Luke 10:25-37 "Hurting Hearts, Helping Hands: Compassion" Scott Hoezee

President Franklin Roosevelt spent a good deal of his life concealing the fact that polio had rendered his legs useless. FDR developed a battery of techniques to keep people from seeing him as physically helpless. He always wore dark pants cut long to conceal his leg braces--steel braces painted black so they'd blend in with his pants. Sometimes for a speech in a stadium the Secret Service would build a large ramp so that FDR's entire car could drive up to the level of the lectern. For press conferences Roosevelt invited reporters into the Oval Office so FDR could remain casually seated at his stately desk.

Above all Roosevelt perfected the illusion of walking. He would lock his steel braces at the knee and then, with a cane in one hand and his other hand holding onto the arm of a Secret Service agent, Roosevelt would swing his legs from side to side, propelling him forward. This was tremendously difficult work which typically resulted in FDR's shirt and suitcoat being soaked with sweat. Yet all the while FDR smiled, bantered casually, and gave that characteristic toss of his head as though he were just taking a casual stroll.

Yet one day FDR compassionately did the exact opposite of hiding his handicap. It happened while visiting a veteran's hospital which had a ward filled with soldiers who had lost limbs to Nazi and Japanese bombs. On this occasion FDR insisted the Secret Service push his wheelchair very slowly through the ward even as the president displayed his useless legs. He wanted the amputees to see his vulnerability and so convey the message that if he could rise up from his own handicap to become president, their lives were by no means over despite the tragedy that had befallen them.

When we exercise compassion, we participate in the greatness of God. God is a compassionate giver of life whose compassion so floods his heart that it sometimes overwhelms what even God suspects may be his own better judgment! Of course, these days compassion is a darling trait in the "back to virtue" and "return to character" movement. Politically we now hear about "compassionate conservativism." The Century 21 real estate folks recently ran an ad in which they claimed that the realty agents with the golden jackets really care. "It's not just listings, it's listening by the real estate company with compassion."

But these casual references to compassion probably serve to empty the word of its real meaning. So what is compassion? Neal Plantinga defines it as a genuine distress over another person's suffering accompanied by a firm desire to relieve that suffering (and then to actually relieve it if possible). Compassion involves a gut-level, emotional response to another's hurt followed by a desire to relieve the person of that hurt.

Compassion really is "gut-level" in the Bible. Both the Hebrew word in the Old Testament and the Greek one in the New Testament refer to a visceral response to grief. The Hebrew word is a cognate of the word "womb," thus making compassion a kind of uterine contraction which ties in with motherly affection. The Greek word similarly refers to the bowels, which is why older translations of the Bible referred to "bowels of mercy" (which when I was a kid I thought said "bowls of mercy," which is an only slightly stranger image than having intestines of compassion!).

Today we locate our feelings not in peraumbilically or around our navels but pericardially or in our hearts--thus we may refer to compassion as having your heart go out to someone. But in any case this is a very emotional response. Here is a curious wrinkle: the Bible commands us to bear the fruit of compassion, but how can an emotion be ordered? If compassion needs an emotional reaction to a situation, then isn't urging someone to be compassionate a little like ordering a young man to fall in love with a certain young woman?

Last week we said the fruit of the Spirit are not just emotions but abiding character traits. The fruit are how we go at life in general. But if compassion all-but requires the ability to have an emotional reaction to another's hurt, how can this trait be developed considering that emotions come and go depending on circumstances?

This emotive component of compassion highlights another thing we said last week; namely, that all of the fruit of the Spirit are intended to grow in each of us. The fruit are yoked. We need all of them to have any one of them. Having compassion, for instance, requires also the fruit of love. Compassion may need also the fruit of joy. We said last week that joy leads as much to sorrow as to happiness. The more you take joy in the way God made this creation, the more you feel terrible about anything far from God's intentions.

In that sense compassion depends on our having also the fruit of joy and love. But where should compassion be exercised? What are the types of people who warrant this particularly sweet and juicy fruit of the Spirit? That was pretty much the lawyer's question in Luke 10. He wanted to know what a Godward life looked like and so Jesus told him that the fullness of God in your life will lead to a whole-personed love for God and neighbor.

