Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing

In my last sermon in this series, Jesus and the Christian Scripture I focused on Jesus as a human being who was clearly recognized as a holy man or spirit person. Jesus, a spirit person trying to make his way home, to the holy mystery that is all around us and within us. People saw or sensed something special in him. They sensed his grounding in the holy mystery of life. They sensed a spiritual presence and,they wanted to be in relationship with him. Being in relationship with the spirit was one of the two central concerns of Jesus’ life and ministry.

People also wanted to be in relationship with Jesus because he was radically compassionate. Intimately intertwined with being in relationship to the spirit was Jesus’ compassion. Stories were told and retold about Jesus being moved by compassion and being filled with empathy. Compassion is central to what Jesus taught about ethics, values and God. Luke (6:36) quotes Jesus, “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.”

Jesus did not teach that compassion was only an individual virtue. To be sure, his teaching applies to each person, individually. Even more so, compassion needs to be embodied by the whole community. Martin Luther King, Jr. brought compassion into the non-violent Civil Rights Movement. He based it on the core of Jesus’ revolutionary message - compassion. I remember my Lutheran seminary professors drilling that point into me two years after King, was shot.

I would not have predicted it, but while preparing my sermons on Jesus and the Christian Scriptures, I was delightfully surprised to discover that I enjoyed returning to the Hebrew I studied when I was in seminary. I find it fascinating that the word in Hebrew Scripture most often translated as compassion is a derivative of the word meaning womb. That is the same word Jesus would have used in Aramaic. Think of the wonderful and powerful imagery of a woman feeling compassion for the child or children of her womb. Thus, Hebrew scripture teaches compassion for all of creation.

Listen to how it is used in Jeremiah (31:20) (translation from Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, pp. 45, 50):

“Thus says Yahweh:
Is Ephraim (Israel) my dear son? My darling child?
For the more I speak of him,
The more I do remember him.
Therefore, my womb trembles for him;
I will truly show motherly-compassion upon him.”

This feminine imagery was the predominant vision of the divine before the masculine God referred to as Yahweh became dominant in Israel. This female deity showed motherly compassion for human kind. Men, of course, can feel compassion for their siblings because they all came from the same womb. Jesus, and the Hebrew scriptures before him, extended the scope of compassion far beyond familial and tribal relationships.

Unfortunately, we lost much of the original meaning of the Hebrew word translated as compassion because we also render it as mercy or merciful. The implication of mercy, however, obscures the more radically inclusive meaning of compassion. Mercy infers or implies a person in a superior position pitying on someone beneath them regarding power, class, wealth or even morality.

Compassion in English is a combination of the word passion from the Latin word meaning “to feel” and the prefix com meaning: “with.” Thus, compassion means that we feel with another person, or we sense the feelings of another deeply, instinctively or in our gut. This is what it meant to Jesus.

To say that God is compassionate is to say that God (or the spirit of life, or the holy) has a positive connection with all that he, she or it bore or created. A compassionate God is life giving, life nourishing and all embracing. This is the very message that our early Universalist ancestors discovered when reading about Jesus. They bravely preached about a loving and compassionate God. They said God was too good to consign anyone to eternal damnation. They preached a God of universal compassion.

“Be compassionate as God is compassionate,” said Jesus (Luke, 6:36). We are called to be compassionate as individuals like the Good Samaritan who rescued the beaten and robbed man essentially giving him the gift of life. He embraced a beaten and bloodied stranger. He lifted him to safety and nourished him back to life. The Samaritan did this, even though the man he was helping came from a higher status religious group that looked down on Samaritans. The Samaritan was womb-like in that he treated the beaten man as if they both had come from the same womb. He was compassionate. He sensed the feelings of the other and responded in a God-like manner.

Today, tell this parable substituting a Shiite as the one beaten, robbed and left for dead along the road to Baghdad with a Sunni as the rescuer. Reverse the Sunni and Shiite and the message remains the same. Perhaps a Jewish political leader was beaten, robbed and left for dead along the road to Jerusalem and a Hamas Palestinian came to the rescue. Reverse the Palestinian and Jewish leader and the message is the same.

Bringing message closer to home, the two people might be a poor black person from Trenton and a wealthy white person from Hopewell or Bucks County. Alternatively, maybe the victim thinks Gays and Lesbians are sinful, impure and dangerous while the person providing aid was on the way to our church for a same-sex civil union. You get the point. Choose any two people from different social strata, or who disagree strongly about religion, values, politics, abortion, war or sex and Jesus’ message remains that they need to be open to experience the feelings of the other.

Jesus taught compassion as his central message. Whenever there is a choice between responding compassionately or in any other fashion, no matter how religious, spiritual or fair it might seem, compassion clearly is always the first choice. That was radical and revolutionary during the time of Jesus. Perhaps, universal compassion remains just as revolutionary today.

Jesus’ application of universal compassion clashed repeatedly with Jewish purity rules. Story after story tells of Jesus conflicting with accepted religious behavior, social standards and political ideals of his day because he valued compassion above all cultural standards.

