Luke 10:25-37
Do you remember the first time you told someone I love you? Not a
parent, a child, or a sibling, but someone you were dating. You were probably very nervous, weren’t
you? I vividly remember the first
time I told Tanya I love you. We were in the courtyard of Hart Hall,
the dorm where she lived at Milligan College. I was really, really nervous. Not because I doubted what I felt, but I worried she didn’t
feel the same way. What happens if
you tell someone I love you and their
response is okay; thanks? That would be discouraging, wouldn’t
it?
What happens if love has no expression? What happens if love is not made visible in any kind of
way? Love, to be love, has to pass
from one person to another person.
As we continue our study of spiritual gifts we are moving to our
final category of gifts – Redemptive gifts. Redemptive gifts are those that make a redemptive, or
life-changing, difference in the life of another person. The redemptive gifts are – compassion, giving,
miracles, healing, and faith.
Today we will study the redemptive gift of compassion.
For
our text we turn to the well-known passage in Luke that is the parable of the
Good Samaritan. We are using the
NIV, which uses the word pity in
verse 33, where other translations use the word compassion.
The
setup for this parable is very important.
A man who was an expert in the religious law comes to Jesus one day and
asked what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus tells the man he is to love the Lord your God will all
your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your
mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.
In
response to what Jesus tells him, the man does a typical legal maneuver – he
begins to get into a discussion over the legal definition of terms – and
who is my neighbor, he asks.
You can hear the haughtiness in those words – oh yeah? And just who is
my neighbor? The man was seeking to evade his
responsibility to be compassionate towards others. There are certain people he doesn’t want anything to do
with, so he tries to hide behind an evasive legal tactic.
The
man knows that when Jesus uses the word neighbor
he’s not simply talking about the people that live next door or down the
street; he’s talking about everyone, including those he doesn’t want anything
to do with.
1.
Compassion is love made visible.
It’s
important for us to define compassion.
I think we generally think of compassion as an emotion, such as empathy
or sympathy. But compassion, in the
Biblical sense, is something far deeper than empathy or sympathy. Compassion, the way Jesus defines it,
is putting love into action and stepping directly into the lives of others to
work on their behalf to bring a positive change to those lives. The way that love is expressed is through compassion.
This
is what the Samaritan did for the man who was robbed, beaten, and left for dead
along the road. When the Samaritan
saw this injured man, he demonstrated compassion; that is, he did something
about his condition. Compassion is
love with hands and feet.
Compassion is taking love out of the theoretical realm and putting it
into the practical reality of everyday life. Compassion is not just saying the words, but putting those
words into action.
We often use the word moved. We might say I was moved by that song or I was moved by those words. Moved
is a great word to use, because it is an action word. Moved is a
verb. It means we are touched
deeply by the condition of another person and we are literally moved into action. Compassion begins in the heart, where we
are moved by the plight of another, but it is not true compassion if it remains
in the heart. Compassion must move
from the heart to the hands and feet, making a difference to another person.
Did you know there was no word in the Greek
language for compassion? The
writers of the gospels had to make up a new word for what Jesus was seeking to
communicate.
Interestingly,
the word compassion means to suffer with. Now, right there is a problem. We expend a lot of energy minimizing
suffering, so why would we want to enter into suffering? Because it is the way of Jesus, to put it
quite simply.
In our time, one of the great examples of entering
into the suffering of others is certainly Mother Teresa. Working with the poor and destitute of
Calcutta, India, Mother Teresa devoted her life to bringing help, in the name
of Christ, to the poorest of the poor.
Not everyone can be Mother Teresa, but everyone
knows someone who needs us to step into their lives, and into their struggles.
Jesus told this man to go and do likewise. He wasn’t going to let him off the
hook. Jesus pushed this man to go
and be compassionate to others.
3. Compassion is
what brings healing to our suffering world.
It’s a hard world in which we live. It’s a tough world, and it seems to be
getting tougher. It takes a lot
just to take care of our families and ourselves. Who has the time, energy, and resources to worry about
others? Sometimes we don’t believe
we do, but that is the calling of Jesus.
It would be far easier, I suppose, to protect
ourselves from the suffering in the world. It would be easier to guard our hearts, but entering into
the suffering of others is what brings the hope of healing to our suffering
world. Compassion takes the risk
of being involved in the lives of others, of walking with them through their
pain and struggles, and doing so means we make ourselves vulnerable to their
pain. But this is exactly what God
did in Christ – he became one of us to walk with us through our struggles, and
our pain, and our difficulties.
The compassion of Jesus would not leave
people to their difficulties and troubles, but reached out to them, in spite of
the difficulty.
How much easier life would be to withdraw into
the safety and seclusion of our own lives, but how much poorer is the world
when we do so.
One of my favorite movies is Places in the
Heart. The movie features Sally
Field, Danny Glover, John Malkovich, Ed Harris, and other great actors. It is set in Texas in the 1930s, and
opens with the song Blessed Assurance sung by a church choir. Sally Field’s character is married to
the sheriff, who is accidently shot and dies. She has two young children and must try to keep their home
and farm. She struggles to raise a
crop of cotton and puts together an unlikely collection of helpers. They face almost every imaginable
obstacle, and there is a lot of heartbreak along the way. Time doesn’t allow me to go into all
the plot developments, but everything culminates in the final scene, which
takes place in a church sanctuary.
The minister is preaching from I Corinthians 13, while the members of
the congregation are sharing communion.
What’s interesting is seeing the congregation as the camera pans down
across the pews. There are some
characters who had been enemies, now seated side by side, sharing the bread and
the cup. And the final two
characters on camera – both of whom had died during the course of the movie –
were now seated next to each other on a church pew. It was the sheriff and the young man who accidently shot
him, sharing together the bread and the cup, and the final words of the film
come from the young man to the sheriff – peace
of God.
It’s a beautiful scene, where people are
brought together through the power of love.
Our world is not going to improve on its
own. The suffering of people will
not go away without action. It is
compassion that will heal our world.
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