The Compassion of the Lord

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"The Lord is compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and of great goodness." (Psalm. 103:8)

"And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, "Do not weep"." (Lk. 7:13)

Compassion \kem-'pa-shan\: "Sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it." 

Merriam Webster Dictionary

The appointed Gospel that we heard at the Liturgy this last Sunday was Lk. 7:11-16, the extraordinary account of the raising from death of the son of the widow of Nain. This account is unique to the Gospel According to St. Luke. And it is one of the three accounts in the Gospels in which Christ restores a human person to life following death (Jairus's daughter and Lazarus of Bethany being the other two). Although only the Lord Jesus Christ has been resurrected unto eternal life - "For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him" (Rom. 6:9) - those three who were resuscitated to life again were seen as pledges or prefigurations of the resurrection of the dead awaited for at the end of time, as affirmed each and every time that we recite the Nicene Creed in our communal and personal prayer. For this reason, the crowd that accompanied the widow of Nain in the funeral procession of her son glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has visited his people!" (7:16) In this account, Jesus appears as another Elijah who raised the son of the widow of Zarephath (I Kg. 17:17-24). 

However, this raising of the young man is not the only remarkable event of note in this dramatic account. For the mother of the young man was a widow and this was her only son (Lk. 7:12). When the Lord had authoritatively brought the funeral procession to a halt, St. Luke informs us: "And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, Do not weep"." (Lk. 7:13) Compassion always characterized Jesus in his interactions with those who were suffering some form of distress, mental or physical. Jesus understood the distress of this poor widow, who would now be on her own without her husband or son. By restoring the young man to life, he also restores new life to the grief-stricken and lonely widow. In fact, the way that St. Luke conveys this story seems as if that was his main concern in immortalizing it in his Gospel. 

Many will claim that St. Luke stresses the compassion of the Lord the most among the evangelists. Compassion goes beyond mere kindness or helpfulness. It wells up from the heart and it seeks to alleviate the distress of the other. Even the dry definition that is so often characteristic of the dictionary - as cited above - captures this deeper meaning of compassion as an interior sympathy seeking to manifest itself in an exterior action.

Looking inwardly at the "household of faith," which is the Church, the followers of Christ need also to be persons filled with compassion for the other who may be suffering. Compassion takes us far beyond outward forms of piety. Actually, without compassion those forms of piety can dry up and manifest the religious hypocrisy so strongly criticized by the Lord. The world can be a very cold place filled with marginalized and lonely people. We also see that people are often manipulated and abused due to their powerlessness. 

Thus, if a given society is drained of compassion because of a certain ideological orientation or political goals, that society has surrendered its basic humanitarian impulses contrary to the natural goodness of human nature as created by God "in the beginning." The neoconservative social commentator, David Brooks, claims that we are living in "the era of dark passions." He comments on the following: anger, hatred, resentment, fear and the desire to dominate. These are the antitheses of compassion and mercy. And that means that they are contrary to the blessed principles manifested in Christ and meant to be manifested by His followers. In other words, a "Christian" is meant to be "Christ-like."

"Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful." (Lk. 6:36)