Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
“Compassion”
July 18, 2021 – Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
The hammer goes down on the thumb. It’s not your thumb, but you cringe. You’re watching your friend, spouse, whoever, drive nails. Suddenly the hammer slips off the nail and lands on the thumb holding it. Your reaction? Before you rush over to inquire, offer help, etc., you yourself will wince with pain, maybe even before the other person cries out, swears, or whatever. According to neuroscience, that’s the structure of your brain at work in what’s called the mirror neuron system.
When we perform actions and experience feelings and emotions, neurons in our brains fire in certain patterns. The amazing thing is that, apparently, so-called mirror neurons in our brains fire in similar patterns even when we merely witness those actions or feelings in others. Some scientists believe mirror neurons help us feel empathy when others around us are hurting. To make loose distinctions, it’s not just “sympathy,” feeling sorry for someone, but feeling as if you were that person in pain, at least for a moment.[1]
The sweet image we get of Jesus our Savior today is His survey of the crowd before Him feeling compassion in verse 34, because the people were “like sheep without a shepherd.” That thought connected us to the beloved 23rd Psalm we recited and a promise we heard from Jeremiah 23 that God will give His people good shepherds.
“Compassion” might be distinguished from both sympathy and empathy as yet a further response to someone hurting, by not just feeling for her, or as if you were in pain too, but actually doing something about another’s pain. [2] It could be getting some ice for that swollen thumb or, as Jesus does here, offering food to people feeling hunger.
The roots of all those words, “empathy,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” blur the distinctions. The Greek of “sympathy” means “suffering together.” Latin roots of “compassion” mean “co-suffering.” “Compassion” in verse 34 is a literally visceral, way to suggest shared pain. That word is esplangchnisthe, deriving from splangchnon, which is bowels or entrails. It’s used in Acts 1:18, when Judas fell in death, to say his “bowels gushed out.” Think how you feel what someone else feels “in the pit of your stomach.”
One part of Jesus “compassion,” then, was feeling what the crowd felt in His own stomach. Further on, in the part we skipped, they were actually hungry. Jesus felt it too, but in that modern sense of compassion, it led to His action, to doing something about it, what we call the “Feeding of the Five Thousand.” Next Sunday we’ll move to John chapter 6 for several weeks for a longer account of that miracle and what Jesus had to say about its spiritual significance. For now, think about just on whom Jesus had compassion.
In verse 33 we find that a crowd of thousands managed to run together around the lake and be there when Jesus and the disciples arrived in the boat. That feat of outracing a boat on foot, might make us wonder if our usual picture of who was in that crowd is entirely accurate. All four Gospels make a point of telling us there were 5,000 men there—verse 44 here—using the specific Greek word that means male human beings, not a more general anthropoi, that can refer to both men and women. Only Matthew adds that there were women and children as well. We usually take that to be merely ancient sexism. Just the men were counted. But what if the point is that it was mostly just men?
This was a crowd of men able to travel rapidly from point A to B, while sticking together. When Jesus seats them, he does it in groups of 50 and 100, and as John tells it, it is again just men who sit down like that. John also tells us that after the miracle feeding, this crowd wanted to make Jesus their king, which in ancient imagery also means their shepherd, and that would mean what we might call their commander-in-chief.
In other words, as R. T. France suggests in his commentary on this Gospel, that crowd on which Jesus had compassion was not just a collection of country people from the general population. In I Kings 22:17 when the prophet Micaiah predicts what will happen to the army of Israel when king Ahab goes to war and dies on the field, he says “I saw all Israel scattered on the mountains, like sheep that have no shepherd.” Mark may want us to understand that this crowd of men, who can march quickly and are easily organized into equal divisions, are actually a would-be army, looking for a general.[3]
When Jesus felt compassion well up inside Him for “shepherdless sheep,” He was not looking primarily at folk you or I might get compassionate about. The crowd was not predominantly poor, starving women and children. They’re strong, belligerent men ready to start a rebellion against Rome. Yet Jesus loved them. In the end, He cared enough about them to feed them, but first He did what we read at the end of verse 34, “he began to teach them many things.”
In our men’s Bible study, Garry said that is a wonderfully suggestive phrase. Wouldn’t it be amazing to know what those “many things” were that Jesus taught them? John’s Gospel gives us the lessons which came after the loaves and fishes, but the lessons that came before were not written down. We might make some guesses though.
