Be Compassion Be Holy
I still have the image in my mind of space shuttle Columbia exploding. The crew, in which there was so much hope and excitement, were lost in an instant. George W. Bush, president in 2003, went on the air to express our country’s sadness. He found in his bible chapter 40 of Isaiah with its first line “Comfort ye my people.” He read from that chapter the words we have in our first reading today:
Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing.
Not one is missing. Every single human being is precious to God our Creator and no one is ever lost. I think this is what President Bush was trying to say to a nation stunned by tragedy and what Isaiah was trying to say to his people who were going through a long, hard exile where many died.
The prophetic tradition was changing the way individuals were thought of. Each individual person was valued for being created by God. This changing view was not the case in practice. Jesus was born into a culture where people found themselves on a spectrum where they were “holy” or “unclean” based on their closeness to the Temple. The priests were first, the Pharisees and scribes next, and so forth. If you were near the service of the Temple you were holy and the farther away from the Temple you were you were thought unclean. Gentiles were the absolute furthest from the Temple and therefore unclean.
Interestingly, Jesus “cleansed the Temple” when he visited Jerusalem the first time. Jesus changed the notion of holiness completely: Holiness wasn’t based on how close to the Holy of Holies a person was or served, but rather how much compassion for others one practiced. This was a seismic shift in thought that challenged all the presuppositions of society and eventually got Jesus killed.
From Jesus’ viewpoint, it was Institutions who harbored demons and were possessed by them, not so much an individual person. (We like to scapegoat individual evildoers as having “demons” and give “hallowed” institutions a pass.) In last week’s Gospel, when the person shouted at Jesus “Have you come to destroy us? We know who you are- the holy one of God.” The “us” was most probably the whole class of scribes who were authorized to teach the Law and kept the whole holiness/unclean ranking system going. Jesus was disrupting this system and turning it on its head. Jesus was/is the Holy One of God and the new Temple. Those who practice compassion like he did are the real holy ones.
St. Paul was a good example of a person being liberated from the ranking system of the human culture around him to the compassionate culture of God. The Gentiles joining the early Christian community had no qualms at all about eating meat that had been sacrificed on pagan altars. Hey, it was good aged meat! But doing this violated the consciences of their brothers and sisters who had been converted from Judaism. What to do? St. Paul, trying to live the new Gospel of compassion, asked the Gentile members to not eat meat sacrificed to idols if it offended the conscience of their brothers and sisters from a Jewish background.
Human culture would say “Just deal with it!” Idols aren’t real anyway, it’s perfectly good food, and the Gentile conscience isn’t bothered by it. Why not just eat it and let the others, whose conscience is troubled, come along? After all, a person’s conscience is inviolable, isn’t it? But Paul, moving into God’s culture, saw the argument differently. Freedom of conscience is very important, even thought of as an absolute right by most, even today, but this “absolute” has to be tempered by the demands of agape, the sacrificial love that puts the other, and their conscience, first.
As we gather together with other believers, we find ourselves like Paul, trying to move from the human culture norms deep in our DNA to live more and more in the baptismal Culture of God’s compassion. The Holy Eucharist slowly helps us with this, letting God’s Word sink in, redeeming us, and slowly changing the institutions we are part of, from the inside out. Come, Holy Spirit, come!
Amen!
John +
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| St. Alban |
Saint Alban Episcopal Mission (English, Anglican Communion) meets for mass every Sunday at 10:00 A.M. (see welcome letter at sidebar) at Casa Convento Concepcion, 4a Calle Oriente No. 41, Antigua, Guatemala.
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| The Reverend John Smith, Vicar 5235-6674 cell telephone (502 country code) |
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