Professors of faith are great prattlers and talkers and disputers but do little of anything that bespeaks love to the poor or self-denial in outer things. Some people think religion is made up of words, a very wide mistake.
—John Bunyan, in Pilgrim’s Progress
For a double PK, John Bunyan’s words hit close to home. As a preacher I stand in the pulpit every Sunday to talk about the good. As a professor of rhetoric in the philosophy department at Oklahoma City University, I talk to my students about how to talk about the good. As an author, I write books full of words about the good for good people to read and talk about. Sometimes I even talk to myself about talking to myself!
I am one of those “professors of faith,” and my life is awash in words—words about the Word, words about the words used to express the Word, and words about the limitations of words. My hypereducated European tribe loves to metacommunicate (talk about talking), and sometimes we even engage in the ultimate linguistic nonsense: we talk about the value of silence.
The danger here is both obvious and insidious. As People of the Book, we are so oriented toward the value of expression that we confuse concept with capacity. Søren Kierkegaard spent the whole of his eccentric life trying to shatter this illusion—reminding us through irony, parable, and prose that talking about the good, the beautiful, and the true is not the same thing as being good, creating beauty, or living truthfully. My favorite Kierkegaard parable alludes to this danger. It is called “The Man Who Walked Backwards”:
When a man turns his back upon someone and walks away, it is so easy to see that he walks away, but when a man hits upon a method of turning his face towards the one he is walking away from, hits upon a method of walking backwards while with appearance and glance and salutations he greets the person, giving assurances again and again that he is coming immediately, or incessantly saying, “Here I am”—although he gets farther and farther away by walking backwards—then it is not so easy to become aware. And so it is with the one who, rich with good intentions and quick to promise, retreats backwards farther and farther from the good… As a drunkard constantly requires stronger and stronger stimulation—in order to become intoxicated, likewise the one who has fallen into intentions and promises constantly requires more and more stimulation—in order to walk backward.1
Kierkegaard was particularly hard on clergy, who agree to be on display every week as an example of what the gospel actually does to a person. We are paid to talk about virtue all the time, but a kind of “virtual virtuosity” sets in. “The performance becomes the product. We must be a caring person, we think to ourselves—after all, we are always recommending it. We must be sensitive, patient and kind, because we just finished a sermon series on all three, and lots of people have requested copies.”2
It is sobering to remember that one does not become gracious by reading a good book on grace. What’s more, the incarnation itself argues against it, since by definition our claim is that theory and praxis were brought together in the pure compassion of one who wrote nothing down. Our faith is “commissional,” not rhetorical. We are commanded to “go and do likewise,” not to go and talk likewise. Disciples are empowered to heal and forgive sins, not to apply for endowed chairs or publish and debate papers on the Q gospel—important as these may be. The life of the mind is not the problem, unless of course our life begins and ends there. Words can be a form of action, but they can also be a substitute for action. According to Luke, the first sermon of Jesus wasn’t a problem as long as it didn’t get personal: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth” (4:22). Then he dared to do what precious few preachers are willing to do. He told an audience of locals who wanted to pat this fine young man on the head, like a member of the youth group, that they were hypocrites. Words are not enough when people are starving and lepers are ignored. What followed, according to Luke, was an attempted assassination (4:29).
Yet even this explanation is a risky exercise, since it is primarily an intellectual activity mediated to the reader through words. Most thoughtful people would agree that we need to do more than just “talk the talk,” and yet here we are talking about it! Ministers can joke that after their first sermon no one tried to kill them—because they were all asleep. Of course Christianity is about compassion, not about theories of compassion. Of course we should be taking action to save a dying world, not just talking about how awful it is that the world is dying.
What has changed dramatically in our time, however, is that we are quite obviously running out of time. We can no longer afford the luxury of a church that is bent over its writing desk but cannot find its boots and gloves. We cannot just go on decrying the hypocrisies of our time, like sheep getting together at annual meetings to pass resolutions against the wolves. No matter how often we say “Whereas” and “Therefore,” the world is changed not by those who condemn but by those who act.
