refuses to make such extraneous distractions the point when he only cares about the raw fact of the pain experienced by the person.

This comes up all the time.  A person gets cancer and we want to attribute it to their foolish habits, like smoking or consistently eating and drinking unhealthily.  We seem to invest more attention in locating blame than in showing empathy for the suffering person.  Like we imagine we can avoid having to deal with the fact of a person's pain by looking somewhere, anywhere, else.  By extension maybe this strategy will somehow reduce our own suffering somehow.  As if bringing the guilty perpetrator to punishment makes us feel like we have done something useful in addressing the pain they caused.  When it really doesn't.

Right now I find myself having to listen to these arguments about Hamas' attacks of October 7 and the subsequent Israeli response.  When I express sorrow over the deaths of Israelis, someone will point out how the decades of Israeli oppression of Palestinians caused this ghastly atrocity on the part of Hamas.  The blame lies with the Israelis themselves.  If I tell how my heart breaks over the deaths of over 20,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza from the recently Israeli bombardment, I will hear about how it is their own fault for supporting Hamas, and Hamas' fault for using them as human shields.  The blame lies with the Palestinians themselves.

All these explanations and rationalizations on both sides have some truth to them.  Israel has brutally oppressed the Palestinians in many ways for decades.  Hamas spouts a toxic ideology and committed a heinous assault on Israel, while carelessly and cynically abusing their own people.  The historical context of this war has deep and very complicated -- and bloody -- roots, going back to the Holocaust and the long history of violent anti-semitism in Europe.  I get that.

Indeed, humans have chosen this approach to "solve" problems for millennia: imagining we can prevent or reduce or heal suffering by committing violence and causing more suffering.  This strikes me as a form of mental illness.  It never works on any level.  It spawns cycles and systems of violence that churn on for generation after generation.  Yet it somehow appeals and makes sense to our egos to treat each other this way.  So we do.

But Jesus does not take this approach.  Hence, Jesus compassionately identifies with the Israeli families and communities shattered by Hamas.  At the same time, Jesus' heart breaks for the thousands of Palestinians dying and suffering terribly in Gaza.  He finds no contradiction in this.  He would only see the suffering, case by case, person by person, child by child.  He would not waste time reflecting on deciding whom to blame.  Indeed, when he himself gets nailed to pieces of wood and hung up to bleed and suffocate to death, he forgives those who do it while they are doing it.  His final identification with the hurt of the world on the cross serves finally to heal and redeem our suffering, our fear, our violence, and our ignorance.  

To follow him means identifying with the pain of the individuals suffering in this world, and seeking immediately to alleviate it... no matter who suffers or why; no matter who inflicts the pain or why.  Maybe if we follow him and start seeing things from the perspective of the victims of our violence, that violence will begin to recede.  Maybe that approach forms the foundation of justice for him, as we decline to support and participate in systems of violence.  Maybe if we stop getting distracted by our ideologies and fears, our desires and our sophisticated reason, and focus just on the pain of this person in this moment, as does Jesus, we can follow him out of this pit of despair and into the Light of his commonwealth of joy.

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