Encounters and Compassion

As I reflect on our gospel reading (Mark 1:40-45), the first thought that comes to mind is the idea of "encounter." Encounter means to "unexpectedly be faced with or experience something hostile or difficult or "to meet someone unexpectedly." "Encounters" in the bible fascinate me, particularly between Christ and those he meets. How does Christ approach people, who approaches him, and what does he do, and how might these encounters teach us something about who God is and what it looks like to follow him.

In our Gospel reading, out of the blue, Jesus encounters a man with a skin disease, a disease that renders him, more than likely, a social outcast, someone to be feared and avoided at all cost, an enemy of sorts, and he petitions Jesus for healing. What blows my mind the most about this story is maybe not the healing but the fact that in and through this encounter, God is moved in God's spirit, in God's gut. Jesus, God incarnate, was "moved with pity," moved with anger (some translations), or perhaps the best translation, moved with compassion. The characteristic Greek word for compassion means to let one's innards embrace the feeling or situation of another. That's wild. At the beginning of Mark, we are learning and seeing, through Jesus' encounter with the man with the skin disease, the God who is the "great companion - the fellow sufferer who understands" (Alfred Northwhitehead).

One author describes compassion as "daring to move 'toward what scares us,' whether pain or brokenness, confusion or fear, or mourning or misery. Compassion is a whole-hearted, full-blown immersion into the human condition. It means to "suffer with" by opening oneself to hurt rather than protection. Compassion requires perception, sensitivity enough to feel the suffering of other people, enough concern to care about their suffering, and enough commitment to act in a way that tries to alleviate their suffering. Compassion fights denial and fatalism; it's the opposite of a cold cynicism that tempts us to think, "Why bother?" Compassion takes risks; it is a bold gesture of vulnerability and tenderness that is radically countercultural in a social context that is more inclined to feign invulnerability and [stir up] blame and rage. Compassion draws near to the other as equals; this recognition of equality is essential for solidarity that can heal personal wounds and social breaches" (The Ethics of Encounter: Christian Neighbour Love as a Practice of Solidarity, Marcus Mescher).

This compassion is the type of compassion Jesus embodied. Compassion is the posture that God extends to humanity and us. When we voice our complaints, pain, and heartache, just like the man with the skin disease, God reaches out with compassion, a compassion that meets us where we are and can heal, transform, and liberate us (Disclaimer: maybe not in the ways we imagine or want or hope for, but ways we need).

God's compassion, visible most profoundly in Christ, is good news, and it might cause us to ask how and where we "encounter" God. In our friends and neighbours, Scripture and song, and bread and wine. As we celebrate Eucharist this morning, maybe there is something (complaint, concern, issue, whatever) that you need to bring to God, a place within you that you need God to enter, transform, and make whole; I encourage you to bring that to God, to the foot of the cross, and to ask for what you need today.

But there's another side of all this to ponder. If compassion is Jesus' posture toward humanity, toward you and me is compassion, and if are a people committed to following in the footsteps of Jesus, then compassion, or acts of compassion, to and for our one another and our neighbours, particular those who reside on the religious, social and political fringes, is a vital Christian practice, perhaps non-negotiable even. Jesus' acts of compassion weren't nice shows of emotion; they were political and social acts that illuminated and railed against all that was wrong (next out the section "The Compassion of Jesus" in Walter Brueggemann's book The Prophetic Imagination for more).

We live in a historical moment where we need more compassion, where we need to be more compassionate. Acts of compassion towards those around us and toward each other have the power to illuminate and critique that which dehumanizes and ushers forth transformation.

In his book The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann says, "[T]he one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief… The imperial consciousness lives by its capacity to still the groans and to go on with business as usual as though none were hurting and there were no groans (reminds me of the Act Party). If the groans become audible, if they can be heard in the streets and markets and courts, then the consciousness of domination is already jeopardized… Newness comes precisely from expressed pain. Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulated grief is the gate of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into the pain and giving it voice."

Can we, as individuals and as a community, better live lives of compassion and solidarity? We need to be a community that appropriately hears the cries of our friends and neighbours and, with unwavering hope, stands with them—compassionately standing in and with broken lives, with people reeling from their missed opportunities and shattered dreams, with communities living in the aftermath of stolen land and broken promises. This morning, may the God of compassion meet us in our place of need, restore and heal us, and, as God does, inspire us to meet those around us in the same way.