The disciples are sent out to heal the sick, not to collect data and issue a report on the long-term effects of too many sheep without a shepherd. “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few,” says Jesus as he first defines their work and then names them (Matt. 9:35–38). Think about it. First there is a job description, and only then are there disciples. The assignment precedes the naming, followed by the “sending out.” Their identity comes from their commission, and his compassion defines their compassion. This is not a teaching moment. Notice the conspicuous absence of theology in Matthew’s description of the mission of the Twelve:
As you go, proclaim the good news… Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their food. Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. (10:7–14)
When I was a kid growing up, the message “Jesus is the Answer” was ubiquitous—painted on barns, outcroppings of rock, or as the final installment of a Burma Shave sign. The message, however, is distinctly unbiblical. The message should be “Jesus is the Assignment.”
Considering our current obsession with what my boyhood church called “sound” theology (correct theology, as opposed to “unsound,” or incorrect, theology), I was led to believe that the Bible was a kind of encyclopedia of theological propositions. It was somewhat shocking to discover how conspicuously absent are theological systems in the earliest strands of the gospel. Mostly illiterate, uneducated peasant laborers are recruited and sent out to practice spiritual healing without a license. They are told that in the practice of such healing and in the radical freedom they will experience by moving unencumbered from house to house, giving freely and taking nothing, the windows of heaven will open. But let’s be honest. What would you do if such a motley crew showed up on your doorstep?
Sadly, to worship Christ in our time is to believe that the healing was made possible by the supernatural quality of the healer. Following Jesus in our time would only require that you believe in the power of love to heal a broken world. What’s more, the tone of much preaching today is not invitational, but condemnatory. It lashes out rather than binding up. “I have condemned, therefore I am” is not the maxim of the Galilean sage. Neither is “Be it resolved the world is a mess.” Condemnation feels good, and it is now a staple of religion, politics, and the media (both left and right), but it changes nothing. Compassion, on the other hand, changes everything.
The gap between rich and poor is widening. Food riots are increasing around the world. Polls show that young people view organized religion with suspicion, even contempt, but have a compelling interest in the ways of Jesus. High-profile fundamentalists have exploited our growing fears of living with less or reaping the whirlwind of terrorism, while high-profile liberals have exploited our hatred of fundamentalists. TV preachers on the right tell us to get saved and then wait for the rapture, while change agents on the left mock the sea of abysmal ignorance in which we are drowning and fund lifeboats for the chosen.
In Oklahoma, the more overtly “Christian” politicians claim to be, the more likely they are to pass mean-spirited legislation, especially with regard to our treatment of the stranger. Anti-immigrant and English-only fever is running high, all in the name of Jesus. Among the more progressive crowd, a fatal flaw continues to paralyze the work of those who believe that, in the end, logic and eloquence will usher in the reign of God or “honking for peace” will end the war. I have grown equally weary of prosperity gospel preachers and Gucci hippies, for each group is trying to have its ideological cake and eat it too.
The Chamber of Commerce crowd pretends to back the rule of law when it comes to undocumented “aliens”—only to discover that there is no one left to clean our houses, manicure the broad lawns of the narrow-minded, or repair the roads down which we drive our gas-guzzlers behind the tinted windows of oblivion. Meanwhile, the peace and justice crowd does most of its work online, sending indignant but soulless petitions to indifferent politicians and then retreating into walled neighborhoods to gorge themselves on the very luxuries that are the real spoils of war.
If the church has converted the subversive wisdom of Jesus into the neutral energy of the Christ (blessing whatever it is we are up to), it is because we have lost the essential quality of Christianity as a way of life. The healer is now the dealer, and the assignment of faith has been replaced by a certificate of salvation. We have no choice now but to attempt our own ecclesiastical “back to the future” move, stepping over Constantine as if the centuries were sidewalk squares in a game of reverse “Mother May I.” Before we vote to move another church to the distant suburbs or build a new Family Life Center instead of feeding the homeless, we should slip into the basement of the early church and take a look around.
