Wednesday, February 06, 2013

TOW: Compassion and Jesus

I have had a couple people in my life experience some high-highs, and some lows-lows lately...and it's a little weird because normally I'm the one in the gutter.  (No really, I was starting to think I lived there.)

Whenever I see people down, I think about whether I should be compassionate.  And when I think compassion, I mean it in the Christian way.

Christian compassion is a very specific kind of charity.

To take a biblical example, as Jesus was apprehended by the Jewish authorities, a discple cut off the ear of a nearby guard.  Jesus put the man's ear back on, healing him.  The very people who would take him away and eventually condemn him to death, Jesus decided he cared more about what other people were doing to each other than the social judgment that was about to be passed on him. 

Sometimes in life we experience things around us that suggest we should be worse people.  We should let bad things happen to bad people.  We should let good things happen to us.  But from a Christian point of view, this is one of the worst kinds of evil.  What tyrant wouldn't want only good things to happen to them, and bad things to happen to others?  Indeed, inside of all of us, is a demon wishing the worst on every other living being, and the wishing the very best things for us.  Such a thing, sad as it is, is an integral part of being human.  The banality of evil is that we accept is much more if it is not happening to us.  As long as we can keep bad things away from us, we think we are good.

But goodness is not about the removal of what is considered, socially or otherwise, evil.  Goodness is about making difficult decisions that don't always mean that we are doing the best things for oursleves, but that we are trying our best to live our lives as servants of Christ.  And that means to be a servant-leader to others as well.

Christianity, for all its weaknesses is special, and Catholicism especially, because in no other religion does one see a need, a desire, and a commitment beyond life or death to care for the young, the poor, women, and the downtrodden.  Roman-Greco society, so easy to put on a pedestal, made its gains off of slavery. They killed babies they didn't want by smashing the baby's head on a rock, especially if they thought it was afflicted with any kind of special need or disability.  In other words, atheist and other theist societies often killed off the weak.

Let's not kid ourselves thinking Christians and Christianity have not done bad things or excesses.  But the mission of Christianity is compassion.  True compassion, to all people, not matter how good, or how bad.

And that's what I've been thinking about this week.





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