The lawyer knew that much. The key is who the neighbor is. The lawyer is looking for a loophole. He's hoping for some legalese from Jesus which will exempt whole classes of people from the category of "neighbor" and so likewise relieve the lawyer from any obligation. Truth is, like the priest and Levite in the parable, this man already believed there were plenty of people not his neighbor. He just wanted Jesus to confirm this.

What the lawyer wanted, Frederick Buechner once wrote, was something like, "A neighbor (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as a person of Jewish descent whose residence is within a radius of three statute miles of one's own residence (hereinafter referred to as the party of the second part) unless another person of Jewish descent lives between the party of the first part and the party of the second part, in which case the intervening person shall be considered the neighbor to the party of the first part, hence relieving the party of the second part of any responsibility whatsoever."

Jesus didn't say that. Instead he told a story about "a certain man." In the very first line of this parable Jesus pulls the rug out from underneath the lawyer's hopes for a loophole by making the victim of the crime as generic as possible. We don't know where this "man" came from, what his social status was, or even what his religion was. He's just a man, any man and every man, and just that is the point. It doesn't matter who this person is. What matters is that he's a person, for God's sake--quite literally for God's sake because as a person this generic Somebody who gets beat up is an imagebearer of God. That is what makes him a neighbor. You don't need to know any more than that.

That's all the Samaritan knows. By the time the highway robbers have their way with this hapless victim, he has been stripped of everything which could have given off clues as to his station in life. When the Samaritan feels compassion, he has no idea whether the man is rich or poor. For all the Samaritan knew this man could have been the CEO of a corporation or a drunken denizen of the streets. The Samaritan does not know whether the victim will later be so grateful as to give him a reward or so ungrateful as to snarl, "My life is such a misery I wish you would've let me die." This is just a mangled heap of bruised flesh lying in a ditch. The Samaritan knows all he needs to know. Here is someone who was hurting and so the Samaritan steps in, takes risks, spends money, and lends a hand.

Let's springboard off this parable to draw some conclusions about compassion. To begin I want to suggest a couple of attitudes which block our compassion and then we will conclude with three ideas of how we can bolster compassion.

The first thing which can block compassion is a refusal to identify with the victim. Denying the fact that all other people are, at bottom, "just like me" can keep those folks conveniently at arm's length. Not only does denying our human linkage prevent us from helping, it sometimes authorizes their harm. This happens any time there is a war. In World War II the government issued posters of Japanese people with such ridiculously caricatured features that they scarcely looked human. Asians became "gooks" just as people of African descent get labeled as sub-human "niggers." Similarly Adolf Hitler flooded Germany with propaganda suggesting that Jews were really rats, not people at all.

Some of you will remember a scene I highlighted before from the film Schindler's List in which the Nazi thug Amon Goeth nearly splits himself psychologically in two when he realizes he has fallen in love with a Jewish woman. As he strokes this beautiful woman's cheek, he says, "I realize, of course, that strictly speaking you are not a person. But I ask you, are these the eyes of a rat? Is this the face of a vermin?" In the end Goeth cannot reconcile what he has been brainwashed to believe about Jews with the obviously human person in front of him and so he releases his anger over his tortured self by beating her up.

Everyone is your neighbor, Jesus said to the lawyer, because everyone is your brother or sister. That is why Jesus used a despised Samaritan as the hero. It would have been one thing to make the injured person a Samaritan so as to make the point that yes, a Samaritan is your neighbor, too, for whom you must feel compassion. But Jesus was more clever than that, making the foreigner the active neighbor, behaving better than the Jewish characters!

Secondly, compassion may be blocked if we spend too much time assessing how the need arose. What would have happened if the Samaritan had said, "Well, what do you expect when you travel this stretch of road? You brought this on yourself!" It's too easy to blame victims for their plight or retroactively suggest things which could have headed off the situation all as an excuse for why we, now, refuse to alleviate it.

But, of course, it's not quite that simple, either. Sometimes the compassionate thing to do is precisely to scrutinize how a certain tragedy happened so as to assist the victim in making sure it does not happen again. If a poor mother does not have enough money to feed her kids, on one level the compassionate thing to do is to feed her kids. But if you also know that the reason she has no money is because she used someone else's donation to purchase crack, then compassion would lead to something more than just bailing her out.

