By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
July 22, 2012
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Reporter Charles Duhigg tells the story of a US Army major in the town of Kufa, in Iraq, who decided to do some behavior modification. He
Apparently, whatever anger or frustration drove the crowd to that plaza, whatever philosophy or idea drove them to feel the need to become violent, whatever it was, was just not enough to overcome the habit of eating supper at suppertime. The major’s ingenious solution, based on his years of being trained in habit formation in the Army, resulted in a non-violent solution to a vexing problem.
It’s also almost the flip of what happens in the story of the Feeding of the Five thousand. The crowd is hungry, and there are apparently no vendors’ carts selling falafel or lamb kebabs anywhere in sight–but the people don’t want to leave. Something about Jesus’ teaching and Jesus’ person is so compelling that they seem completely unable to tear themselves away to do what they’ve always done and eat supper at supper time.
What could be so powerful, so compelling, that it causes people to resist their natural instincts—both their ingrained habits and their own evolutionary and bodily needs—that they’d be willing to forget to eat dinner?
Jesus.
But it’s not just any trait of Jesus that is compelling them to stay. Jesus had many traits, and some of them were alienating—in fact, they are alienating to many today. Jesus could be very demanding. Jesus is often still demanding. His expectation that we are to take up our cross and follow Him remains pretty off-putting. So it’s not just the fact that He’s Jesus, the Son of God, the way, the truth and the life, that’s holding people in thrall against their better judgment. It’s something else. It’s something that many in the crowd are experiencing as a kind of miracle:
It’s His compassion.
Mark sets it up for us. “And as He landed He saw a great throng, and He had compassion on them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd; and He began to teach them many things.”
It is the power of His compassion that keeps their attention. That’s especially striking when we compare it to the story of the angry Iraqi crowd in Kufa. Anger is a powerful force, and not always a bad one. In the last few years we’ve seen anger drive any number of movements, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street Movement. It’s a common ploy of modern politicians too, to build their campaigns on our anger and also our fear.
But as the story of the crowd in Kufa suggests, anger and fear don’t have staying power. They don’t have the power to cause us to rise above our self-interest. In fact, to a certain extent, anger and fear DEPEND on our self-interest. It is sad today that so many religious people, Christian and otherwise, depend on fear to keep people in the faith. Fear of hellfire, fear of THE OTHER, fear that God might get angry at them and deprive them of something.
And anger—anger that someone is somehow threatening what I believe, or my way of life, just because they exist and just because our society dares to treat them as equal to me. There’s no question that anger and fear are great organizing principles, but they don’t compel us to rise above our self-interest–they are entirely about our self-interest. That’s why the crowd in Kufa couldn’t stay together when there weren’t any food carts around. Their self-interest was at the local McDonalds.
Now, compassion has also often proven itself to be a powerful organizing force, too. Think, The Salvation Army, the non-violence movement of Gandhi, so on. But let’s first define what compassion is, as its set up for us in this passage. Mark says that the crowd is like sheep without a shepherd. What do sheep without a shepherd do? They fend for themselves. They break away from the flock in search of food and drink, but since they don’t have a shepherd, they don’t know how to find it. They get lost. They die.
What a good shepherd does, according to this passage and according to countless other scriptural examples, is keep the sheep together. The disciples, meaning well, want to send them off on their own, explode the flock, so that they can fend for themselves.
To Jesus, this precisely is the problem. These shepherd-less folk have been wandering lost for years, each individual, each family unit, operating as if it was alone. Like sheep, they’re starved–not of real food, perhaps, but of spiritual food, the true food of the soul. A large part of what they have been missing in their lives is a sense of community, a sense of being part of something larger than themselves.
From the very beginning of the bible, it has been true that, as god says in genesis, “It is not good for the human to be alone.” but we are. We’ve even made it a societal value–the rugged individual who’s pulled herself up by her own bootstraps.
But too often that masks our sense of loneliness. It certainly undermines one of the great goals of the Kingdom of God–to build up what Dr. King called The Beloved Community, that community where all the human boundaries that alienate us from one another–race, creed, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality–would be overcome by our shared common ground that we are all beloved children of God.
In that sense the alienation that plagues humanity today is an example of humanity’s spiritual starvation. And because Jesus is compassionate, he doesn’t want to force this group, this newly formed Beloved Community that has at last tasted what it’s longed for, to break up.
A huge part of Jesus’ appeal, then and now, was his compassion. He didn’t preach that the god of Israel ran an exclusive club, but that anybody could join it. Back then, the welcome was extended to those who were considered ritually unclean–the disabled, those defined as ‘sinners,’ and strikingly, to Gentiles.
The message of compassion is one that always welcomes those who are considered on the fringe. It’s meant to counteract the terrible message of exclusion and alienation that religion too often preaches. The miraculous message of the Gospel is this: the God we know through the Bible, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is not the God of exclusion and alienation, the God of fear and hatred, but the God of love. It’s not the God who destroys, but the God who saves; it is not the God of distance and rules and fear and alienation but the God of love and reconciliation. It is the compassionate God that Jesus taught who runs the universe.
It’s a message that is especially timely today as so many religions try to build a following based on hatred and exclusion. That message is great for bringing a crowd together, no doubt. But it won’t keep a crowd together. Eventually, their spiritual hunger will become so overwhelming that they’ll have to break up a find a soul food restaurant somewhere.
But compassion and community, for all their virtues, are also still not enough to provide the spiritual food we need. Let’s face it, there’s been a lot of political or social leaders who’ve touted compassion and community. Some have been sincere, some not. Some have had some success, others not so much. We’ll never gather the sheep into the sheepfold if we don’t have a good shepherd, and that shepherd is Jesus. It is his Lordship that makes the difference. It is He who is the source of the spiritual food we hunger for.
What makes Jesus unique is something we only discover through faith: He is the Son of God, God in the flesh, Lord of the universe. So when He says that compassion and The Beloved Community are what God desires and what the universe is all about, we need to listen. Yes, it seems to go against the way the world works, but you know what? That’s why it’s called good news.
This is the good news the world is hungry for. A Barna Group survey of professing non-Christians made an interesting discovery: the vast majority of American non-Christians believe that Jesus was more loving, more inclusive, more forgiving, and less judgmental than what they saw in the church! What that tells you is that the compassionate Jesus has far more potential to bring people back to the church than the angry, “us vs. them” Jesus we so often hear preached.
Right now, a lot of people who somehow understand instinctively that the compassionate Jesus is the true Jesus, are scattered near and far outside the walls of the church. They’ve heard professing Christians say that Jesus is Lord their whole lives. The problem is they’ve rarely heard–from Christians– that Jesus who is Lord is also Jesus who is compassionate, loving, and welcomes all the lost sheep back into the sheepfold, without prejudice and without exception. Churches all too often have not been the beloved Community Jesus taught about.
Our challenge as the church is always, always to be that Beloved community.
St. Stephen has always represented that. Often we don’t have the words or the theological language to get past the more exclusivist ways other Christians talk about Jesus. We sometimes feel a bit ashamed and embarrassed.
We need not be. We preach the true Good News– news that’s really good: that same compassionate Jesus is Lord of the universe. We the church need to tell the incredible, unbelievable Good news that the God of the universe is the God of compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and new life that Jesus’ life and teachings have shown us. We should always invite them and welcome them into the church in the name of the compassionate Christ.
If we, God’s people, tell them and SHOW THEM the real good news of His compassion and love, well gather them into the arms of God’s Beloved Community.