Compassion: God’s Outrageous Love and the impropriety of Jesus


II Kings 5:1-14
Mark 1:40-45

Key words:

σπλαγχνον splagchnon(Greek):  feeling in one’s “depths” or literally “intestines,”  translated as compassion.
t(arace tsara’ath(Hebrew): scourge or marks on the skin.
λεπρα lepra (Greek): scaliness or any marks on the skin that is thought to be a disease. 

Both Hebrew and Greek have been translated as leprosy, but the words in fact referred to marks on the skin that may have indicated a variety of diseases.  These marks would have been seen as shaming the one who carried the marks.  To carry such marks was to be an outcast, disconnected from the whole.

Psa)e acuph (Hebrew): To collect or draw back together. 
(ε)καθαρισθη: (e)-katharistha (Greek):  To clean, to purge and purify.  The English catharsis finds its roots in this word.  It means to be released from the hold of something that prevents one from living life fully.

So often when it comes to the bible and theology, as the late David Lockhead once commented, we hear and see what we expect and want to hear and see.  This is not a problem that is exclusively theological or biblical.  It is in some sense the human condition.  We see and hear things as we are culturally, socially, emotionally, intellectually and religiously conditioned to see them.  We have an interpretive framework into which we fit things.  However, in the course of human history, there have been leaps and shifts in understanding that have shattered or caused past ways of seeing to be radically altered.  Jesus was one who acted and spoke in ways that ruptured and broke the world-view of those who heard or were touched by him.  He behaved and spoke in ways that were seen as improper, that challenged common norms and practices.

This is no small thing.  The idea of propriety, that certain behaviours, actions, ways of dress and physical appearance, locate one within the human community and ultimately in the cosmos, is no mere idea.  These external markers indicated how the cosmos hung together and how human life found its meaning and purpose.  Jesus’ acts of impropriety took aim at the very world-view shared in the ancient Near East.  For example, when we read his acts of healing or cleansing, forgiving and drawing persons back into the community, we must reckon with the fact that they were not only about the physical health of the persons involved.  By reaching out to touch and cleanse, and being motivated by compassion (Greek, splagchnon) he in fact challenged a fundamental taboo and accepted standard of behaviour.  There were other healers, but Jesus’ acts of healing disturbed the community, because they challenged the fundamental notions of insider and outsider.  His way was experienced as a great impropriety.  The compassion was experienced as an outrageous love that began with love of the outcast, the enemy, and the stranger.  In short, this love was a scandal to the religiously and socially correct.

The Hebrew scripture also has scandalous passages, where outsiders disturb and challenge the so called proper conduct of Israel.  In II Kings we have the story of Naaman’s skin disease.  In the case of the passage in II Kings, the outsider—an alien war-lord who had invaded Israel and imprisoned and enslaved its people, in short an enemy—demands that the King of Israel allow one of his prophets, Elisha, who is able to cure skin problems, be ordered to cure him.  The King is disturbed, because he is asked to do a thing that is not in the best interests of Israel.  The rending of his clothing in two is sign of how this request comes in fact as a threat to Israel and a threat to the presupposed order that informed the King. 

It is a demand that is equally against the pattern of acceptable religious practice.  No non-Israelite should be entitled to the cleansing of skin ailments at the hands of an Israelite healer/prophet—the disease is a sign of their carrying the curse of God.  The outsider should not have access to God’s power. There is no easy solution to the problem.  To say no would mean risking the wrath of an enemy who has greater strength than vulnerable Israel, but to allow the cure is to give up an important religious distinction between the outsider and the insider, the chosen of God and the enemy of God.

In a number of other places in Hebrew scripture, the “insider” / “outsider” distinction is challenged.  Most forcefully, this is seen in the second part of Isaiah, where the anointed one of God—the messiah, or to use the Greek Kristos (Krystos, Christ)—is said to be Cyrus.  Cyrus is not a member of the chosen people.  He is a Persian war-lord, and a worshipper of foreign deities.  The Messiah comes in the shape of an outsider, a foreigner, who does not in this case even worship the same God.  The shattering of a religious paradigm, in fact the shattering of a world, is the effect of such pieces of scripture.  As the Gospel of Thomas puts it, “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find.  When they find, they will be troubled.”  The trouble that is brought is the trouble of seeing the presupposition one holds, religious or otherwise, as no longer sustainable, given the experience of God’s compassion.  We might wish that our eyes had never been opened.  The healing means reconnecting with our enemies.
The passage in II Kings equally challenges the lines drawn between insider and outsider.  It challenges the paradigms of religious, political and social propriety with an understanding of God that literally cannot be contained in the conventions and practices thought to be foundational to the nation, religion and society. 