It did not take long for the men who served others to become the bishops whom others served. Entitlement is the scourge of this and every age, and men of God still recline at the feast of power like Dives, belching their way through a meal to which Lazarus is not invited. Orthodoxy’s front door is gilded, but the rusty back door of the early church remains ajar—the one leading to the kitchen behind the creedal looking glass. There sits Jesus, cross-legged, amid the steam and misery of the world. He has not moved. He has no new marketing plan or quarterly mission emphasis. He is not a “new hermeneutic” or a cognitive physician who makes house calls with a bag full of answers to life’s toughest questions. He is a movable feast, complete with bony knees and a matted beard. His message is a nonjudgmental presence. Without saying a word, the crowd gets it: we all matter; no exceptions.
TO FEEL WITH, NOT SORRY FOR
In many American churches, Jesus still comes “as one unknown”—or perhaps as one so well known as to be unrecognizable. He was penniless and itinerant, yet his gospel is now attached to some of the richest and most powerful people on earth, and the good news is really bad news for the poor. Captives are not released; they are warehoused. The blind do not see; rather, the sighted wear blinders. The oppressed are not liberated; they have become the new scapegoats. Sermons are no longer dangerous; they are simply adapted to the appetites and anxieties of the audience. Conservatives rail against sins of the flesh, as if to exorcise their own demons, and liberals baptize political correctness at the expense of honesty.
One crowd is reminded that some out there are sicker than they are, while the other is seduced into thinking that the problem is not enough thinking. Each, in its own way, is being called out of the wilderness of freedom and back to the dark but seductive slavery of an Egypt to which we cannot return. The peddling of fear in any form as incentive to faith remains the most egregious sin that can be committed in the name of Jesus. It feels very good to name the enemy and thank God that you are not like “those people.” But if Christianity is to survive, someone needs to stand up in the middle of one of these hapless sermons and quote the comic-strip character Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
From twenty-four-hour cable news stations to pulpits that duel over “much ado about nothing,” everyone has climbed on the condemnation bandwagon. We enjoy being right so much that we have forgotten just how little this has to do with being a follower of Jesus. In our time, the land is full of culture warriors and their indignant disciples. What we lack are statesmen and -women. What we hunger after is kindness, patience, and an antidote to ego, instead of its sanctification. Worshiping Christ keeps us locked into theological battles over who is right and who is wrong. But following the example of Jesus liberates us to imitate rather than judge. What’s more, the means to measure such imitation is utterly simple. The ministry of Jesus was, and is, and will always be about compassion—pure, unbridled, reckless compassion.
Indeed, when we choose a muscular form of locker-room Christianity, we are rejecting Jesus in favor of John the Baptist. But if we turn the gospel into an argument, no matter how elevated, we are the equivalent of those Pharisees who “tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God” (Luke 11:42). Perhaps this is the hardest lesson of the faith, next to forgiveness: “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned” (6:37).
In the earliest strands of the Christian tradition, followers of Jesus moved decisively away from God as apocalyptic judge and practiced instead a gospel of present healing. When Jesus called out demons and lifted curses from the afflicted peasants before him, he did so for one reason: he was filled with compassion. He was not trying to follow the law (indeed, he broke it by healing on the Sabbath), get elected to office, or establish a rogue medical practice outside the jurisdiction of the Temple. He did it to try to relieve suffering. He did it to restore broken human beings to wholeness. He did it to help those bent over by their own feelings of worthlessness to stand up. There were apparently no preconditions, no theological requirements; not even a form of proper Jewish I.D. was required. Gentiles were welcome, female and male, slave and free, rich and poor. The consequences of such radical hospitality were as unacceptable in the first century as they would be in this one. True equality terrifies those who depend on hierarchy to run the empire.
One can only wonder what caused Jesus of Nazareth to become a follower of John and then get in line with all those other sinners to be baptized. According to Luke, he’s not even at the front of the line (3:21), and undoubtedly the dove and the voice are descriptive fictions of the faith, like the virgin birth and the twelve-year-old genius in the Temple. But perhaps it was the execution of John without apocalyptic consummation that gave Jesus the sign he was looking for, and a new voice. Perhaps the storm god from Sinai, the lawgiver and judge, was not the last word. Perhaps faith is not a transaction at all, but a covenant of compassion with only one requirement—it obligates the recipient to become a “healed healer” taking the reign of God to others.
