Being Who God Is
Today I am sharing an excerpt from a larger piece I've been working on.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Every time the church gathers for worship, there are deeply traumatic events taking place in individual lives, families, communities, and the world. Given this reality, it is important to ask how our liturgies are either ignoring or leaning into the suffering. Do the songs we sing, the prayers we pray, the scriptures we read, and the sermons we preach hurry through or even ignore the hard work of lamenting trauma in favor of the ease of rejoicing? Are our practices cultivating a patient attentiveness that gives way to the kind of compassion modeled by Jesus?
The ministry of Jesus is defined by the compassion he showed to the outcast. While compassion is sometimes defined as taking pity or showing concern for the burdens of others, Jesus’ brand of compassion was different because he removed the gap between himself and those who suffered, literally becoming like them. Gregory Boyle describes this wonder of the incarnation,
Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others. There is a world of difference in that. Jesus didn’t seek the rights of lepers. He touched the leper even before he got around to curing him. He didn’t champion the cause of the outcast. He was the outcast. He didn’t fight for improved conditions for the prisoner. He simply said, “I was in prison.”
In his suffering, Jesus broke the barriers between himself and those to whom he ministered. Jesus did not just come as God incarnate, far removed from humankind, unable to identify with their pain. Instead, as Philippians 2:8 reminds us, he became like us, and “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”
Despite this example set by Jesus, many things prevent Christians from living out the compassionate way of Jesus. In their book Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, Christopher Smith and John Pattison point to a fundamental lack of patience deeply imbedded in culture that has also infiltrated the way we approach worship, and especially the way we think about expressions of suffering. Embedded in the very nature of suffering is an ambiguity that renders us incapable of knowing when the darkness will cease and we will once again step into the light. Our inability to wait, and our unwillingness sing, preach, or pray uncomfortable words of lament often cut us off from healing that can only come when suffering is spoken out in a safe community.
By cultivating patience and a willingness to sit with the wounded and bear witness to their suffering, we come to understand the true meaning of compassion. While pity seeks to provide a temporary solution, compassion calls us to commit to a long-term relationship of support born of the acknowledgement of our own suffering and fallibility. Tsh Harrison Warren reminds us, “Jesus calls people to a cross – to die, to lose their life that they might gain it. . . he drank his own poison. He was honest about the cost of discipleship and about pain that is not easily solved.” (from A Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep) Because of his own suffering, Jesus was able to model the empathetic essence of compassion. As Gregory Boyle, “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals. . . If we long to be in the world who God is, then, somehow our compassion has to find its way to vastness.” (From Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion) We feed the hungry, tend the sick, shelter the homeless, sit with the solitary because we, too, have known hunger, sickness, homelessness, and loneliness, because we, too, have suffered.