Compassion, at least in its problem-solving phase, can be endlessly dicey. However, the key is to have a loving enough heart to desire finding a solution. As Plantinga says, compassion is a little like the leather of a baseball mitt: soft enough to wrap around the baseball but tough enough to absorb what would otherwise be a hand-breaking blow. We need to be tender enough to feel genuine grief and yet strong enough to do what's necessary to help. Compassion may lead you to do different things in different circumstances but what it does not allow is to ignore the situation by refusing to identify with the hurting at all.

As Cal VanReken says, the ability to go at life with the fruit of compassion requires that you have a low flashpoint for generating feelings of sadness over another person's plight. You need to have a tendency to well up with tears at the hurts around you. As we said earlier, having such emotions requires having also a cluster of other fruit, starting with love and its God-like ability to see everyone as a cherished child of God. So now let's close with three suggestions to make us more likely to generate compassionate care.

One way to develop the ability to get out of yourself and into others is to do just that: find ways to get out of yourself. For instance, if you say that you simply do not know what it must be like for a woman to be raped or a black man to be the target of racial slurs, in one sense you are simply being honest. However, what if at least part of the reason for your ignorance is moral laziness? What if the reason you so often find yourself saying, "I just can't understand that" is because you refuse opportunities to learn more? There are, after all, books, plays, and movies which helpfully depict a welter of things, the pain of which may go beyond your ordinary life experiences but which you can learn about through the skilled writing or acting of others. There are also real life opportunities to listen to people who have experienced hurts you do not know firsthand. We can listen carefully and thoughtfully to such folks to gain a greater compassionate understanding.

So, for instance, although it may not change your opinion on an issue like homosexuality, wouldn't Christian compassion demand that you at least take the time to listen to parents who have pain over a gay son or to the son himself who also has a story to tell? Similarly, wouldn't it be easier to generate compassion for victims of racism or sexism if we made the effort to understand the kind of world they are forced to live in?

A second practice which may help to make compassion a habit is the honest admission that we are the beneficiaries of God's great compassion despite the fact that we are our own worst enemies much of the time. Reminding ourselves of that may help us to feel compassion toward people who are their own worst enemies, too. We need to remember that God repeatedly forgives us for the messes we make. So the fact that so-and-so got himself into a jam is no reason to dam up the stream of compassion. "He brought this onto himself," we may say. God could say the same about us every day. But he feels compassion anyway.

A final word has to do with the mass media. Between movies which glamorize violence and TV news shows which package the news as entertainment, we face the danger that nothing will get to us on a visceral, gut, my-heart-goes-out-to-them level anymore. Have you noticed that if you watch 60 Minutes on a Sunday evening, the show concludes with Mike Wallace saying, "And now here's Dan Rather with a look at what's coming up tomorrow on The CBS Evening News." But how can Dan know twenty-four hours in advance what's going to happen on Monday? He doesn't, of course. Instead what gets previewed are the side-bars they have already filmed--the stuff which has nothing to do with what is actually "new" in the day's events but which is interesting and entertaining.

I recently read an article by a man who came to himself one evening while watching one of those "Cops" shows which present real life videotape footage of officers on the beat. This episode centered on domestic violence and showed the police breaking up violent fights between spouses. This writer, passively watching this like millions of others, suddenly woke up morally and realized he was passing his evening by watching the break-down of people's lives. He was getting entertained by the dissolution of marriage vows!

As we get more and more of these real life shows, we run the risk of being seduced into thinking that nothing need stir up our compassion since it's all at arm's length. Over time this may have the tendency to deaden our ability to feel the pain of others.

The story is told that once upon a time a certain man fell into a pit and could not get himself out. A therapeutic person came by and said, "I really feel your pain down there." A common sense person came by and said, "It was inevitable someone would fall in there eventually." A fundamentalist said, "Only bad people fall into pits" even as a Calvinist swung by and said, "We all deserve our pits." A mathematician came by and calculated the odds of falling into the pit, and a self-centered person exclaimed, "You haven't seen anything until you've seen my pit!" An optimist saw the man and said, "Could be worse" even as a pessimist rejoined, "It will get worse before it's over." Then Jesus came by, dropped down onto his belly in the slippery mud around the pit, reached out a pierced hand, and pulled the man free. And this Jesus says to us, "Go and do likewise." Amen.