What Is Your Compassion Quotient?

What Is Your Compassion Quotient?

Mark 6:30-44

            For those of you who only remember the word quotient from math classes, there is another definition, one I recently became aware of.  It can also mean, “a degree or amount of a specified quality or characteristic.”  That’s the sense in which I’m using it here.

            Compassion is not the easiest characteristic to deal with.  Most of us have some compassion for those near and dear to us, but widening our compassion circle is difficult.  We tend to look at those who are not close to us through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.  We keep them at a distance.

            Nowhere is this truer than in our attitude to the poor, especially the multigenerational poor.  Their poverty must be their fault.  How can someone continue to be poor year after year, generation after generation?  Surely there is something they can do to change their position!  Perhaps if they got some help organizing their finances, or denied themselves things like new TV’s or cell phones, or learned to shop for food more economically.  Can’t they put a little something away every month, build up a nest egg, so that when disaster strikes they’d have something to help them get through difficult times?

            Last week I quoted Herman Melville, who said, “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.” 

This is where I was heading with that quote.  Those of us who have enough—even if it’s barely enough—can’t understand why some people remain mired in poverty.  They not only lack the money to get out of poverty, they lack the means of figuring out how to change their status.  They have been poor so long they’ve come to believe that it is the only way they can live.  No amount of telling them how to make things different makes a difference.  Even if they have a windfall they don’t know how to use it to help them change their financial condition.  Those who have studied the poor and worked with the poor will tell you it is almost hopeless to expect them to turn their lives around.

Jesus understood those society had oppressed.  He was born into a blue collar, working class family.  Mary may have had relatives from the priestly class, but Joseph worked with his hands.  No matter what we see in Renaissance paintings, Jesus did not live in a palace surrounded by fine things.  He lived in an ordinary house, in an ordinary village, among ordinary people.  This is why he was rejected by his neighbors when he returned to Nazareth claiming to be the Messiah.  They believed he had gotten above his raising.

Jesus felt so much compassion he gave up needed rest and decompression time with his disciples to teach those who followed him to a desolate place.

Jesus felt so much compassion for these same people that he fed them rather than sending them away hungry as his disciples suggested.

Jesus felt so much compassion that he healed people on the Sabbath, even though it upset the religious leaders.

Jesus felt so much compassion for humanity that he gave his life for them on the cross to provide a path to reconciliation with God.

So…what’s your compassion quotient?  Christians say we are called to be like Jesus.  Are we?  Do we have as much compassion as Jesus had, not just for our nearest and dearest, but for those far away—even for all humanity?  Can we claim to be Christians if we don’t share Jesus’ compassionate love for everyone—and then do something about it?