These Biblical stories set up a conflict, a conflict between social norms and the way of the God of justice and compassion (Hebrew, hesed, hesed).   Throughout, Hebrew scripture challenges commonly accepted paradigms, the model of proper religious and political behaviour.  Elisha offers a cure to the alien war-lord, the enemy is cured.  Jesus’ healing and hospitality leaps beyond the boundaries of social and religious practice.  God’s outrageous love in fact breaks the paradigm, the model of the righteous and the damned.

The biblical texts bring into awareness a fundamental problem of all religions, societies and understandings: the conditioning of human perceptions by unexamined social and cultural norms. This sounds, and is, a difficulty of some philosophical and theological weight. In its simplest form it has been one of the central difficulties for religion, science and philosophy from the beginning.  It is to raise the question, “how do we know that what we know is what actually is, and not what we assume the case to be?”  The simple idea that we know by a critical use of our senses doesn’t in fact get us far.   The senses themselves are shaped and take in the world according to cultural patterns, and they can be easily fooled.  When the Spanish explorers were first sighted off the shores of North America, the First Peoples reported that they saw, not big boats with human crews, but floating Islands with ghosts on board.  From their perspective, this observation fitted with what they knew about the world and its patterns.
One of the tenets of modernity, often tacitly accepted by theology and religious life in the Western Church, is that there exists a reality that we might call objective or external to our experience, as well as a subjective or internal reality.  The things that make up the world constitute the “facts,” and our subjective experience can more or less accurately apprehend those facts.  When it comes to religious matters, this idea of modernity gives a “bible” that is an objective fact that requires correct interpretation for the believer to receive it accurately.  On one side there are those who argue that the bible is an absolutely clear and incontestably factual document.  Accept it or not, this is a book listing facts, simply to be believed, and rules to be followed.  The other side of this coin equally moves from an understanding of the world as constituted by absolute and objective material facts, seeing the bible as simply unreliable factually and only to be accepted where reliable and historically verifiable.  The poetry, the story, the parables, the proverbs, the visions, the dreams and the songs are only important in as much as they point to the objective and factual. 

The hidden assumptions that cause a certain text to be understood in one way and not another, or that make certain texts rather than others the central focus for faith, are themselves unexamined when the biblical text is treated as a document, either factually correct or not.  The two readings discussed earlier erode the reader/listener’s capacity to proceed in such a linear way to understand the bible.  They are texts that call into question the reader/listener’s presuppositions and lure the reader/listener into a confrontation with hidden assumptions.  They do not refer to an exterior verification, but in fact call into question the very structure used to verify the position of the hearer and the norms that hold his or her world together.  If one receives these texts as factual reports, or as false reports, their power is lost.  They remain on the page or in the past, or, worse, merely confirm expectations and norms that prevent the transformation of relationship that compassion calls forth.  Informing them is the reality of God’s outrageous love, a love that breaks all the human paradigms of acceptable religious and social behaviour and brings a new way of being in relationship.

The radical challenge of the biblical encounter is one that calls us beyond the paradigms and models of our times.  The impropriety of Jesus that the religious authorities of his day named as blasphemous was itself part of this biblical tradition of challenging accepted paradigms.  The presuppositions that keep us from that transformational encounter that releases (Greek, Katharista) us from the tyranny of these presuppositions and draws us back together (Hebrew, Acuph) are hidden from us until we encounter that which challenges the structure of our understanding.  The heart of the biblical story, the heart of the gospel, is in this encounter that overturns our world.  Let us pray that we are so troubled by God’s outrageous love.

Sermon Notes
 Minister's Page
 Spiritual resources
 Home Page