July 31, 2011 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Imperative of Compassion

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 103
Isaiah 55:1–5
Matthew 14:13–21

“And he had compassion for them.”

Matthew 14:14 (NRSV)

Generosity and compassion are inseparable, and both have their model in God, that is to say, in creation and in the Passion.

Simone Weil

Well, the numbers are in, and it’s really looking not bad for God overall. I know you’re wondering what I’m ranting about up here. There was a report this week in the Huffington Post about an opinion poll that was taken among American people: if one assumes that God exists, what would God’s approval rating be? The good news was that God came in with a 52 percent approval rating. Only in America could this happen: a 52 percent approval rating for God’s overall dealings, everything taken into account. Now that’s very good in comparison—you won’t be surprised—to Congress, which together had approval ratings of 33 percent. But not quite as good as Oprah, who came in with a storming 60 percent overall approval rating.

When people were asked about particular aspects of God’s actions in the world, there were some interesting statistics. For God’s act of creating the universe, there was 71 percent approval in the poll, an interesting number. And there were 5 percent who disapproved of this. (Who is disapproving of the act of creation? There’s maybe a secret network of nihilists out there who prefer nonexistence to existence, but there you go.) And then an interesting one: when it came to the question of natural disasters, disapproval among young adults came in at 26 percent, but only 12 percent disapproved who were over the age of sixty-five. I thought that really, to be honest, was a fascinating question about God’s action in the context of natural disasters. And, to be honest, I was surprised that the disapproval rate was so low. It would seem that that would be an easy thing to hang on God. You’d only have to watch the outcome of the situation in Somalia in the Horn of Africa, where a famine has now been declared. Or perhaps I’m not giving people who responded to the opinion poll their due. Perhaps they’re actually smart people who realize that famine and so many natural disasters are not acts of God but are largely human-made. This is true for the famine that is happening in Somalia.

I’ve been kind of haunted this week by the developing reports coming out of that part of the world. I think it is because I’ve spent part of this week reflecting on the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, the miracle of abundant food in the desert place. I know, of course, that famine need not happen today, that there are abundant resources that would feed the people of the world. I was reading a commentary on Matthew, a new commentary by a Scottish minister, Leif Fischer, and Fischer in the commentary speaks about how it’s important that although we all gather here in this church, we are not, most of us, hungry this morning. We’ll have had a nice breakfast before coming to church, yet we have to recognize that there are people who go hungry in our world and that there is a word for them in this miracle. Fischer writes that in "God’s economy all will be fed." It reminds me of a slogan that was used by one of the large aid agencies coming out of the United Kingdom some years ago, a group called Christian Aid, a faith-based Christian aid organization working largely in Africa. And their slogan the last time there was a major famine was “We believe in life before death.” Let’s use that context to approach Matthew’s story of the feeding of the multitudes in the desert.

I’m not this morning going to try to explain how the miracle happened or to reflect on the mechanics of the miraculous feeding. There’s an old saying from the Sufi tradition in Islam, that mystical wing of Islam, that says that once people develop an interest in the miraculous, they have no desire to learn anything of true spiritual value. It’s too easy to get caught up in thinking about how God is present in this when what I would invite you to do is to hold the mystery in faith and ask what it means for us.

So let’s do a little context and think a little about location here. Jesus has retreated to the desert. He’s just had two very major events happen in his life and ministry, as we read last week. Jesus has gone back to his hometown of Nazareth, where he has been rejected by the people who knew him as the son of the carpenter. They do not hold him in honor. And then soon after that Jesus learns of the execution of John the Baptist at the hands of the ruler of that region, Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, whom we learn about in the birth stories of Jesus. John the Baptist, the prophet, the forerunner, has been executed at the request of Salome. And hearing about this death, Jesus grieves, and as he often does in Matthew’s Gospel, he retreats to the desert place.

Now when we read in the Gospels about geographical locations like the desert or the city or the lake, it’s important that we don’t just see them in that geographical sense, but that they have a deeper meaning in them. The city is a place of danger. The desert is a liminal place, a place on the margins of existence and of society. Remember that when he is on retreat in the desert early in his ministry that Jesus encounters the temptations of the devil. That time, you will remember, Jesus refused to turn stones into bread. Yet here we are back in the desert where Jesus is dealing with the need of those who have followed him into that place and we might agree with the disciples that it is really time to turn the people away, that they should go and get their own food and leave Jesus in peace to grieve, but Jesus says no.