As for Jesus, he was not the kingdom’s patron, and the disciples were not its brokers. The benefits of the reign of God would be freely given to anyone. The only debt owed for hospitality and healing would be for the clients of the kingdom to turn around and “heal likewise” in the name of the open table and a God of pure compassion. The movement of ministry for Jesus was threefold: question, action, and assignment. What do you want me to do for you? Go; your faith has made you well. Now “pay it forward.”
What did this compassion look like? One scholar described Jesus as looking like a beggar, “yet his eyes lack the proper cringe, his voice the proper whine, his walk the proper shuffle. He speaks about the rule of God and [the peasants] listen as much from curiosity as anything else. They know all about rule and power, about kingdom and empire, but they know it in terms of tax and debt, malnutrition and sickness, agrarian oppression and demonic possession.”3 Even so, they had heard would-be messiahs before, and poverty has a way of turning one into a cynic. “What, they really want to know, can this Kingdom of God do for a lame child, a blind parent, a demented soul screaming its tortured isolation among the graves that mark the village fringes?”4
One of the earliest and probably most authentic utterances of Jesus is: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). This is his imitatio Dei, the way to imitate God. Unfortunately, Matthew uses the word “perfect” (which makes faith an impossible ideal; 5:48), and in many English translations the word is “merciful,” which has a very different connotation. In Hebrew as well as Aramaic the word usually translated as “compassion” is the plural of a noun that in its singular form means “womb.”5 As a woman feels compassion for the child in her womb, so compassion (passion, from the Latin word meaning “to feel,” and the prefix com, “with”) is a quality of vicarious, even visceral, empathy. This happens at a level “beneath” the brain, in biblical terms, for a man in the bowels, for a woman in the womb—in other words, deep within.
The problem comes when the Hebrew term is translated as “mercy” or “merciful.” More than just “lost in translation,” something is altered. Mercy has connotations of pity, especially between people of unequal status, or a response to wrongdoing. A person “chooses” to show mercy (or feel pity) toward someone even though he or she has the right to act otherwise. There is an implied, if not an explicit, quality of condescension. The concept of a God who chooses to show mercy is very different from that of a God who is, “to coin a word that captures the flavor of the original Hebrew, ‘wombish.’”6
One’s view of God determines one’s view of faith, and thus to say that God is compassionate is different from saying that God is merciful. A compassionate God is one who models compassion for us, which is not the same thing as a God who may or may not extend mercy to us for something we may or may not have done wrong. Indeed, much of the liturgical “pleading” that dominates prayers of confession, to “take pity on me and have mercy on me a sinner,” is a manifestation of this crucial difference. This is faith as a bargain, struck between a worshiper who is weak and helpless and a God who has the power to show mercy or turn away. Thus when we pray, we are not moving toward a transcendent Mystery, drawing on an ocean of compassion, but entering into a kind of private divine small-claims court, hoping for a favorable verdict.
In what was metaphorically a move down from the sky god of primitive religion to what Paul Tillich would one day call the “Ground of Being,” Jesus shifted the thinking of his disciples away from a God who is remote, angry, unapproachable, and judgmental—to a God with earthy and distinctly feminine characteristics. This is a God who births us, feels with us (not sorry for us), and is nurturing and caring and protective. Luke portrays Jesus as reversing all the normal metaphors of power and gives us, instead: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing” (13:34).
One can only wonder how the world would have been different if Constantine had painted a mother hen on the helmets of his soldiers, wings spread to protect a brood of helpless chicks, instead of the cross. How strange that a symbol of nonviolent resistance and redemption ends up becoming part of a military uniform or is worn around the necks of inquisitors. Today the cross is quite literally wrapped in the American flag, as if there were no contradictions between the world’s only superpower and the symbol of God’s power made perfect in weakness. Writer and teacher Barbara Brown Taylor ponders the image of a mother hen with her customary eloquence:
Given the number of animals available, it is curious that Jesus chooses a hen. Where is the biblical precedent for that? What about the mighty eagle of Exodus, or Hosea’s stealthy leopard? What about the proud lion of Judah, mowing down his enemies with a roar? Compared to any of those, a mother hen does not inspire much confidence. No wonder some of the chicks decided to go with the fox.7
This unbridled compassion, which is never an abstraction, but always a way of being in the world, would later be spoken of in the New Testament as “love.” Again there is something lost in translation, because the word “love,” like the word “freedom,” has a thousand meanings. Just as the word “faith” has morphed into a synonym for a set of beliefs, rather than a deep and abiding trust, the word “love” is elastic beyond belief. It runs the gamut from a tenacious and self-sacrificing covenant to the squeal of an adolescent in the mall. But compassion (again, “feeling with”) is the authentic religious move—to move beyond the life of the self and into the pain and possibility of another life. It does not mean to take pity or catch a whiff of one’s own superiority, but to take action. To care is to make a difference in someone’s life.
