Luke 7:1-17
Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
February 9, 2025
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justice, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” [1]
I don’t know about you, but a lot of people are feeling daunted right about now. In the past few weeks I’ve heard a lot of righteous anger and a lot of fear. Both of those are certainly very reasonable responses to recent events. Less often, I’ve heard people name lament or grief - but make no mistake, those are also present. These are big, complex emotions. Emotions that, in general, we have a hard time working through. Many of us were taught not to express our fears out loud, lest we accidentally speak them into existence. Or simply because we don’t want to admit our vulnerability. Many of us were taught that it is impolite or unproductive to be angry. And so we turn it inward or try to push it down. And few of us have had excellent models for lament and grief - they’re such messy emotions. They come at inconvenient times. They can make us feel out of control. They feel scary.
Like many of you, I keep thinking of Bishop Marian Budde’s powerful sermon at the National Cathedral a few weeks ago. What a sad state of affairs it is when people are surprised to hear a Christian preacher speak of mercy. And what a horrifying affront to our faith to hear people chastize the Bishop for lifting up Jesus’s core message of mercy and compassion.
It’s hard to study the life and ministry of Jesus and come away with the idea that mercy and compassion are bad. Honestly, I have no idea how anyone could get that idea from reading our sacred texts. Because compassion and mercy are Jesus’s meat and potatoes. It’s, like, his MAIN THING. In word and in deed, Jesus is filled with compassion. Extravagant, some might even say “wasteful” compassion. For everyone. From every background. No ifs ands or buts. We saw it in action last week when we read the story about Jesus healing the man with the withered hand. Even on the sabbath when he wasn’t supposed to be doing work, Jesus couldn’t help but be moved with compassion.
And then, in between last week’s passage and this week’s, Jesus even tells his disciples to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. He says, “Be merciful, just as God is merciful.” [2]
And then we get to today’s passage. Two stories of Jesus’s compassion just overflowing. It’s like he can’t even help it. He’s just a fountain of mercy and compassion everywhere he goes.
If you go and listen to Biblical scholars talk about the two stories of healing that we just heard, you’ll hear all kinds of hot takes on what these stories mean. As always, when we’re talking about miraculous stories, I want to note that we can take the Bible SERIOUSLY without taking it LITERALLY. Even if we don’t believe these stories factually happened in this way, we can still maintain a posture of curiosity about what truths are conveyed through them. After all, the late great Marcus Borg pointed out that metaphor can often convey deeper truths than factual stories.
Okay, so back to these healing stories. We have two of them today: Jesus heals an enslaved servant of a Roman soldier and then Jesus raises a widow’s adult son from the dead. In both instances, there are lots of complexities, lots of characters, lots of details to explore. And while I love exploring all those details, we’re not going to get into many of them today. Instead, I just want to lift up a few themes.
First, first-century hearers may have been surprised at Jesus’s kindness to a Roman military commander. Rome was an occupying force in Galilee and even though this particular centurion seems to be friendly with the locals, it’s still unexpected that Jesus chose to act with such kindness towards him.
Second, first-century hearers probably would NOT have been as surprised that Jesus helped an unnamed widow. After all, the entirety of the Jewish scriptures are full of admonishments to support widows. They were uniquely vulnerable in ancient times and a widow who lost both her husband and her son was likely in a very tenuous financial position.
Thirdly, first-century hearers likely would have heard echoes of 1 Kings - the story of the Prophet Elijah going to Sidon and healing the son of the unnamed widow of Zarephath. That story is the one that Jesus mentioned in the Temple earlier in Luke when he shared his mission statement. And the locals seemed to be perplexed and upset that Jesus was lifting up the global reach of his ministry. Like Elijah, Jesus didn’t plan to ONLY show compassion to those in his “in group” but to foreigners, too.
And so these two short stories of healing lift up some huge themes in Jesus’s ministry:
Ministry in the midst and oppressive Empire of and even ministry TO the oppressor
Ministry to and among those who are most vulnerable in society, like this widow
Ministry that is unconfined by national, ethnic, or religious borders
And the theme that undergirds it all is Jesus’s superpower: compassion.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that this story takes place in Capernaum. One translation of the name is, “Place of Compassion.” It is the place that Matthew calls Jesus’ home base – the place he retreats to after withstanding temptation in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry. Capernaum is also the place where Jesus got in trouble for teaching and healing on the Sabbath – acts of compassion for a people who were hungry for knowledge and for Simon Peter whose mother-in-law was quite ill. And it is the place where he healed a paralyzed man lowered through the roof in a scene of movie-worthy drama.
Capernaum. The place of compassion. Jesus’ home base.
Time after time in our scriptures, the people around Jesus wonder, “Where does this man get his authority? How does he do these mighty acts?”
Perhaps we never needed to look any further than the name of the town where he settled after beginning his ministry. The place of compassion.
Those of us who earnestly seek to embody Christ’s love in a hurting world would do well to remember his superpower of compassion. Bishop Budde knows this. And I think we all know it on some level. Even people who don’t follow Jesus and have grown weary of listening to hypocritical churches paid attention when she spoke of mercy. There is something within us that understands the power of compassion. We inherently experience it as a healing force for good.
Even non-religious experts will tell you compassion is important. Psychology educator Kendra Cherry wrote about compassion on the health website VeryWell. She defines compassion as empathy in action. We feel empathy for someone and then when we are moved to act - that’s compassion. Cherry says there are two primary types of compassion: compassion for others and compassion for self. And that if we want to “flex our compassion muscles” we can:
Speak with kindness
Apologize when we’ve made a mistake
Listen carefully and without judgment
Offer to help someone with a task
Express gratitude and appreciation
Be patient [3]
Lovely tips, yes? Not rocket science but important reminders.
But if we really want to take compassion to the next level - compassion for ourselves and others - I think we need to recognize there are spiritual components. Using Jesus as our model, we can actively seek out spiritual practices that help us build up our compassion muscles. Louis Savary and Patricia Berne speak of a spiritual practice of compassion for another person as “kything” - a term borrowed from Madeleine L’Engle. Kything is more than just a physical or psychological connection with another human. It’s a “spirit-to-spirit or soul-to-soul” connection.
They describe a practice of kything in three steps:
Centering ourselves: getting settled in our own spirit - the foundation for any spiritual practice
Centering on the other person: this is a “state of consciousness they call being lovingly single-minded” and they give several suggestion for how to do this
Establishing connection with the other: they call this communion and describe it as “being freely and lovingly joined in spirit” [4]
I’ll share the link to their full description in the sermon notes later if you want to learn more about kything and practice on your own.
There is an enormous amount of pain and suffering in the world. And with the injustices mounting, I’m sorry to say that I don’t think the pain and suffering is magically disappearing any time soon. If we are going to do what Rami Shapiro describes and find ourselves undaunted by the enormity of the world’s grief, we will need robust spiritual practices to ground us in our common humanity.
As always, Jesus shows the way through his compassionate acts: Don’t overthink it. Do justice, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. We are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are we free to abandon it.
May we be held in that great circle of everlasting compassion as we keep breathing in and out.
NOTES:
[1] This aphorism is usually attributed to The Talmud, but that’s not quite right. It’s a paraphrase of wisdom Rabbi Rami Shapiro gleaned from several places. It’s a commentary on Micah 6:8 a text from the Pirke Avot. All of which is to say, it appears in its most complete form in Shapiro’s book Wisdom of the Jewish Sages but it’s a mashup of Jewish wisdom.
[2] Luke 6:36
[3] https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-compassion-5207366
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