September 14, 2008 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Radical Empathy

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 103:8–13
Matthew 18:21–35

“Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave as I had mercy on you?”

Matthew 18:33 (NRSV)

I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap; at a crossroad so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek; . . . at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldiers gamble; because that is where he died; and that is what he died about; and that is where church people ought to be and what church people ought to be about.

George MacLeod

Nice to welcome you all to church today. I’m slightly surprised there’s anyone here after the deluge of biblical proportions that we’ve been encountering these last few days. What a faithful people you are.

It also helps to have baptisms this morning, of course, to get the families in, so that’s always good. I drove down from Milwaukee yesterday with my family, only to discover the Edens Expressway closed both directions and then have to find ways of snaking down through the city to get home. One of the things that that experience brought me was some empathy with our brothers and sisters who are dealing with the effects of hurricanes in the Gulf Coast area and Texas. That’s perhaps a good lesson for me, as today I want to us to reflect on the quality of empathy.

A story from the Hasidic tradition of Judaism:

It intrigued the congregation to see their rabbi disappear each week on the eve of the sabbath. They suspected he was secretly meeting the Almighty, so they deputized one of their number to follow him. This is what the man saw. The rabbi disguised himself in peasant clothes and served a paralyzed Gentile woman in her cottage, cleaning out the room and preparing a sabbath meal for her. When the spy got back, the congregation asked, “Where did the rabbi go? Did he ascend into heaven?” “No,” the man replied, “he went even higher.”

A story of empathy and empathy put into action. A second story, this one a story about a lack of empathy, a story from Matthew’s Gospel; the parable that Jesus tells in order to reflect on the meaning of forgiveness.

A parable, as many of you will know, is a common teaching method that Jesus uses, a story where one thing is set beside another in order to illumine the one. That’s why Jesus often begins his parables by saying, “the kingdom of heaven is like . . .” or “can be compared to . . .”

Scholars in the middle of the twentieth century believed that the task of interpreting the parables was to understand something about the historical context in which Jesus lived and walked and acted and to try to find the one single meaning that the parable had that Jesus was trying to teach the people. Well known in this undertaking were C. H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremias. Later in the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first century, the impact of literary criticism on interpretation of scripture has taken us away from that rather simplistic approach to an understanding that when we read the parables, we’re entering into a different engagement than simply finding one single meaning. The work of people such as Frank Kermode, the English literary critic and author of a book on reading Mark’s Gospel, The Genesis of Secrecy, invites us into a relationship with the text that doesn’t look for one simple, single meaning to give us the answer, but rather invites us to find different meanings for different contexts or multiple meanings within the story.

One of the historical interpretive methods for understanding parables was what we call allegory. Allegory is when each part of a story stands for something else, and so we would say this part of the story means this thing in real life. For example, Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, used allegory to provide a critique of his own culture.

The scholars tell us that we can’t really do that with this story, that it’s not just as simple as saying, “The king in this story is the same as God, and the debts equal our sin.” That would mean that God did not follow Jesus’ prescription of forgiving seventy times seven, and we find it hard to think of a God who would want torture to happen.

And yet there seems to be something of God in the king’s action. This magnanimous act of forgiveness by the king perhaps reminds us of Psalm 103: God does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.

So to the story: One servant is forgiven a massive financial debt—10, 000 talents—and in turn, that servant encounters another of the servants of the king, probably administrators in local areas who collect the taxes. He comes across one who owes him a debt that is miniscule compared to that which he owed the king, but he has power over this man and he does not forgive his debt. Having been forgiven, he does not forgive.

Really, the unforgiving servant, as he is commonly known, is one of scriptures more miserable characters. The writer Susan Pendleton Jones suggests this way of understanding what has happened: she says that “because the first servant is unwilling to forgive, he is not then able to receive God’s forgiveness.” Now that kind of comes from it backwards, but I think what she is saying is that the mark of forgiveness from God is our ability to forgive others. That might seem obvious to you, for it is at the heart of our faith: “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” we will say in the Lord’s Prayer later on in the service. Another way to put this is that the first servant lacked empathy. The first servant refused to see himself in the plight of the second.

What do we mean when we talk about empathy? A good working definition for us this morning comes from a writer called Lynn Meyer, who has written extensively on a Catholic saint and martyr who died in Auschwitz, Edith Stein. When Meyer speaks about empathy as being one of the qualities of spirituality that led Edith Stein from her Jewish upbringing to converting to Catholicism, this is what she says: “Empathy constitutes for us an experience of another human being in all his or her complexity. Body and member of a body, fallen and redeemed, vulnerable and transcendent and perfect and loved.” It was axiomatic for Edith Stein, she says, that emotions move one to act, “empathy, however, moves one to love.” Empathy is the quality that moves us to love like the rabbi in our story. Empathy is more than kindness; it certainly is more than sympathy. It’s about living in another’s shoes, about recognizing our common humanity. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of this in one of his sermons on the Good Samaritan. He wrote,

The real tragedy is that we see people as entities or merely as things. Too seldom do we see people in their true humanness. A spiritual myopia limits our vision to external accidents. We see men as Jews or Gentiles, Catholics or Protestants, Chinese or American, Negroes or Whites; we fail to think of them as fellow human beings made from the same basic stuff as we, molded in the same divine image.

In the same divine image.

I sometimes wonder if Martin Luther King was thinking about the English poet William Blake when he preached that sermon. Blake has a famous poem called “The Divine Image.” Listen to the words of the stanza: “For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love / Is God, our Father dear, / and Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love / is man, his child and care.”

For Blake and King, the nature of God is instilled in our humanness through the image of God, the divine spark in all of God’s children. Empathy is inherent in God’s nature. In fact, I’d go as far as to say God practices a radical empathy, and we see that most profoundly in the incarnation. At Christmas, we celebrate God the Word taking on flesh, a radical empathy that erupts God into our history and our time and our lives. In the first chapter of John, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”; in the Greek, the Word “pitched his tent with ours.”

I love an affirmation of faith that comes from a conference held in Hong Kong some years ago. At the service the people affirmed this: “We believe that God resides in slums, lives in broken homes and hearts, suffers our loneliness, rejection, and powerlessness, but through resurrection God gives life and pride and dignity.” That is like the beautiful Christmas prayer from the Iona community that thanks God at Christmas because “you crept in beside us,” you became like us. That is radical empathy.

Now this is not my idea; this is not some newfangled kind of postmodern liberal theology. It’s there at the heart of our faith. At the beginning of the Reformation, Martin Luther, the great German reformer, wrote this about what God known in Jesus Christ is: “The God of the humble, the miserable, the afflicted, the oppressed, the desperate, and of those who have been brought down to nothing at all.”

This is where it gets scary; this is where you start to get to an edge, because you realize that this empathy is not just about our ability to empathize on a one-on-one basis with someone in need. Radical empathy, the empathy that God shows in Jesus Christ, is a calling to us, the church, and a challenge to the prevailing economic and political structures in this country and in the world.

Radical empathy is a challenge to an economic system where those with the most power and resources sustain their position while keeping in place an underclass and a class of working poor.

Radical empathy is a challenge to a political discourse that ignores the marginalized and powerless, focusing instead on some intangible concept they call the middle class. To a political discourse that, in this week of remembrance of the tragedy of 9/11, the news stations revolve around the meaning of a metaphor involving lipstick and a pig. As Christians we are called by God to call to account this lack of empathy, where the plight of the least in our world is invisible to those who have the most just as the plight of the second servant in debt was invisible to the one who had been forgiven.

In Christ, God crept in beside us so that we would stand beside all of God’s children in their deepest need. Amen.