Today we seem surrounded by Christians who are long on condemnation and short on compassion. They identify the enemy and then hunker down armed with blessed assurance and an arsenal of rhetorical invectives. In so doing they have reversed the parable of the Pharisee and the publican by forgetting which one went home justified. It was not the one who said, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11).
When Paul says, “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured” (Heb. 13:3, emphasis added), he is appealing to the empathetic imagination. We are not just to feel sorry for those in need; we are to feel with those in need as if (and until) the burden has become our own. Just as the amputee has been known to feel a “phantom” pain in an arm or leg that no longer exists, so too are followers of Jesus to feel the pain of others as if it existed in their own bodies.
When Jesus makes it clear that the criteria for judgment will be ethical and not theological (“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me,” Matt. 25:40), he is asking his disciples to “transpose” their love for him into everybody they meet as if they are encountering him over and over again. This requires the most difficult, but most important single move in the life of faith—to escape the prison of self—the dungeon of self-absorption into which we are all born. Thus to be “born again” is not to repeat a mantra “accepting Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior,” but rather to accept the radical freedom that comes only when we are freed from the self. Then we can take the longest journey in the known universe—the trip from the head to the heart.
TOUCHING THE UNTOUCHABLES
One of the most helpful insights to come from recent historical Jesus research is a renewed emphasis on the difference between purity and compassion. Marcus Borg makes it clear that Jesus’ attack on the purity system of his day was a self-conscious re-definition of “holiness.” At the heart of the Jewish social world was the “holiness code” of Leviticus 17–26, which contained the purity laws and was grounded in the imperative: “Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (19:2).
For observant Jews, this meant that to imitate God was to be holy as God is holy. “Moreover, holiness was understood to mean ‘separation from everything unclean.’ Holiness thus meant the same as purity, and the passage was thus understood as, ‘You [Israel] shall be pure as God is pure.’ The ethos of purity produced a politics of purity—that is, a society structured around a purity system.”8
Lest we think this is only an ancient phenomenon or peculiar to Judaism, consider that in every culture there are distinctions of class and race that form infinite varieties of the caste system, always distinguished by relative degrees of ritual purity or pollution and ordered by social status ranging from the royals to the untouchables. But in each case, a purity system establishes a social and cultural “map” that indicates “a place for everything, and everything in its place.”
In first-century Palestine, the purity map showed a range from the inherently pure (priests and Levites), to “Israelites,” to “converts,” to “bastards,” to those with damaged testicles and missing body parts, especially a penis.9 Physical wholeness was thought to indicate purity, while those missing something—the maimed, the chronically ill, lepers, eunuchs, and so forth—were impure. One’s behavior as well as one’s economic status could render one more or less pure. The observant were more pure, the nonobservant, less so; the worst were “outcasts” like tax collectors and shepherds. No wonder Luke has these lowest of the low receive the birth announcement ahead of the New York Times.
Being rich was no guarantee of purity, but if you were poor, you were almost certainly considered impure. For one thing, following the labyrinth of purity laws was not possible (or affordable) if you lived on the edge of starvation. So the “righteous” were those who followed the purity system (or could manipulate it), and the “sinners” were those who did not (or could not). Psychologically, cleanliness has always been considered “next to godliness,” and that is why sinners to this day, in Christian confessions, are referred to as “sinful and unclean.” Isaiah says it plainly: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth” (64:6).
It should come as no surprise that males were considered, in their “natural state,” to be more “pure” than females (a fact that can only come as a kind of late-night comedic shock to women who actually live with men). The reason is both obvious and born of male fear and superstition: childbirth and menstruation rendered women “impure.” They bled, but they did not die. In this state, they had to be impure, so they could not enter the Temple to worship God.