It’s clear that Jesus wanted nothing to do with a military rebellion against Rome. After the feeding miracle, Mark tells us in verse 45 that Jesus “immediately” made his disciples get in the boat and leave. He didn’t want them there in that charged atmosphere aimed at violence. Over in John 6:15 we read that Jesus realized they were going to grab Him and force Him to be king. So He slipped away to mountains. It seems likely that what Jesus tried to teach to that host of wanna-be soldiers was that the kingdom of God was not about that, not about literal fighting, just as He taught a crowd on a mountainside earlier on. Even though these men weren’t having it, Jesus still had compassion on them, still loved them.
Like I said, that mirror neuron system is built in. There’s a natural tendency in human beings, and even in other animals, to react to and even feel the pain and suffering of others. One limit to that natural, maybe neurological, experience of shared feeling is that we exhibit it most with people who are more or less like us. When we encounter someone we identify as “different,” that mirroring reaction is reduced or even short-circuited. That’s partly how racism and the abuse that comes with it works. When we label fellows human beings as “other” or “them,” we are no longer so able to “mirror” what they are feeling in ourselves. We will ignore their pain, sorrow, hunger and so on. There by the sea, Jesus could not have been more different in heart and purpose from the violent men He was trying to teach, but He still had compassion on them.
Making that distinction between “us” and “them” also seems to be built into human beings as is that capacity to feel each other’s pain. The most glaring example right now is the huge chasm that has opened between Republicans and Democrats in our nation. The rhetoric, the stereotyping, and the color-coded maps have made it almost impossible not to picture ourselves as one or the other, and to regard those in the different group negatively.
Yet it’s basic human nature. Studies show that all it takes in a school classroom is for a teacher to pin a yellow badge on some students and a green badge on the rest and then suggest, even in some gentle way, that green badge kids are different from yellow-badge kids, even if it’s not true. The children will start to gather in separate groups according to those meaningless badges.
Robert Sapolsky recalls a story about the filming of Planet of the Apes. In the movie, the simian characters were divided between those who were gorillas and those who were chimpanzees. When the actors took breaks for lunch, “the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate in separate groups.”[4]
So we might be tempted to simply throw up our hands and throw in the towel and conclude that human divisions and separations are inevitable. We’re hard-wired to have more compassion for people that belong to our group and less for those outside. So just go with it. The problem is that simply accepting the inevitability of separate group identity and less compassion for outsiders leads to things like six-pointed stars pinned on people whom you don’t feel anything for when they die, or to a crowd of men, women and children cheering and smiling while a person of a different color hangs by his neck from a tree.
We want to say, “but that’s not us.” But it is. It’s human nature. History and science prove that it’s human nature. And the Bible teaches us the same thing. Sin and mistreatment of others is part of who we are. Early Christians experienced the same “us and them” dynamic. Paul wrote those words we heard from Ephesians 2 this morning because followers of Jesus were dividing up according to Jew and Greek, according to who was circumcised and who was not. But then in verse 14, talking about Jesus, Paul wrote, “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility that is between us.”
Jesus could have kept Himself and His disciples completely separate from others, from people who had different plans and goals in life, people like those men who marched along the beach to commandeer a commander. Sometimes He did. At the beginning of this text, Jesus tried to get His disciples away to someplace where they could rest by themselves. But Jesus was not afraid to interact with and, here’s the key, to have compassion for others who were not of the same mind. He wasn’t just a Shepherd to those ready to peacefully lie down in green pastures or follow Him in paths of righteousness. Jesus reached beyond His group to love and care for those who did not even understand Him. That same kind of compassion is our greatest challenge now if we want to follow Jesus in the 2020s.
Compassion and feeling other’s pain and distress should not mean giving up who we are, though. That’s part of what is behind Jesus seeking rest for His disciples and Himself. He will let His and His follower’s needs be interrupted or sidetracked by the needs of others, but He won’t quit being who He is. He won’t become king over an army. And He won’t forget or ignore those who need His compassion even more than do a restless bunch of young men who want to fight for their freedom.
So our reading skips from verse 34 to verse 53, skips both the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus walking on the water as the disciples row against the wind after He sent them away in the boat. We simply pick up with “When they had crossed over,” to find that Jesus and His followers met another crowd there on the west side of the lake by Gennesaret. They too recognized Him and came rushing to Him, but it was a different sort of group. They were the sick and people who brought the sick as they lay on mats. These weren’t healthy specimens who could outrun a boat. They were poor, helpless, unwell folks who needed others to carry them where Jesus was.
