June 24, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
[Pentecost III (Proper 7) BCP]
Zechariah 12:8-10;13:1- I will pour out a spirit of compassion
Psalm 63:1-8 Deus, Deus meus
Galatians 3:23-29 No longer Jew or Greek. . . male or female.
Luke 9:18-24 They must take up their cross daily
[Revised Common Lectionary: trial use parishes, Penecost 3]
1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a A still small voice.
Psalm 42 Quemadmodum and 43 Judica me, Deus
or
Isaiah 65:1-9 I held out my hands to a rebellious people
Psalm 22:18-27 Deus, Deus meus
Galatians 3:23-39 (see above)
Luke 8:26-39 His name is "The military"
If there is one word of Hebrew that the faithful should know besides "Amen" and "Hallelujah", or its Latin twin, Alleluia, it is the word "CHESED"-- our translation for it today is "compassion", but "mercy" is used 148 times as well in the Authorized Version, and Miles Coverdale invented the neologism, "lovingkindess" for it, which he used 23 times in the Psalms. The nearest New Testmament word is "charis", our English "grace" and Luther used Gnade. It's in the Zechariah reading today, where the prophet records that Yahweh has promised to pour out on the house of David and all the people a spirit of CHESED, so that they will be able to look at the ones they kill and weep and mourn. Compassion--to suffer with, to enter into the passion, the pain of another to such an extent that their pain becomes our own, and affects us so that we feel its bitterness, we grieve as for the loss of a child of our own--an only child. It's a maternal word, itself born from the womb. It is perhaps the key word in all the Bible, in all our Jewish-Christian understanding and theology, and yes, in that of Islam as well, of who God is, and how God's people are called to solidarity, to maternal identity with the suffering of others, like the suffering of the parents of Timothy McVeigh this week, as well as the suffering of the parents of all his victims.
The Muslim daily calls upon Allah, the merciful, the compassionate. So should all the People of the Book.
This is not a word that you will hear bandied about much from radio or TV evangelists, and even Robert Schuller would not preach much on the suffering God, for compassion is not an upbeat subject; it involves pain. I heard it not once in all the hype about lethal injection as "closure" in the media this week. A religion of positive thinking, of New Age optimism and cheery praise songs was as perfectly capable of killing Timothy McVeigh and glaring as ghouls at his chemical garroting, as he in his cocksure patriotism was in exploding children as "collateral damage" in a crusade of self-righteousness. Compassion will not seek such simplistic "closure" and does not "move on" and "get on with our lives" in the face of disaster or betrayal. When religion becomes a form of self-hypnosis, self-injecting us with compassion paralysis, so self-regarding that only OUR pain is real, only the victims we love are real, and even Yahweh's compassion is denied, our glance at the crucifix averted, then we have lost the good news to a public relations game, indeed a parlor game in front of the TV, which has replaced the imperial box as a place to turn tumbs down on gladiators. We will watch judicial poisoning of a deranged patriot to "bring closure" to the bad news he brought to our media for months. Out of this comes the attitude, "My Holocaust is bigger than your Holocaust", which shows no sorrow for a crucified gay man, murdered gypsy, or Jehovah's Witness. Palestinian kids don't count, or Israeli infants: only our team counts. Only we bleed.
Luke tells us that it was while Jesus was praying alone, but in the presence of the disciples, that he suddenly turned his attention to them and asked, "Who do the crowds (the TV audience?) say that I am?" The question of his identity comes to him in the midst of his prayers, and we get the impression that he has prayed much about it--Who am I? Who has Yahweh called me to be? Where am I going?
If we look at Luke, in the chapters before this occasion, we find the feeding of a hungry multitude, we find Jesus sending out the Twelve to heal, to live simply, to have power over demons--are they not all alike?--all so much of a piece? We see Jesus heal the little girl everyone thought was a goner, we watch him cast out a legion--(a Roman military unit)--of demons from a madman, maddened like Tim McVeigh by his military brainwashing in the graveyard by the sea.
"It was almost like the devil was inside him looking at us." - so the New York Times quoted Gloria Buck, on watching Timothy J. McVeigh's execution via closed-circuit television.
Indeed, Jesus saw the same demon in the graveyard madman, and didn't call for capitalist punishment, but for compassion, for CHESED. The demons there named themselves, "We are a military unit." As Jesus showed compassion to his fellow convicts on the Cross, so he showed compassion--his Sacred motherly Heart of Love, to the demoniac.
And we hear him speak to calm a storm at sea (in Spanish, a tormenta). We meet the marginalized women whom Jesus gave back their dignity--Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Chuza and Susanna and the others. . . and the woman from last week's gospel, the hooker with the perfume who crashed the party at the Senior Warden's house. And the Widow of Nain's only son, and the gay Army Officer and his beloved servant, and the healing of the man with the withered hand, the paralytic on the stretcher. Jesus calls Levi, a tax officer for the occupation army, and heals crowds at sunset at Peter's house in Capernaum and ministers to his feverish mother-in-law as well. In every instance, all the way back to his first sermon at Nazareth, Jesus is shown in the ministry of liberation, helping people escape their exclusion, their captivity, their sickness and weakness and powerlessness, their exile from the community. In each of these occasions Jesus also taught his disciples Who He Was, and in each instance he must have been learning himself Who He Was, and what Yahweh had called him to.
