A Life-Line:

Jesus in his solidarity with the marginal ones is moved to compassion. Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but it is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness. In the arrangement of “lawlessness” in Jesus’ time, as in the ancient empire of Pharaoh, the one unpermitted quality of relation was compassion. Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion. The norms of law (social control) are never accommodated to persons, but persons are accommodated to the norms. Otherwise the norms will collapse and with them the whole power arrangement. Thus 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. This 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 hurt and finally comes to embody it.

The characteristic word for compassion, splagchnoisomai means to let one’s innards embrace the feeling or situation of another. Thus Jesus embodies the hurt that the marginal ones know by taking it into his own person and his own history. Their hurt came from being declared outside the realm of the normal and Jesus engages with them in a situation of abnormality. Concretely, his criticism as embodied hurt is expressed toward the sick, . . . the hungry, . . .[the] widow, . . . harassed and helpless.

~ Walter Brueggemann
from The Prophetic Imagination, p. 85-86.

ARTWORK: The Mourning Parents by Kathe Kollwitz