Today’s Life-Line is:

The compassion of Jesus is to be understood
not simply as a personal emotional reaction
but as a public criticism in which he dares to act upon
his concern against the entire numbness of his social context.

Empires live by numbness.
Empires, in their militarism,
expect numbness about the human cost of war.

Corporate economies expect blindness
to the cost in terms of poverty and exploitation.
Governments and societies of domination
go to great lengths to keep the numbness intact.

Jesus penetrates the numbness by his compassion
and with his compassion takes the first step
by making visible the odd abnormality that had become
business as usual.

Thus compassion that might be seen simply as
generous goodwill is in fact criticism of the system,
forces, and ideologies that produce the hurt.

Jesus enters into the hurt and finally comes to embody it.

~ Walter Brueggemann

Artwork: Georges Rouault, 1937