When he called Peter to be his student, the way Luke tells it Jesus has already once been to his house--he had gone there from the synagogue one Sabbath day because "they had asked him to" and had ministered to his mother-in-law. It isn't until next chapter (5) that he runs into Simon at the lakeside, where Jesus was preaching and Peter was mending nets, and Jesus asked to borrow a boat to stand in offshore and preach. Then Jesus lends a hand and enters into Peter's anguish--("We have worked all night and caught nothing") and in this act of solidarity-compassion Jesus is declaring "in what is your agenda, your hard work, your job, your livelihood, your sweat, I am with you." And so it was that Peter was moved again, as he had been moved when Jesus had laid hands upon his wife's mother. Now when Jesus asks, "Who do folks say that I am?" he knows what the others have talked about; about his being John Baptist redivivus, as we all knew in our own lives (I met him in Chicago, and touched his hands) Martin Luther King to have been a prophet risen from the dead. But then Jesus asks, "you folks--who do you say that I am?"
Peter's answer is given as if it were immediate, impetuous, as a star pupil's hand shoots up before the teacher finishes the question. But was it so sudden? Maybe there was a hesitant silence. Maybe Jesus had said, "I'll give you all a while to think about it." Three or four centuries, or a couple of millenia. Luke says only that "it was Peter who spoke up." Does that imply no one else spoke up? Or thought about it? It was in these recent weeks and months of ministry that the reflection had been done, surely, and the first definitions were emerging in Galilee, which we thought had culminated at Nicea and Chalcedon, or with the 39 Articles, or the Baltimore or Westminster Catechisms, or the Augsburg Confession, but even now in our own time are unfinished and incomplete. For the question is open-ended and even now addressed to us. As Albert Schweitzer realized after his Quest, it is in our own experience that we come to learn Who He Is.
To each of us the questions come: Who is He? What are we to be to Him now? Who are we? The answers to those questions, like Peter's answer to Jesus, surely come out of what we have heard and seen, how He has touched our lives, what we know of Him in our selves and our compañeros on the Way, the lives we have seen him rescue, the dead we have seen alive again. At that moment on the roadside it all came together in Peter's consciousness, and the words leap from his lips. Jesus quells the enthusiasm, stifles the celebrity title. He gives them strict orders, says Luke, not to publicize this, not to call a press conference. The truly Human One must suffer--the authentic person is destined to grief, to know rejection, even to be killed, and Resurrection can only come after all of that. Paul Macartney, on Larry King Live, told us last night that it was John Lennon who taught him about Love, "Yesterday." We learn all along the Way.
"If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, to learn my Way, what is needed is a deliberate embracing of the stauros, the Cross that stands along the highways of the world--this occupied territory, the noose, the lethal injection of vengeance that keeps domination and the cycle of violence in its place." Every Cross is tailor-made, there are no two alike. The boys hanged to die with Jesus at Golgotha are described variously as bandits, murderers, insurrectionists. One of them may have been a Timothy -- a timid soul who was capable of mayhem, of grandiose and ghastly gesture of adjusting history with a bloody hand. Misguided patriots. On the other unbloody hand, there is young John, who "trimmed the flapping sail, and. . . homeless in Patmos died" and "Peter, who hauled the teeming net, head-down was crucified."
The ministry of Jesus and his gang was not all beer and skittles, peaches and cream, fishburgers and wine tastings. They were daily at risk, and daily took up the Cross and hauled it in a Via Crucis around Galilee, and so Jesus found a definition to articulate at Capernaum today. His answer, and the catechism of the infant Church, was crafted in the Crucible of Compassion. Jesus says that the way of discipleship is a daily going into CHESED, into the Way of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
The call of the disciple is not merely to hold the hands of the suffering ones, to fluff their pillows or even extend a sponge of anaesthetic, a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple. These will not be forgotten, the Rabbi promises us. But it is our Calling to enter deeply the suffering, to exercise our CHESED, to move our wombs of compassion and "dar luz", give birth to new life, as a Way of Life.
Tuesday in the madrugada--the dark of night--I was surprised to find the Playboy channel showing soft het-porn at one in the morning and appropriately, the other cable TV option was the circus in the U.S. over the poisoning of Timothy McVeigh. Porn and Poison in tandem to please the populace.
Paul says that a religion which merely fulfills obligations and duties--due process--"The Law" as he calls it, is a baby-sitter religion. A good baby-sitter would have turned off my TV at midnight. The peda-gogue, the custodian, is there to see that nothing happens! That's what baby-sitter does--the good news that a baby-sitter has when the folks get home is "nothing happened". It's not the baby-sitter's job to instill character, to form the personality, to teach adult responsibility, to share a life, to implant compassion. Or to leave her house and all good things in her last will and testament as an inheritance for the children. If all your religion consists of is legal obligations, or the three common duties (prayer, fasting, almsgiving), it's still a baby-sitter religion. What to do till you grow up.
Jose Porfirio Miranda, a Mexican Liberation theologian* says, "Frankly I do not see how there can be an authentic COMPASSION for the oppressed without there being at the same time indignation against the oppressor." Justice is the best synonym for compassion, and that means we look to do justice in our time, in our lives, in the world we found here when we came, and to take the stance of the oppressed day-by-day. Last week in the U.S., the oppressive government tried to teach us again that Justice means Vengeance, judicial murder is the cure for murder. A lie. Did Timothy deserve it? Oh, yes, but so does Geoge Bush! The bible claims we all do.
The great issues that faced us when I was ordained in 1959--racism rampant, capitalism and militarism rampant, sexism rampant-- are roaring and rampant still. In our Me First world, these become unnoticed foot-notes for a judicial system that postpones or sidetracks or ignores them and those who suffer from them, appoints its own president, and provides instead of leadership, pornography and drugs and poison to its Youth. Yet God--Yahweh--is still trying to form in Her womb of Compassion, of CHESDED, a new People, a Church which is itself a World of Covenant and Compassion.
------------------------------------- *José Porfirio Miranda, "Marx and the Bible: a Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression." Maryknoll: Orbis books. 1974. page 47.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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