Jesus
Showed Sympathy
Stephen
Terry
Commentary
for the August 20, 2016 Sabbath School Lesson
“In
reply Jesus said: ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was
attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away,
leaving him half dead.’” Luke 10:30, NIV
Many are familiar with the Parable of the Good
Samaritan. A man attacked by thieves was left for dead. None of his countrymen
would venture to lend him assistance, but a foreigner made the effort and took
the time to bind up his wounds and provide for his recovery. In this way, Jesus
illustrated that sometimes those who are isolated from us by race, culture or
geography may be more compassionate to us in our need than those who live right
next door. It is compassion and not proximity that makes us truly neighbors of
one another, uniting us and defining us as humane.
One cannot help but wonder, however, what would have happened if the Samaritan
in the parable had arrived sooner? What if he had arrived when the robbers set upon
their victim? What would compassion have required of him? Many years ago, I had
the opportunity to face a similar scenario. I cannot say whether my response
was Christ-like or not, but compassion compelled me to act.
At that time, I was a traveling representative for a company
headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. Working on promotional programs with
churches and banks throughout the Pacific Northwest, I needed to carry a fair
amount of equipment with me. Also, being younger and stronger than I am now, I
carried weights and a barbell for working out in order to stay in shape while
on the road. All told, together, everything made it necessary for me to use a
small pickup truck with canopy to hold it all as I traveled from city to city.
One night, while checking into my motel in yet another city after a long day on
the road, I heard someone cry “Rape!” from across the highway. Looking in that
direction, I saw a man and a woman struggling in an alley. Grabbing the nearest
thing at hand, I retrieved from the back of my truck my barbell with the heavy
iron collars on each end. I ran across the highway and into the dark alley.
When I arrived, the man was already on top of the woman on the ground, doing
his best to complete his assault. I
struck him across the back with that barbell, hoping that would deter him from continuing
the attack and also free the woman from his clutches.
To my surprise, he jumped up and began to wrestle with me
for the barbell. As we went round and round, I shouted to the woman to call the
police. She quickly left the alley, and I continued to struggle with the rapist
until his wounds caught up with him. He promised to let go of the barbell if I
promised not to strike him again. I agreed, so he let go of the bar and sank to
his knees in grave pain. Shortly the police arrived and not knowing who was
whom, they cuffed me for safety reasons and placed me in the back of a police
car. Once the woman explained that I had likely saved her life, they freed me
and allowed me to go on my way. The rapist was not so lucky and left in an
ambulance.
I had not considered whether or not the assailant might
have had a gun or a knife. I had simply responded to a cry for help. Things
might easily have ended up differently. But what are the limits of compassion?
When do we imperil or even sacrifice personal safety in order to do the
sympathetic, compassionate thing for others? Perhaps an even greater issue is
whether or not the use of force can ever be a compassionate act. One might
argue that the victim in this scenario deserved compassion but the perpetrator
did not, having forfeited their right to compassion by committing their heinous
act. But how do we balance that with the expectation that we love our enemies?
Can it be a loving act to restrain a criminal with deadly force? If we go there
for our responsibilities as humans, can we extrapolate the idea to God when he
inundates the Earth with water or flame? Can those be seen as loving acts?
Complicating the matter still further is the belief by
some that God is not involved in what happens here on our blue marble of a
planet. They hold that God set things in place and then at some point simply
walked away, trusting in the processes He initiated to carry things to a
positive outcome. The intricacy of those processes, biological and mechanical,
lends credence to the idea of a celestial Watchmaker who created and wound up
the mechanism, but the self-perpetuating nature of those systems may argue
strongly for His desire to not be involved. Then there is the issue of the
efficacy of prayer. While there is sporadic anecdotal evidence of miraculous
healing in response to prayer, such results have never been able to be verified
in a true double-blind experiment. This can make it seem as though a distant
God capriciously inserts Himself into the process without regard to a formulaic
quid pro quo. In other words, it
cannot be demonstrated with exactness that a prayer request will result in a
positive response from an engaged deity. This has resulted in an apologetic that
insists that God answers all prayers, and sometimes the answer is, “No.” But
this, as apologetics is often guilty of, simply gives us a facile response to a
particularly thorny issue. Perhaps the apologist may be forgiven for wanting to
maintain faith in the face of a direct challenge to assumptions already
committed to. But while this may protect creeds and dogmas, it does little to dispel
the nagging voice of doubt that will not simply be wished away.
But perhaps the problem is not in the nature of God, but
in our understanding of that nature. We may wish to have a God who always rewards
good and punishes evil. This of course definitely requires an engaged deity.
For in order to be an ongoing rewarder and punisher, He cannot remain distant.
He must be both aware of the deeds to be rewarded and punished, and also be actively
dispensing those rewards and punishments to mankind. The flood and the
apocalypse are distinctly evidentiary of such involvement. However, their
remoteness in the distant past and the far-off future can make their
attestations challenging and difficult, arguing perhaps because they are so
singular that God is indeed remote. This is perhaps an important reason that
God interjected His presence in a unique fashion that may have been intended to
remove any doubt of His engagement.
For thousands of years, men had been not only sending prayers
up to God, but had continued to maintain an elaborate sacrificial system
offering up the smoke of incense and the odor of roasted animal flesh, all in
an effort to communicate with God and receive His blessings in return. At
infrequent intervals, prophets would arise claiming to speak to the people on
God’s behalf. More often than not, those prophets brought words of
condemnation, for even though the sacrifices continued to be done, the
character of God was not faithfully reproduced in His people. We might ask if
it has ever been, for no one appears to be able to refrain from
unrighteousness.[i]
While we might admire the work of the prophets, they were a sign of our
failings. If they could have produced righteousness by their witness then God
would not have had to directly intervene. He did so with gusto. His
intervention was not just a cameo but a leading role in the ongoing revelation
of His compassionate character and sympathy for our plight here on Earth. Incarnating
Himself as a defenseless human infant, He grew as an adult to become the
epitome of the loving and compassionate nature of God. Even his name, “Immanuel,”
spoke to God’s engagement with humanity, meaning “God with us.”[ii]
What did that intervention reveal? It revealed that God
desires our healing,[iii]
our freedom,[iv]
and a hope for our future.[v] It also revealed that God
does not show favoritism.[vi] He sends His blessings
without reservation on both the righteous and the unrighteous.[vii] But Jesus not only
revealed the character of God to us. He told us that we should reproduce that character
in our lives.[viii]
In order to do that we must abandon any narcissistic tendencies we may have.
Such focus on self destroys empathy for others. Without empathy, we cannot find
our way to compassion. Instead we will default to our own needs and our own felt
superior claim to blessings that rightfully belong to all. When we believe that
God is distant and unengaged, we find it easy to be distant and unengaged as
well. But when we acknowledge His momentous and ongoing interaction with our
world and the compassion and love that entails, we may find the desire arising
within our hearts through the presence of the Holy Spirit to emulate the
character of such an engaged Presence. Maybe our prayer should be that we
become in character more and more like Jesus. Perhaps that is the prayer that
God is ever eager to answer. Maybe the only way God has ever really been
distant is when we refuse to emulate Him and push Him out of our lives, leaving
unlit the flame of love and compassion that we were intended to use to light
the path of others. When their lives are lit by compassion, we may find them lighting
our path as well.
