My thanks to the Southern Cayuga (County) Wider Parish, an ecumenical gathering of churches representing several denominations, whose steering committee invited me to lead their weekly Lenten program this past Sunday evening. This year, the subject of the Lenten series is “compassion.” My assignment was to speak about compassion in the New Testament. Following my presentation and a spirited question and answer period, several participants asked if they could have a copy of my remarks. Since I only had notes with me rather than a manuscript, I promised I would write up an abbreviated version of my talk and post it on this blog. I don’t think blog posts should get too long, so I’m spreading it over two posts. Here is Part One of “Compassion in the New Testament.”
Before addressing the subject of compassion in the New Testament, I want to say something about compassion in general. Com-passio literally means to “suffer with.” In Latin, com means “with” and passio means “to suffer.” “Passion” is suffering, which is why we talk about “the Passion of Christ” during Holy Week. I remember having to explain this to my boys when they were younger. It seemed odd to them that we would refer to the crucifixion as “passion,” since they associated passion – like a lot of us do – with the ecstasy of romantic love. In fact, “passionate” love is a depth of feeling so intense that it hurts. True love always involves suffering. Suffering is an inevitable consequence of the deep joy that comes with binding oneself to the heart and soul of another, which is why the traditional vows of marriage are “for better and for worse.”
In his book Open Hands, Henri Nouwen wrote that we should never confuse compassion with “pity.” Pity is what a person feels for someone less fortunate. If I’m standing at the side of the road and you are lying at the bottom of a ditch, I might look down on you with pity. Or, as a person of means, I might have pity for all those poor souls who don’t have enough to eat. I can satisfy my pity without ever having to get near those for whom I am concerned. I can write a check to some organization that feeds the hungry or dial 911 and ask for someone else to come and get you out of the ditch. Pity implies distance.
Nouwen also distinguishes compassion from “sympathy” (though the words are quite similar). Sympathy is a kind of nearness, but it is shared only with certain individuals or particular groups of people. I am sympathetic to people who share my point of view, who’ve been through the same troubles I have, or whom I already know and love. To have sympathy is share in the sufferings of those with whom I have an affinity.
If pity implies distance and sympathy implies an exclusive nearness, then compassion is “inclusive nearness.” It is an orientation toward all people, not just those you know or already care about. Compassion is the willingness and ability to suffer with others regardless of who they are. When you speak of a compassionate person, you have in mind someone who conveys a natural sensitivity toward the hurt and pain of other people, whether they know them or not.
These distinctions provide an important framework for understanding how compassion functions in the New Testament.
Since com-passio is Latin, we do not find the word “compassion” in the Greek New Testament. The closest Greek word is sun-epathese (literally, “suffering with”), but this word is found only once – in Hebrews 10:34: “You had compassion for those in prison.” In every other instance, the English word compassion translates another set of terms. In Philippians 2:1 Paul writes, “If there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation of love, and sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete.” Colossians 3:12 says, “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion. The Greek phrase common to both these verses is splagchna oiktirmou. What does this mean?
First, let’s look at each word on its own. Oiktiro is found in some form in Hebrews 10:28, Romans 9:15, Romans 12:1, and 2 Corinthians 1:3. In all these instances, it means “mercy,” and particularly refers to the “mercy of God.” In the secular Greek culture of the time, oiktiro referred to grief or lamentation. In the New Testament, it refers to God’s deep feeling for us. Splagchna appears by itself in Philippians 1:8, where Paul expresses his deep affection for the Christians in Philippi: “I long for you with the compassion of Jesus Christ.” This translation presents a rather sanitized version of the original meaning. The last English translation to do justice to Paul’s words was the King James Version, which rendered the verse this way: “I long after you all with the bowels of Jesus Christ.” The word splagchna means “bowels” – literally, the innards in your belly. It’s an earthy image that might offend some, which is why splagchna usually gets translated as “affection,” “tender mercies” or something else less off-putting.
The people of the ancient world believed that all of the most intense feelings originated in the belly. For them, “guts” did not mean “courage,” but depth of feeling. It’s easy for us to understand why they would believe that, because when we feel anxious or afraid, our stomachs churn. Our lower innards give away how much we are affected by our circumstances. Splagchna oiktirmou means something like “the bowels of deep feeling.”
In the gospels, the word “compassion” translates something a little different, but not unrelated. Mark 6:34 (repeated in Matthew 9:36) reports that Jesus “saw a great crowd and he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.” The word translated as compassion in this verse is esplagchnisthe, a unique word that turns splagchna into a verb. We find this same verb in Mark 8:2, where Jesus says, “I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me for three days and have nothing to eat”; Mark 9:22, where the father of a demoniac asks Jesus to “have compassion on us and help us”; Matthew 20:34, where Jesus is moved with compassion to heal two blind men; and Luke 7:13, where Jesus had compassion for a widow whose son had died.
Esplagchnisthe is unique to the New Testament, and it is only found in the gospels. Most important of all, Jesus is the only subject of this verb (though Jesus sometimes used the same verb to describe characters in his parables who represented God). Even Paul wrote that he longed for the Philippian Christians with the splagchna of Christ. That is, on his own, Paul was not capable of the depth of feeling he had for them. He was the vehicle of Christ’s compassion.
The use of esplagchnisthe by the gospel writers tells us that, in Christ, something new was happening in God’s relationship to the human race. Through Christ, God shares our sufferings so completely that we don’t even have good language for it. It isn’t enough to say that God has mercy for us. That is a true statement, but it is not adequate to express all that God feels for us. It is certainly not enough to say that God “pities” us, for Christ has erased any distance between God and humanity. Nor is it enough to say that God “sympathizes” with us, for God does not suffer only with certain people. It isn’t even quite adequate to say that God “has compassion” for us, though that is the usual rendering in our English translations, because that is as far as the English language will take us. Through Christ, God’s compassion has become a verb. God “compassions” us. Our sufferings have become God’s sufferings. In Christ, God has entered fully into all human pathos, exercising a level of inclusive nearness that forever deepens God’s relationship with humanity. God is Spirit, but in Christ, God experienced “the bowels of deep feeling” for the human race. That might seem too crude or earthy a way to speak of Almighty God, but Incarnation (or “en-flesh-ment”) is all about earthiness. It’s about God being “enfleshed” in Christ, right down to the bowels of the human experience.
This is what I call the “radical compassion of Christ.” In part two, I will discuss how this radical compassion is central to Jesus’ identity as Savior and Son of God, and what this means for us as individuals and as church communities.
Look for part two in the next few days.
Copyright 2012 by J. Mark Lawson
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