All Gentiles were considered impure by definition, and Palestine was occupied territory, controlled by the military force of a gentile oppressor. Add to the oldest and most vicious kind of hatred on earth (hatred of a foreign occupying army) the additional insult that such infidels were impure, and they thus quite literally contaminated every street corner on which they swaggered with the sword. When they raped a Jewish girl, the despoiling was complete, and the eternal question took on a dark urgency: “When will the messiah come?”
At the geographic and cultic center of Israel’s purity map stood the Temple and the priesthood.10 Not only were the priests required to adhere to the strictest purity laws; the income of the Temple itself was derived from charging taxes, or “tithes,” on agricultural products, which were otherwise considered impure and unfit for purchase by the observant. Add to this kosher enterprise the business of selling sacrificial animals, and you’ve got a kind of one-stop purity market at the epicenter of the religious universe. Religion and commerce have always been mutually parasitic, of course, and separating them is perhaps the most dangerous part of being a prophet. But if God does indeed desire compassion and not holiness and sacrifice, as the Hebrew prophets tell us, then the purity system collapses, its coffers dry up, and its beneficiaries get angry—very angry.
This set the stage for a single confrontation that may have been sufficient cause to arrest and summarily execute a peasant revolutionary—the “cleansing of the Temple.” But this should come as no surprise when we consider that attacks by Jesus on the purity system were numerous. His imitatio Dei (“Be compassionate as God is compassionate”) could not be reconciled with the imitatio Dei of his day (“Be holy [pure] as God is holy [pure]”). These were not just two different ways of seeing God, but two entirely different social visions. It is no wonder they called him the “Great Offense.”
In every age, religious ideas have been considered safe if they are private and personal, but dangerous if they are public and political. By “political” I don’t mean party affiliation or policy, but political in the Greek sense of polis, or “the city.” This broad definition of politics seems largely forgotten but needs to be recovered. Who has the power? How is it exercised? Who wins and who loses?
The existing politics of purity was not merely an individual matter, as in “different strokes for different folks.” It was a sociopolitical paradigm, and any attack upon that system was an attack upon the religious homeland. His numerous and direct attacks upon that system go to the core of what was offensive and dangerous about Jesus. He saved his white-hot anger for the sin of religious hypocrisy. This fact alone should make every religious professional nervous. When he called Pharisees “unmarked graves” that people walk over “without realizing it” (Luke 11:44), the criticism can seem rather obscure. That is, until we remember that corpses (and thus graveyards) were sources of severe impurity. To call Pharisees, who wished to expand the purity system, “unmarked graves” is tantamount to declaring them to be the source of impurity. When Jesus claimed, “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile” (Mark 7:15), he was attacking a central tenet of Mosaic dietary law.
Even the familiar beatitude “Blessed are the pure in heart” (Matt. 5:8) can be understood in the context of the politics of purity. Although we often interpret this to mean that we must be as clean on the inside as we are on the outside, it may well be an ironic statement about the one-sided obsession with purity in the time of Jesus. The dominant religious culture stresses outward purity and external boundaries, but Jesus reverses this emphasis and thus critiques it.
Perhaps the most stunning example, however, is the parable of the good Samaritan. It is often used to stress the importance of being a good neighbor, but the message is much more explosive. The two religious professionals in the story (the priest and the Levite) may have felt obligated to remain pure, and contact with the dead was a major source of impurity. The wounded one is described as “half dead,” so noncontact was a religious requirement. The Samaritan, who was considered impure to begin with, is described as the one who acted “compassionately.” The parable sets listeners up to expect a Jewish hero, only to have that expectation shattered.
In healing lepers, a woman who was hemorrhaging, and a man possessed with a “legion” of unclean spirits and living in a graveyard near a herd of unclean swine, Jesus doesn’t just trespass on forbidden turf but seems to act deliberately and provocatively in the breaking of social and religious boundaries. He ate with sinners and outcasts, thus violating the sacred tenets of table fellowship. In some instances, the guests were said to “recline,” marking such an occasion as a banquet or celebration, which only added to the offense. This “open commensality” was one of two unforgivable sins according to John Dominic Crossan. The other was “free healing,” which undercut the established doctors of religion.11
The open table would later be symbolized by the sacramental meal known as the Eucharist or Holy Communion, in which the breaking down of all barriers that exclude and separate human beings from one another and from God is dramatized. Unfortunately, it has become such a sterile affair, with grape juice and snow-white dice-sized cubes of bread sans crust, that we forget what it stands for: a real meal with real outcasts! Try imagining Communion with homeless people, for starters.