What follows is this miraculous feast in the middle of the desert. Remember the juxtaposition of this, that there has just been a feast at which death was present, the feast that Herod holds and at which Salome dances and John the Baptist is executed and his head is placed on the platter. And here in the wilderness, in the desert, is this feast of life. Leif Fischer comments on this. He notes the contrast between the death-dealing arrogance of power on one hand and the power of compassionate sharing on the other, between the stink of corrupt luxury reeking from Herod’s table and the forces of life as Jesus nurtures folk in the stark barrenness of the desert.

He had compassion for the crowds, Matthew tells us, giving us the motivation for the miracle of life. It grows out of compassion, the Latin root of which means to “suffer with.” The New Testament scholar J. Won Lee writes that in this passage Jesus is serving the weak on the basis of compassion and this manifests God’s ruling activity, so for J. Won Lee the presence of compassion is the presence of God’s very reign.

Compassion is more than sympathy. More even, perhaps, than empathy. Or it requires empathy. But there’s more to it. There’s an action that must happen for it to be compassion. In God’s reign, compassion acts out as service and is the mark of faithfulness to the gospel. Compassion, I believe, is love that is put into action. This is the imperative of compassion—that is requires action toward the other, action rooted and grounded in love. And we might reflect that the absence of compassion means the absence of God’s loving presence. In his autobiography, the great worker for peace Mahatma Gandhi tells how when he was in his student days in South Africa, he became deeply interested in the Bible and especially in Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. Gandhi became convinced that Christianity could be the answer to the caste system, which had plagued India for centuries and which Gandhi fought against. He seriously considered becoming Christian. One day when he was in South Africa, he went to a church to attend mass and to begin instruction. He writes that he was stopped at the entrance to the church and told that if he desired to attend mass he was welcome to do so in another church, one that was reserved for blacks and coloreds. Gandhi writes that he left and never returned. There was an absence of compassion in God’s love.

I never really hear much of what contemporary media commentator Bill O’Reilly says. I never really watch him; I only hear about him when he says something, usually controversial, that is reported in other media, and I usually find myself in vehement disagreement with his opinions. However, I find myself in agreement with him this week. It was reported he spoke about the New York Times headline that described the killer in the Norwegian massacre as a Christian extremist. O’Reilly, as reported, said, “No one who claims to follow Jesus Christ could act toward others as he did.” I agree there that is the absence of compassion.

Indeed I believe that compassion is the antidote to hate, the antidote to apathy, to smug contentment that can so often take over our lives and comfortable, wealthy world. Compassion is the antidote to a worldview in which the least basically do not matter. In our gospel, in this miracle bread, is the manifestation of God’s compassion in Jesus. But we see miracles of compassion in the everyday. If only our eyes are open to see. I was touched this week in watching a beautiful, poignant movie, a French film that came out last year, called Of Gods and Men. It tells the story of a small Cistercian community of seven or eight monks who live in Algeria during civil unrest in Algeria. It is a poignant and sad story and yet at the heart of it is how these men live in community with the Muslim village in which they are situated, primarily in the provision of healthcare that one of the monks, who is a doctor, gives to the families in that wider community. In that healthcare is the manifestation of God’s compassion in that community.

Thanks be to God that even in our own community of faith we can encounter these miracles of compassion. One of our elders, Bill Becker, died a few weeks ago. Many of you would have known Bill. He loved this church and served it faithfully. He had a long, debilitating illness over the last four or five years, which confined him to a wheelchair. Over those years, Bill always was cared for by members of this congregation who had formed a care team, surrounded him, and made sure he always had food, always had companionship. If he needed groceries, there was someone who would shop. There were people who would help him if needed to move to a new apartment. These are manifestations of God’s love in the compassion that people have for someone else.

We are not hungry this morning, most of us, in that way that people in Somalia are, but I wonder if we’re willing to believe in abundance, in a gospel of abundance, abundance of compassion for all, including those who are on the margins. I wonder, are we willing this morning to believe in a God who, in the words of our psalm, satisfies you with good as long as you live. I wonder this morning if you’re able to capture that miraculous vision of abundance in the fifth-fifth chapter of Isaiah, in this belief that the more that we give, the more there is to go around. Isn’t that at the heart of the miraculous feeding in the desert? Or will we turn away from compassion to apathy, like the people in the Charles Cosley poem, Charles Cosley’s story of Jesus in poetry called “The Ballad of the Bread Man”?

He went round to all the people
A paper crown on his head.
Here is some bread from my father.
Take, eat, he said.

Nobody seemed very hungry.
Nobody seemed to care.
Nobody saw the god in himself
Quietly standing there.

Amen.