Jesus Seminar scholars believe the parable about the dinner party was very typical of Jesus. The master in the parable demonstrates the radical inclusivity that Jesus taught and practiced. He invited outcasts: the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind to sup together. No self-respecting person of Jesus’ time would do this. Clear social groupings of the pure and the impure, the acceptable and the non-acceptable existed. Of course, we do not have anything similar to that today, do we? Then, why is New Jersey one of the most segregated states in the union, both racially and economically? Do not feel too righteous Pennsylvania residents. Bucks County is not much different. Wealthier towns, communities and neighborhoods today use various tools to make it difficult for different economic and ethnic groups to live together and mix socially.

The Jesus of compassion met with, talked with and even ate with societal outcasts and religious rejects. Some were outcasts by occupation, like a tax collector or a shepherd. Others were outcasts because they were sinners or unclean, had lost a limb or other body part or were chronically ill. Being unclean was not restricted to the poor, but being poverty stricken was a sign that you had not lived right. Being a Gentile, a non-Jew, automatically made you impure. Jesus challenged these purity-based restrictive social boundaries. In word and deed, Jesus promoted the bold message that people ought to “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.”

Miraculously, Jesus replaced the dominant core value of purity with a new core value of radical compassion and egalitarianism. This message brought more healing to the outcasts than any physical healing. For the very first time, they felt accepted and loved by God. For the very first time, they had an accepted place in the human family.

The Good Samaritan is one of the selections in the Gospels that the Jesus Seminar scholars subscribe to Jesus. The Levite and the Priest passed by the bloodied, beaten and unconscious man, not because they were cruel and unloving. Purity laws and cultural customs taught that if they went near enough to him to see if he was dead, they would have automatically become unclean or impure. The Samaritan on the other hand was already viewed by the dominant religious culture as unclean and impure. The shocking parable identifies the Samaritan clearly as the compassionate one.

I cannot stress enough, that for Jesus, this was not just about individual ethical behavior. He wanted to change the community, the whole society. His message was political because it challenged the foundational systems that kept some people subservient while elevating others. Consider the economic class system here and throughout the world. The tiniest percentage of the population controls the vast majority of wealth and power.

Jesus associated with tax collectors, the poor and destitute. He touched lepers, had female disciples, touched and healed the sick including a hemorrhaging woman. Jesus defended himself and his followers when they broke the Sabbath law for human benefit. Remember, eating a meal with others had significant implications. It was not like eating with someone today. Breaking bread and sitting at the table with others signified mutual acceptance. If you were a respectable person, you certainly did not share table fellowship with anyone who was impure or an outcast.

Repeatedly, Jesus broke social taboos by associating and eating with tax collectors, women, the unclean, the impure and sinners. Because of this, Jesus was accused of being a drunkard, a glutton and a friend to sinners. Dominic Crossan, one of the Jesus Seminar scholars, calls this behavior “open table fellowship and radical egalitarianism.” Jesus demonstrated that the ethics of compassion would create a radically inclusive community. These inclusive festive meals were the predecessor for what became the Christian practice of Holy Communion or the Eucharist. Ironically, today, the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion is often exclusive. The church refuses communion as a punishment for people disagreeing with its rules.

The early Christian Church tried to model Jesus’ life and teachings. It did this by joining in inclusive, compassionate communities. Paul writes about the new social order, saying: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female.” (Galatians 3:28)

This was and continues to be a subversive, boundary-shattering message. “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” The message has echoed down the centuries. Yet societies, Christian and non-Christian repeatedly labeled some people as good and pure and others as bad and impure. Dividing and separating people is a universal practice, whether by religious, racial, ethnic or even gang identity. In every era and in every culture there are those who establish rules designating some good and others bad.

The Jesus of compassion continues to challenge us to be compassionate, to feel another’s sensibilities. However, the Jesus of compassion does something even greater. Jesus wanted to change not only individual behavior, but even more he wanted to change his community, the whole cultural system. Jesus shattered the institutional walls that separated people, the rigid boundaries that kept them apart. The Jesus of compassion, believed in a radical inclusivity. Compassion was central to his message and life. Whenever there was a choice between being compassionate and behaving differently, Jesus stood on the side of compassion. If a religious law or a cultural custom called for behavior that was not compassionate, Jesus urged his followers to reject it.

The best Christian tradition propounds compassion, but sometime it conforms to the same cultural divisions among the acceptable and the non-acceptable that Jesus died trying to change. I wish I could say that we Unitarian Universalists have always been on the side of radical compassion, but we have also fail to be as compassionate as we wish to be. The implications for us are very clear. Universalist Unitarian tradition differs theologically with Christian tradition and doctrine about whom and what Jesus was, but our ethical positions have deep roots in what Jesus taught and how he lived.

Compassion, or feeling with others, calls upon us to rededicate ourselves individually and congregationally to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another… the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all; and, respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Let us be open individually and as a congregation. Let us not hesitate to reach out and show compassion, or feel with the person next to us, the person behind us, today, here in our sanctuary, and tomorrow in our neighborhoods, at work, on the road, in the neighboring communities, states and countries.

We are called to “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.”