At the time of Jesus, women, considered a source of impurity, were second-class citizens; they were the property of males, forbidden to learn Torah, testify in court, initiate divorce, go out in public unveiled or unaccompanied by a family member, or attend meals unless they were courtesans. The inclusion of so many women in the early Jesus movement is yet another stunning example of the radical vision that is the reign of God. Jesus defends women against attack from indignant males, is hosted by Mary and Martha, and is taught by a Syro-Phoenician (gentile) woman. Women were part of the itinerant group from the beginning, were disciples, and are remembered as present at his death. In the early church, women played a prominent leadership role.
As today’s church is torn asunder over the issue of homosexuality and quotes passages from the Leviticus holiness code to support discrimination against gays, we would do well to visit again the most neglected New Testament text with direct relevance to this issue: the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Desexed in order to serve the queen (or not serve her, as the case may be), eunuchs were obviously “defective” and thus unclean. But this multilingual eunuch sits in a chariot reading a nonnative text from the prophet Isaiah, and Philip approaches him to ask if he understands what he is reading. This decision to approach and “sit beside” the eunuch is telling, and Philip’s question is poignant when it comes to the vital task of interpretation, as is the eunuch’s answer (“How can I unless someone guides me?” v. 31). Philip expounds on the meaning of the life of Jesus, and the eunuch recognizes that the prophet speaks to him—even to him, who bears a stigmatizing mark and will never have children. At that moment, he asks the most urgent question of our time when it comes to all those who have been left out: “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” (v. 36). The answer is nothing. The joyous conclusion of the story says it all. He is baptized and goes on his way “rejoicing.”
I’M COMPASSIONATE, AND I VOTE
In the struggling and often stagnant mainline church, there is one constant refrain from those who have abandoned the pews to take up fishing, reading the paper, or just sleeping in on Sunday morning: don’t mix religion and politics! I cannot imagine any preacher today who tries to interpret the gospel in ways that are faithful and relevant who has not heard this warning more than once. I’ve heard it many times myself: “Reverend, just deal with ‘spiritual’ issues, and leave politics out of the pulpit.”
At one level, I am sympathetic to this argument; on another, adamantly opposed. First of all, this complaint is almost always directed at a “liberal” preacher by a conservative layperson, even though the Christian Right wrote the book on how to mix religion and politics. A more honest version of the complaint might sound like this: don’t mix religion and politics in ways I don’t agree with. This really means, don’t mix religion and politics in ways that threaten my way of life—which really means, in ways that might require me to surrender power, money, or status. Not all preaching can be a healing balm. If we are true to the gospel, some of it will disturb, disorient, and even distress listeners.
In the sectarian world of politics, we should not let the gospel be co-opted by any party or politician. It is patently absurd to refer to God as a Democrat or a Republican, but it is nothing short of a mortal sin to suggest that all political decisions are neutral with regard to the life of faith and the ways of compassion. As long as politics is broadly conceived as the exercise of power and its moral consequences, then the church should never separate the body, soul, and body politic. Furthermore, it would be an abdication of the prophetic role of ministry to stop caring about political decisions that affect the lives of the people we have been ordained to care about. There is a difference between partisan politics and the politics of compassion. When asked to explain when he would stop being political from the pulpit, William Sloane Coffin Jr. responded, “When politicians stop making decisions that affect the lives of those for whom Jesus died.”
Having said this, I am keenly aware of the delicious feeling that preachers get, on the right and on the left, by condemning the “mad hypocrisies of our time.” We all wish to be thought of as “prophetic,” but the definition of a prophet is sometimes so slippery as to be nonexistent. Fundamentalists condemn individual misdeeds, especially sexual ones, to the almost complete exclusion of collective sin and systematic discrimination and oppression. Liberals condemn collective sin and systematic oppression to the almost complete exclusion of individual misdeeds, especially sexual ones.
