Opening Prayer/Intro:
Happy second day before the beginning revelations of the James Webb telescope. I’m sort of expecting a big sign just 300,000 light years beyond the point of the Big Bang, a sign flashing “Made in Heaven Above.” And we, actually, have a reading that can do some of that heavy lifting for such a cosmological theme. From Paul’s letter to the Colossians, a hymn proclaiming that Christ is at the beginning and at the end of time, holding all that God has made for that Christ and for all creation.
But there are some other heavy lifting materials among our readings. The Gospel proclaims Luke’s version of the double love command, then Luke’s confusing clarification of the parable of the Good Samaritan. And, not to be outdone by the New Testament, the Old Testament blows apart early religious legalism by giving our rules a human heart
So, we have to cover the depth and breadth of creation, and the depth and breadth of the human soul. Let’s get to it. Let us pray, Lord our God, on this ordinary Sunday in an extraordinary time, we pray in the hope that Your boundless mercy and endless loving will embrace all that You have created. Be ours. Allow us, all of us, to be Yours.
1st Reading: Deuteronomy 30:10-14
2nd Reading: Colossians 1:15-20
Gospel: Luke 10:25-37
Homily: Leon Hooper SJ
St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century, quite heady Dominican, claimed, several times over, that he would rather be able to feel compassion, than to define it. He, of course, had the smarts and the holiness to do both. Most of the rest of us are a little short in our ability to define the reality of compassion, and/or a bit lacking in our ability to feel compassion. During our planning session, when it became obvious that we were settling on compassion or its lack as our theme, I decided I needed, at least, to try defining the virtue if not embody its practice in our prayer today.
So,…first of all, some definitions, then comments about feeling compassion (mostly from our readings for the 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time), then, finally, a comment on our not being able to define compassion nor experience it unless we live it. One of those values we learn only by doing them, incarnating them.
So, how do dictionaries define compassion? The easy answer is just a transliteration of the Latin and Christian roots of the term. Cum passio – “passion with”. Compassion is “feel with”, “be passionate with or about” something together. Now that’s simple enough. Or is it?
Getting more venturous, dictionaries, or we ourselves, might offer as possibly similar realities the terms “mercy,” “pity,” and “tenderness” as more or less meaning the same thing as compassion. Pity. Mercy. Tenderness. Yet, if we give those terms some thought – or tap into how those terms feel to us — we notice that compassion evokes a rather distinct sense of the “we” who are doing the evoking.
Not just a distinct “me.” A distinct different “we” gets created. We can pity someone or something – without a bond of a “we” being created. “The poor, dumb turkey. Get her out of my life.” I can pity someone without being compassionate toward them, without making a new “we,” at least a new “we” described in our two readings this morning.
Similarly, we can feel mercy toward someone who is hurting or is hurting us without the sense of “we” that our three readings call for. “The poor, dumb turkey, I’ll sit next to him during dinner.” So can mercy be and still be uncompassionate Mercy.
And we can feel tenderness toward the vulnerable. But, again, mercy and tenderness both lack a “we-ness” that the term compassion insists on. The “com” of compassion means we are one with another in a special sense.
Some claim that the most basic notion of compassion has its roots in Hebraic language and Hebraic history. The Hebrew for compassion is the term rahmain (and here I’m stealing shamelessly from a guy named Michael Downey). As Downey has it, rahmain means entrails or “guts” – (and recall that our sense of anatomy three or more millennia was rather weak). Rahmain’s etymological meaning is “trembling womb.”
Compassion in old Hebrew equals a trembling womb.
The reality that is pointed to here is the felt communication between a mother and the child in her womb. In Hebraic anthropology, they share the one and same passion, more intimately than they will ever be able to recreate after childbirth. Only moms and preborn have the closeness to be fully compassionate.
Downey points out that the Hebraic and early Christian traditions did allow that there were and are some men who can be significantly compassionate. There are, of course, Moses and Jesus. One can’t leave them behind in either tradition. They created senses of “we” that extends as far as the human heart can reach or be dragged, but such male compassion is rare. The prime analogue is mother and the yet to be born child, known mutually as “we.”
Downey doesn’t say anything about that paired sense of “we,” but he can help us with other aspects of compassion. There is another dimension to the term and reality of compassion which is the type of passion usually thought to be the primary, foundational reality of compassion. Compassion is “feeling with another their suffering, pain, weakness, their fragility”. The compassionate person, such as the Samaritan, sees one in pain, (sees even an enemy who would shun him given the chance) and responds as best he can. Fragility, weakness, pain, suffering. And that’s the way we mostly talk about compassion.
And yet, is “passion with” or “feeling with” necessarily born only in weakness, pain, suffering, fragility different?
Here I get thrown back on child-carrying (i.e., being pregnant that is not just a metaphor, but rather as a foundational analogue). A kicking in the womb child is not a weakness, nor a wound. A friend who is currently a week overdue, is fragile and weak, but it is the conversation in which she is involved, that compassion of her and her child, that is a wonder, that gives the rest of us a handle for learning what compassion might be.
Each of our readings is after multiple values that are endangered. Beside the gracious Samaritan, there is the (beaten traveler) – presumably Jew, the “we” of compassion opens us to that possibility whether the (befriended) man wants to admit it or not. The story invites us to invite both into our house. Compassion invites us to bring both into our inns.
Then again, catch the tone of Deuteronomy. It is strongly an improvement in the God who wrote the earlier rules and sanctions. Much of Deuteronomy is one rule following another, interspersed with promises of dire punishments for violating those rules. But that which we read this morning is permeated by a new sense of compassion. But here it is God who is learning to perceive compassionately. Curiously, though, it’s is God who is learning from exercises in compassion. The law is to be a com- passionate guide and companion. It is to be written in their hearts. The rule of law can, in the face of guns and land mines, open our eyes to move beyond regret and outrage. Move us and (all who are) fragile into the inn.
Meditation: Sharing in the Compassion of God, Walter J. Burghardt SJ
If to be a Christina is to put on Christ, then to be a Christian is to clothe yourself in his compassion. You can discuss till doomsday exactly where you should play the Good Samaritan: in Thailand or D.C. General [Hospital], on campus or at home. After all, much of the world has “fallen among robbers” (Lk 10:30) and most of the wounded you must “pass by on the other side” (v. 31). What is beyond argument is what your heart should feel like….
It’s not so much a question of your own inner hurt. As time goes on, you experience increasingly what Christ went through – possibly more. For all its rock and roll, for all its quiet joys and occasional ecstasies, human living can tear you apart. The question is, how does this affect you? What does it do to you? ….
To feel hurt is to be human; to link that hurt to others is to be Christlike. But the compassion of the God-man is not only your model to imitate; it is the very source and possibility of your compassion. You compassion not only reflects his; it is a sharing therein, a sharing in the compassion of God. He makes it possible. The Gospel “Go and do likewise” (Lk 10:37) is not addressed to your native, natural, inborn powers. The command is at the same time a gift. And the gift is the compassionate God deep within you, the God who alone can change you.
From “Sir, We Would Like to See Jesus”