Besides seeking to disconcert Jesus, the lawyer in Sunday’s gospel is probably also looking for some practical guidance when he asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Everyone asks this crucial question at some point in life. “What must I do to be saved?” “What will really make me happy?” “What will make me whole?”
Rather than telling the lawyer what to do, Jesus challenges him to a new perspective. The parable of the good Samaritan invites the lawyer to broaden his vision and to use his imagination in a radical, prophetic way.
This story stands at the heart of Jesus’ message of salvation. In effect, Jesus tells the lawyer (and all of us) that to be saved, whole, and happy we must love God and ourselves by loving our neighbors, including those for whom we may have no understanding or liking. Jesus insists that our relationships to God, to others, and to ourselves are intertwined.
Jesus’ parable asks the lawyer and us to stop, reflect, and embrace whom and what we most despise. He asks us to act as the Samaritan does when he stops to help and heal another marginalized person, someone whose wounds and distress everyone else has ignored. He asks us to allow compassion to change our hearts and lives.
The word compassion comes from the Latin, passio (suffering) and cum (with): to suffer or feel with. The Hebrew word for compassion, rahamim, expresses a deeply tender and empathetic love like that of a mother and father for their own child.
Compassion may be understood as the capacity to be attracted to and moved by the vulnerability of someone else. It requires the willingness to risk, to stop and share one’s own strengths and vulnerability, rather than rushing on with our own preoccupations or stereotypes. As Jesus’ story shows, compassion is the opposite of a priest’s self-righteousness and a Levite’s apathy.
- How have you learned compassion? How do you make it a daily pattern in your life?
- When have you felt lost and dejected, like the man whom the Samaritan stopped to help? What was going on in your life? What crisis seemed to be overpowering you? Who took time for you or simply provided a caring shoulder to lean on or an attentive ear to hear your story? How did that feel? What did he or she do for you?
- What did you learn from that experience? Did you feel condemned by others; did you condemn yourself for being in a seemingly helpless situation?
- What experiences in your life make it difficult to feel compassionate?
- What experiences have taught you compassion and the need to be less judgmental?
Genuine compassion for others, especially the marginalized, presupposes a compassion for ourselves — a dropping of our own high expectations of perfection, of accomplishing great and memorable deeds, of being in control. We cannot love in others what we despise or fear in ourselves.
Surely the Samaritan whom we call good took time to stop and bandage up another man’s wounds precisely because he recognized and accepted the same type of woundedness in his own humanity and perhaps in his own personal and professional life. From his suffering, he had learned to be attentive to someone else’s and to do what could be done.
Compassion is a movement of the heart. It includes sensitivity to what is weak and wounded as well as the courage to allow oneself to be affected by another’s life and pain. Who can take away suffering without entering it? How can we help heal someone else’s wounds if we have not begun to accept our own? Without compassion for ourselves, the one in need only reminds us of our needs and deficiencies.
Compassion also demands action — the type that takes time and even makes time — to help change persons and structures that sometimes blindly exclude and marginalize others. This is the ministry of our daily living: to find ways of making our own gifts and limitations, our own joyful and painful experiences available as sources of clarification, wisdom, and leadership.
- What is a way you can have compassion for yourself?
- How can compassion for yourself impel you into ministry?