It's a derogatory phrase. Meant as a put-down. And yet – leaving the third-rail label of “liberal” alone for a moment – I have always found the term “bleeding heart” to be quite … well, quite poignant.
As a seminary student, the late
American prophet William Sloane Coffin would often closely observe the
deeply-lined face of his professor, a famed theologian of yesteryear named H.
Richard Niebuhr – a man of immense spiritual depth. “Watching his face in
class,” Coffin would write, “I used to wonder what the world would be like if
people defined each other less by what they had accomplished than by how much
they had suffered. I wondered why ‘bleeding heart’ was so pejorative a term
when clearly only hearts that bleed continue to seek for truths to make sense
of the sufferings humans endure.”1
A bleeding heart. If not a bleeding heart liberal, then
someone who is liberal with their love. One who feels a deep, abiding
connection with the longings of God’s world. A connection known simply as
compassion.
Compassion.
It’s an endlessly rich term, derived
from two Latin words together meaning “to suffer with.” An enlightening little
book by three prominent pastoral theologians, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life, describes the word
in this way:
Compassion
asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in
brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out
with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in
tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the
vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion
in the condition of being human.2
And
then – later in the book – the authors outline what compassion is not:
It
is not a bending toward the underprivileged from a privileged position; it is
not a reaching out from on high to those who are less fortunate below; it is
not a gesture of sympathy or pity for those who fail to make it in the upward
pull. On the contrary, compassion means going directly to those people and
places where suffering is most acute and building a home there. 3
Compassion.
What it is: Following life’s downward pull … experiencing full immersion with
others … and building a home there.
Compassion.
What it is not: bending down … reaching out from on high … gesturing
with sympathy or pity from above.
For that is the stuff of mercy. An important
virtue, mercy can be. Just not as vine-ripened as the virtue of compassion.
As
Marcus Borg writes in his new book Speaking
Christian, “The problem (lies in) the common meanings of mercy and merciful.”
(These
meanings) presuppose a situation involving a power differential between two
parties. Somebody with power stands in relation to an offender or victim. The
former can decide to punish the latter or to reduce or forgo punishment. A
governor shows mercy by commuting a death sentence to life in prison. A parent
shows mercy by deciding not to punish a disobedient child. A soldier decides
not to harm a captive.4
Mercy. A virtue that
presumes a power differential. A virtue often run in the Christian playbook
through confession of sin and forgiveness of sin. One we run each and every
Sunday – as we did a few moments ago.
Such is the context – confession and
forgiveness – of the blind beggar's cry in our Mark passage today:
“Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Yet,
why does the blind beggar need to confess to Jesus? What about his condition
calls for forgiveness?
The
answer can be found in the purity code of Jesus’ day – a code whose effects
still linger today. A code based on a simple matter of false inductive
reasoning, telling this poor man: “If
you are suffering as a blind beggar, then
you or someone in your family must have sinned.” False induction: If you
are suffering … then there must be sin!
No
wonder the purity code-bound blind beggar calls out for mercy. He’s been told through
his banishment he’s thoroughly defective. He’s been told by the powers his soul
is polluted. No wonder he cries to the only hope he knows, “Jesus, Son of
David, have mercy on me!”
If he only knew. If the blind beggar
only knew that his sight would be restored – not by the mercy he brazenly
sought, but by the compassion Jesus scandalously brought.
Jesus’ compassion. Compassion encapsulated by a single word found twelve times
in the original Greek of the New Testament: Splangchnizomai.
Certainly you’ve heard of splangchnizomai?! It appears twelve
times in our Greek New Testament – the basis for all of our English translations.
Say it with me: Splangchnizomai … Bless you!
Splangchnizomai is used exclusively in reference to Jesus or God. The meaning of the word: “To be moved with compassion”. This verb has its roots in a Greek noun, splangchna: the entrails of the body – what we might call the guts. It is related to the Hebrew, or Old, Testament word for compassion: rachamim, which refers to the womb of God.
As with the uniquely English phrase
bleeding hearts, compassion in Greek is about wrenching guts. And before that,
in Hebrew, it was about the womb of life.
Compassion.
Suffering with. Following our life’s, as well as our body’s, downward pull …
and building a home there. Jesus, God: Moved with compassion. Splangchnizomai.
A Jesus who is moved with compassion
… so we in turn can follow with ours. Follow on a journey from top-down mercy –
the sin-forgiveness two-step, which has its lordly, absolving, and charitable
place – to the fullness of the embrace of entrails and womb.
Don’t we all want to believe that
the embrace of compassion – more than top-down mercy – conveys the essence of
our God? Not a threatening judge from above to
whom we appeal, if not beg, for mercy. But a life-giving force and nourishing
reality, who wills our well-being and the whole of creation? Just as a father
offers the glory of his guts. Just as a mother wills well-being from her womb.
Just as any man and any woman would do, who fully immerse themselves in the
condition of being human.
Compassion.
Splangchnizomai. “Suffering with”,
laying out the entrails of our humanity – and God’s with ours. In the
biblically pivotal words of Exodus today: “The Israelites groaned under their
slavery … and God heard their groaning.”
Mercy. Certainly, we all need it. To get it … to give it.
We
all need mercy. To be charitable to those less powerful than we, and to receive
the charity of those powerful over us. We
all need mercy. We all need forgiveness; we all need to forgive.
For without knowing the mercy of charity
and forgiveness both … could we ever really know the power of compassion?
And yet, once mercy has had its say
– after the hand-me-downs have been distributed, and after the handouts have
been extended – just how do we build a bridge of compassion?
How do we, in the words of that
little book called Compassion, “go directly
to those people and places where suffering is most acute … and build a home
there”?
An old Sufi Muslim tale tells of a man who strayed from his own country into the world known as the Land of the Fools. He soon saw people fleeing in terror from a field. “There’s a monster in that field!” they shouted to him. He looked, and saw that the “monster” was a watermelon. He offered to kill the “monster” for them. He cut it from its stalk, carved a slice, and began to eat it. The effect was this: The denizens of the Land of the Fools were now more terrified of him than they were of the watermelon! “Have mercy on us!” they shouted. “Have mercy on us!” And when he tried in vain to explain, out of their fear and trembling they drove him away with their pitchforks.
The next day, a woman strayed into
the Land of the Fools, and the monster story was related to her. But, instead
of offering to help them with the “monster”, she agreed with the Fools that,
yes, it must be dangerous. And so she led them away from it on tiptoe – and by
so doing gained their confidence. She then spent time – a long, long time – in
their houses, until she could teach them, little by little, the basic facts
that would enable them not only to lose their fear of melons, but even to
cultivate them for themselves.
My friends: Which person – the man
or the woman – proved to be the compassionate neighbor to the so-called Land of
the Fools?
1Coffin, Once to Every
Man: A Memoir (NYC: Atheneum, 1977), 116.
2Henri J.M. Nouwen, Donald P. McNeill, and Douglas A.
Morrison, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life (NYC: Doubleday,
1982), 4.
3Ibid., 27.
4Borg, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power -- And How They Can Be Restored (NYC: HarperOne, 2011), 125.
