Luke 7:11-17
“Soon afterward he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow, and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he was moved with compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not cry.’ Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stopped. And he said, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’ The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them, and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has risen among us!’ and ‘God has visited his people!’ This word about him spread throughout the whole of Judea and all the surrounding region.”
As an Enneagram three, it’s tempting to read this passage and conclude that God’s dream of compassion is a strategic plan to right all wrongs and end all suffering in the world. I’m sure I’m not the only one that gravitates towards the fact that Jesus’s compassion led him to action. There was a problem (death), and Jesus fixed it with compassionate doing (resurrection).
By God’s grace, however, we are not all an Enneagram three. In my own growth journey, as well as my plight from social worker to therapist, I’ve learned that compassionate doing without compassionate being can sneakily turn into a very unhealthy pattern of “rescuing and saving” that often dead ends in resentment, exhaustion, and broken relationships. We are not, after all, human doings, but human beings.
In a sermon on this very passage Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “Maybe it goes without saying, but right now I need a story of Jesus seeing and being moved by human grief because that (stuff) is still so heavy around me. And like many of you, I'm not unfamiliar with how bad we church folk can be around loss and suffering, how we tend to blame God or we blame each other, or we blame ourselves for it. And I'm also not unfamiliar with how often we avoid the grief of others, so we're not infected by it. So I love the simplicity of Jesus just seeing grief and being moved by it and being totally unafraid to touch it.”
Deep and intimate connection has always been God’s design and desire for creation. It's true that such connection often moves us towards action, maybe even life-saving action. It’s also true that sometimes there is no action to take, and all that we can muster is the movement of an arm being draped over a grieving shoulder.
Nadia goes on to reflect, “Jesus sees her, and the text says he had compassion on her. But compassion is really far too polite a translation because in Greek it's more visceral than what we think of as compassion. It's more like his guts turned, his insides lurched at the sight of such loneliness as a widow grieving the death of her only child in the middle of a crowd.”
Compassionate being is visceral. It’s embodied. When we are overwhelmed, it’s an invitation back to ourselves, back to relationships with others, and to being held by a compassionate, connection-seeking God.
As you check in with yourself, are there ways you have been avoiding difficult emotions (like anger, sadness or grief) that have kept you from deeply connecting with yourself? With others? With God?
How does it feel to glance up at a God who sees your pain, is viscerally moved and affected by it and ‘totally unafraid to touch’ and connect with you right now?