“A
healing place for souls.” That is part
of our threefold mission statement: “A
healing place for souls, a school for justice and a welcome table
First
off we should acknowledge where the phrase comes from. We did not make it up. It was the inscription over the entrance to a
library in Thebes in ancient Greece. No
one knows exactly what they meant by that, but libraries ideally have always
been places of the quiet gaining of knowledge and humility, a place where
balance is easier to achieve than most places.
Unfortunately, when people hear the word “healing,”
they tend to think of the curing of physical illness. They think about the practice of medicine and
if “healing” is used outside of the practice of medicine than we must be
talking about miracles. But although we
do not want to preclude the possibility of the miraculous we certainly do not
mean by calling ourselves “a healing place for souls,“ that we are “a place of
miraculous cures.”
In one sense the possibility of and longing for
miracle is a distraction for something much, much bigger that is going on when
we talk about healing. This is clearly
true in the story of Jesus. The miracle
stories are about physical cures,
even, as in this morning’s reading, the raising of the dead, which, in today’s
language, we might call “extreme miracle.”
But none of the miracle stories in the story of Jesus are just about, or
even primarily about, the physical cure.
They are themselves enacted parables, Jesus carrying out his teaching.
Last week and this week we have the two miracle
stories from the seventh chapter of Luke.
In chapter six Jesus was teaching, in the Gospel of Luke’s version of
the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew, shorter and more
concise. What Matthew takes 109 verses
to say, Luke says in 29. The summation
of Jesus’ teaching in Luke 6 might be verses 36 through 38.
Be merciful just as your Father is
merciful. Do not judge, and you will not
be judged. Do not condemn, and you will
not be condemned. Forgive, and you will
be forgiven; give and it will be given to you.
In short, “Live with compassion, as
God does.” The word translated as
“merciful” can just as easily be translated “compassionate.” I think “compassion” is a better English word
for what Jesus is getting at. “Mercy” is
a great word, but it still implies having power over someone, just choosing not
to exercise it. “Compassion” is more
empathetic, putting one’s self in the place of another. It comes from two Latin words, cum, “with,” and passio, “to suffer,” “to suffer with.”
Jesus then lives out this teaching in
the two miracle stories of chapter seven.
Last week we heard the story of the healing of the Roman centurion’s
slave. This week we have heard the story
of the raising of the son of the widow of Nain. Jesus shows the compassion that
he urges his followers to have, and that he teaches God already has. The word even appears in the second story,
the one we just heard.
When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her.
There the Greek word for compassion is
one of my favorite Greek words of the New Testament. Jesus has splanchnizomai. It comes from the Greek word for our inner
organs, splanchna. It is rather like our word “guts,” which come
also to mean boldness or courage. “He’s
got guts.” This compassion is truly
felt; it is emotional as well as reasonable.
It comes from inside. It’s a very
strong word.
Just as important in these stories as
enacted parables is not only what Jesus does and his motivation for doing so,
but to whom he does it. After teaching
us to have compassion just like God does, he shows compassion to a Gentile
soldier and a widowed woman.
In the first case, the Roman soldier, his
followers must have been disturbed that he was doing a good deed not only to a
Gentile, but to a man who worked for the system of oppression that kept Jesus’
people under its thumb. Granted, we are
told that he was recommended to Jesus by the Jews of his town and had even
helped build them a synagogue, but a Roman was a Roman was a Roman.
In this morning’s story we have a
widow who has lost her only son, apparently the last male under whose
protection she was able to be. Her
future was bleak. Without a male to
support her, she was a social nothing.
In these two miracle stories, Jesus
shows that our compassion is to be so deep that it pushes at the boundaries of
our culture, our natural sensibilities, or even our religion. God’s compassion knows no bounds and neither
should ours.
This is an important part of what we
mean by healing. Compassion heals even
if it does not cure, and healing takes place when compassion crosses
boundaries. Illness itself can be a kind
of boundary, a very strong one, in fact.
Sickness or distress of any kind often isolates us. It can make us feel alone and it can cause
others to be wary of us, even if what we have is not communicable. Human beings have a natural tendency to treat
all illness as if it were communicable.
Jesus asks us to have the “guts” to push against this boundary.
When we say we are a healing place for
souls we mean that we are a boundary busting place. It means we have our eyes wide open, and our
senses honed to detect boundary building within and among us. It means that when someone walks in the door
carrying a burden, we are prepared to care and to act as much as we can to
unburden, or at least share the load. No
one has to suffer alone here.
That is an ideal, of course. It is a calling, a high calling. It is sometimes hard work, extremely hard
work, and sometimes we fail. But our
failures are not a sign of our commitment, or lack thereof, or, if they are, we
ought to remove that phrase from our Mission Statement.
The question, “What would Jesus do?”
that was popular a few years ago was not a bad question. It is appropriate to ask it of
ourselves. Whatever specific action is
the answer to the question, compassion should be its chief characteristic. Compassion is not only what Jesus did and
does, it is who Jesus is. So for us, who
share his body and blood, and, with God’s help, his guts too.
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