Jesus rushed His disciples away from the crowd that wanted to make Him a king. Yes, He had compassion on that first crowd. He taught them and fed them and loved them. But when He finds Himself in the midst of people who simply want to be well, Jesus stayed and traveled around among them. Verse 56 says, “wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.”
He only did that feeding of thousands thing once or twice, but Mark tells us that wherever He went Jesus healed people, had compassion on those who had no bodily strength of their own, no hope but their hope in Him. I have to believe that Jesus asks the same of us if we want to follow Him where He goes and do as He did. Yes, we are called to have compassion on everyone, including misguided, foolish mobs who think violence is the answer to their problems. But most of all, He wants us to follow Him where the people are who are often forgotten, the people who are pushed to the edges of society, people who are different enough that we find it hard to feel compassion like Jesus felt.
That’s why we had a Zoom conversation this past Wednesday evening about disability justice. People with disabilities were exactly those to whom Jesus went in that region around Gennesaret. People with disabilities in our own community and world often find themselves disadvantaged and on the margins, with no one noticing or drawing near to offer them access and participation in activities many of us take for granted.
Our goal in such discussions, just as in conversations about racism, is not to take up some political cause, although political action on behalf of people with disabilities may be an important Christian thing to do. But our main aim is to grow in that same kind of compassion which Jesus exhibited throughout His ministry on earth. His compassion caused His human nature to feel what suffering people feel and His divine nature do something miraculous and wonderful in response. Compassion ultimately took our Savior to the Cross to feel the pain of the whole world and at the same time redeem us and save us from that pain. He’s given His followers the same sort of mission.
So I’d simply like to encourage us to keep cultivating compassion. It’s easy sometimes to feel it, but then let other things get in the way of doing something. Even the empathy, the sharing of pain, shuts off then. I John 3:17 uses that Greek word for “bowels.” It warns against seeing someone in needing and shutting up one’s “bowels of compassion,” in King James language. Literally it’s just “shutting your bowels.” We might say “closing your heart,” cutting off any chance that the other person’s pain might become your own pain.
I’ve told this story a couple times this past week. At my previous church we started a building program not long before I left. One part of it was to add an elevator, to bridge the gap between a parking lot that was on the first floor and a sanctuary that was on the second floor. If you couldn’t climb stairs, the only route to our sanctuary from your car was a half block round on the sidewalk and them up a ramp, maybe on a cold snowy Nebraska winter day. An elevator would mean you could enter at ground level and ride up to worship like everyone else. In particular I envisioned Dale, a church leader who had suffered from polio and had paralyzed legs, soon able to access our sanctuary in a way he never could before.
When the plan came to the congregation, though, it was more money than they wanted to approve. It went back to the building committee and that elevator, an expensive item, got chopped from the design. When I think about it, I still ache for what it meant for Dale on his crutches, Nancy in her wheelchair, and any number of others still making a trek around to get into their church.
If someone from that congregation reads or listens to this sermon, my point is not to make anyone feel guilty or shamed 30 years later. The point is simply that it’s easy to forget, to shut down and shut up. But the example of Jesus calls us to keep opening ourselves up to what others feel and experience, sharing their pain, whether it’s the humiliation of racial micro-aggressions or the struggle just to get into a building or to use a restroom. Let us remember what Jesus said in Luke 6:36, “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate,” as loving and full of feeling for others as the Lord Himself is for you.
I do want to end today by saying what I said Wednesday evening. I believe that you all here at Valley Covenant have your hearts in the right place. Dare I even say your “bowels” in the right place? Over the years, God has sent people of all sorts here, people of color, people with physical disabilities and people with emotional and mental disabilities. They have been noticed and, in many ways, you shared their pain and tried to do what you could to help. You didn’t try to shut the doors of your own self, your own heart. That’s exactly what this is all about, doing our best to let God make us like Jesus in His compassion. May that compassion be what anyone who comes to this place remembers most about the people here. Because we go by the name of the One who has compassion for everyone.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] See Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Books, 2017), p. 522f.
[2] Ibid., p. 523.
[3] The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI; Eerdmans 2002), p. 261ff.
[4] Behave, p. 386.