Compassion

1st Week in Ordinary Time - Saturday (19 January 2019)

Hebrews 4:12-16. Psalm 19:8-10, 15. Mark 2:13-17.

In Jesus, the Son of God, we have a supreme high priest, who was capable of feeling our weaknesses with us, and has been tempted in every way that we are.

Jesus Christ is 100% God, and 100% human. That is a contradiction. Our minds can't possibly understand what this means. Just to intellectually assent to the two natures of Christ has no meaning to us. A forceful belief in this doctrine or any other doctrine or dogma using our mind has no dynamic possibility in our soul that opens up our heart and mind in order to give peace.

With our binary mode of thinking, some of us have translated the above doctrine into saying that Jesus is 100% God and we are 100% human. Therefore, practically there is no connection between him and us! We missed the major point—which was to put the two together in him—and then dare to discover the same in ourselves! We made our inclusive Saviour into a Redeemer that we were told to worship as a quite exclusionary God. Instead of seeing Jesus as one whom we could imitate and participate with, we made him into an object of devotion keeping him at a "safe" (or perhaps "unsafe") distance. We have even forgotten that we are invited be sharers and "partners in his great triumphal procession" (2 Corinthians 2:14), and participate in the already-begun process of theosis or divinization as the Eastern Church called it.

Today's first reading tries to put the two natures of Christ, especially without neglecting his human nature. It says that Jesus had a share of all weaknesses and temptations that you and I have a share. And his weaknesses and human nature have become the source of compassion. Thus we have a supreme leader who is able to feel with us, and suffer with us. Isn't this beautiful? He is not far away from all the human troubles and mess that life is very many times.

The good news is that our struggles and weaknesses can become a source of compassion. Compassion and patience are the absolutely unique characteristics of true spiritual authority (which starts from an inner authenticity and leads to an outer authority). A spiritual leader who lacks basic human compassion has almost no power to change other people, because people intuitively know he or she does not represent the Divine or Big Truth.

Moreover, this has to lead us to accept that we humans are a bundle of contraries and opposites. If we wish to be whole we must accept we are a mix of contradictions. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things. So, interestingly, the failures and weaknesses of our lives are not to be left out, eliminated, rejected or dumped, but they all need to be embraced and owned and integrated. Wholeness is not the absence of the negative and the dark. But it is the situation where both light and darkness, positive and negative are integrated. They are con-joined to give us true maturity and wholeness. Our negative energies are not to be hated or rejected, but instead they can be made use of: they are to be accepted, owned, embraced and integrated into compassion.

The very failures and radical insufficiency of our lives are what lead us into larger life and love. They are the source of our true compassion.