The essential premise of conservative religion is that we change the world one saved soul at a time; more progressive traditions stress the responsibility of individuals to acquire wisdom through reason and use it to change the unjust structures of society. To justify and perpetuate our own identity, we often make a cartoon out of the “other” and stress the merits of our tradition while neglecting the truth that our “opponents” possess. The red-state, blue-state dichotomy is true of religion as well and even drives much of the political division.
Unless one believes in a universe of equally true assertions (if this is postmodern, then I’m not), then the universe must at least have some things in it that are more true than other things—and for the church, more or less faithful to the gospel. We don’t get to make it up as we go. The reason that serious biblical scholarship is so important is that we can indeed “recover” a message that more accurately represents Jesus as a teacher of wisdom and discipleship as a process of imitation, not conversion. We can indeed glimpse the Jesus of history and not be blinded by the Christ of faith. We can indeed deconstruct the high Christology of the church that obscures the politics of compassion and then reconstruct a church based on rejecting the politics of salvation.
For example, if one believes that Jesus rejected a politics of purity for a politics of compassion, then antigay forces in the church today must be subject to the critique not of “liberals,” but of the gospel itself. Until we have homosexuality all figured out, shouldn’t we practice radical hospitality? As long as we see “through a glass darkly,” isn’t it wise to err on the side of inclusion and compassion, rather than condemnation? Perhaps we cannot even admit to what is most difficult about this issue—that it is not what gays are, but what they do that is repulsive to so many. Does it not strike many heterosexuals (and perhaps some who do not live comfortably inside their own sexual skin) as “unnatural” and therefore impure?
To find scriptural support for what strikes them as “dirty,” some cite the very holiness passages that their Lord later challenges. Under his imperative of radical hospitality, surely we can assume that even Paul would widen the circle today, saying, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, there is no longer gay or straight; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28, amended).
If it is true that Jesus lifted up women in obvious and extraordinary ways, then the continued second-class citizenship of women in the church comes under the judgment of the gospel, not just Protestant reformers or feminists. If Jesus invited those on the margins of society to take the best seats at the banquet of the kingdom, then what has the church to say about a culture that continues to reward narrow, stylized versions of beauty, while creating a “reality” entertainment subculture that thrives on humiliation?
The question for the church of the future is not, “Have I provided dogmatic information sufficient for salvation?” but rather, “Have I shown compassion to those who need it and the love of God to those denied it?” In all honesty, we still operate by purity codes, and this is why we could not discuss AIDS for years after the outbreak of the disease, at the cost of thousands of lives. The most powerful, but unarticulated, objections to homosexuality are grounded in the idea that some things don’t “belong together.” Our halting response to the implosion of Africa is tied up in the ancient prejudice against “unclean” natives.
When the church preaches prosperity theology and gives divine aid and comfort to a society already paralyzed by rampant individualism, what word has the “body of Christ” to offer that brings hope to a world that desperately needs to value community again and restore the quaint but essential early American concept of covenant? If Jesus was indeed a “free healer,” then how can anyone say that all health-care options are equally “Christian”? If the healthy will not pay to help the sick, just as the strong refuse to help the weak, then what are we saying about being our brother’s or sister’s keeper?
A church entirely devoid of political engagement is a living contradiction. Churches are political even when they refuse to act politically, because silence is a form of complicity and thus an endorsement of the status quo. The church is political the moment that it determines that one way of treating human beings is more compassionate than another way and then sets out to do the right thing. The church is political because it is a “city-state” whose citizens are under very strange and countercultural orders to live as resident aliens in a world gone berserk. When Britney Spears’s navel gets more media coverage than millions of uninsured children, the church is not called upon to serve tea and wring its hands. It is called upon to speak truth to power.
It was Martin Luther King Jr. who recognized the difference between comforting the poor and confronting the people and systems that cause poverty. Of course we should be good Samaritans, but we should also consider doing something to make the road to Jericho less dangerous for everyone. In the end, Dr. King knew that “you cannot set the captive free if you are not willing to confront those who hold the keys. Without confrontation compassion becomes merely commiseration, fruitless and sentimental.”12