ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

6th Sunday of Trinity, 2009
Proper 11 B
Sermon preached by Fr Alan Moses

"As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things..."

Yesterday afternoon, as we were enjoying a walk through Sofia Gardens in Cardiff with my brother and his wife before catching the train home to London, I realised that almost all the people we saw as we walked were believers of one kind or another. Many of them were Jehovah's Witnesses in town for their annual convention, identifiable by conference badges and unseasonable suits and ties. Others were Muslim women in hijabs, or Sikhs in turbans. There may have been even more folk whose faith, like our Anglican Christianity, was not manifested in a dress code.

Religion, instead of declining quietly in accordance with the secularist script, is making a comeback in our world. Politicians and journalists, academics and commentators are scrambling to catch up; having to take God and religion far more seriously than they have ever anticipated.

Among the reasons that they have to do so is that religion is powerful stuff, potentially dangerous even lethal; especially when it comes wrapped in an explosive suicide jacket. Some respond by honest attempts to understand what believers are on about. Others, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins launch attacks which, in language and tone seem to mirror what they condemn in religion. Listen to an example I came across recently, from the waspish American writer Gore Vidal:

From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions...the sky-god is a jealous god...he requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose."

Religion is not just an undifferentiated mass. When people believe in God, including Christians, we have to ask: What kind of God?

Two fundamental questions emerge today from the welter of global religious striving:

Our gospel passage to day contains the answer that Christians give, or ought to give, to this two-sided question: "he saw a crowd; and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd."

The word "compassion" is explicitly used of Jesus' attitude toward human beings on at least eight occasions in the Gospels, and it is implicit in the entire witness of his life, including his healing ministry that also features in the Gospel for today. For Christians, Jesus is the one in whom we see the unique revelation of God, God's unique representative in history, so it follows that compassion must be of the essence of the One who created us and before whom all life is lived.

This is a claim to be taken not lightly but with the utmost seriousness. The history of religion and its present reality demonstrate that compassion is not the most common or popular idea that human beings have used to describe their sense of the divine attitude toward the world. Far from it! For many religions, both primitive and recent, deities have been regarded to some degree as ominous, wrathful, vengeful, angry, vindictive - to be approached only with great care - preferably through rituals supervised by a priestly caste.

Christianity, if we are honest, has had its share of this kind of thing; its own understandings of God, of his holiness and justice, have been insufficiently informed by that primary Christian category we see in today's Gospel - agape suffering love, - of which compassion is a synonym or extrapolation.

It is no accident that this word is used so naturally in the gospels and Christian tradition of Jesus. It is at the very heart of the prophetic traditions of ancient Israel, their essence which the great American Jewish scholar Rabbi Abraham Heschel named "divine pathos".

To the prophet...God does not reveal himself in an abstract absoluteness , but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and affected by what happens in the world...God is concerned about what happens in the world..,..God is concerned about the world and shares its fate. Indeed this is the essence of God's moral nature....His willingness to be involved in the history of man".

The passio Christi, the passion of the Redeemer, the suffering love of Christ, is nothing more nor less than the incarnation of that pathos of the God if Israel, the Creator.

Christians are called to examine conceptions of God that neglect this foundational claim, and thus distort our view of God, of our fellow-believers and of the world made and loved by this compassionate God. In making that examination. We should beware however of cheapening the claim as such. "Compassion" must not be turned into what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "Cheap Grace": "God has pity on us - what else would God do?" "God will pardon me, that;' his business" (Heinrich Heine). Compassion is not about being "nice".

Against such presumption and sentimentalism, we need to look more deeply at the meaning of compassion. We should begin with the word itself. Our problem as English-speakers is that our language with its latinization of basic human experiences, can obscure the picture that lies behind this word. The German word for compassion is Mitleid - literally "with suffering". Of course that is the literal meaning of "compassion" too, but most of us do not hear it. We think of is as another world for "pity". Pity is something we can manage from a distance - at one remove. Some years ago aid agencies began to notice a phenomenon which was given the name "compassion fatigue" ; people were growing weary of one disaster appeal after another. This is not true of real compassion, the divine compassion. We do not have compassion, really, unless we suffer with those to whom you refer. The pre-condition for compassion is unconditional solidarity with the ones for whom we feel it.

Jesus' compassion for the crowd, the very centre of our faith, is not condescension. It is the mark of his identification with his kind, and it will not achieve its full expression until, at Golgotha, he has gone all the way - identifying himself with our lot not only in birth and life, but also in death; even in that terrible sense of abandonment by God as well as human beings. For Christians, this is not just saying something about a good, generous and loving human being, Jesus of Nazareth. It is a statement about God - the Source of our lives and of all life, the One before whom we live out our days and must render an account, - the ethic flows without a break from the theology. As recipients of such compassion, we contradict our own being, our "new being" if we fail to enact the same compassion to others.

As Christians we tend to criticise Islam for having substituted for divine compassion a militant and perhaps inherently violent conception of the Deity. But "the time has come for judgement to begin with the household of God" (1 Peter 4.17). Before we begin criticising others, we need to ask ourselves if we have grasped just how radical belief in a compassionate God and whether we are ready to live that compassion.