Starting at compassion

Last week a friend sent a postcard titled “The Seven Last Words.” Borrowing from what some Christians call “the Seven Last Words from the Cross” she laid out on card stock with thread and ink the seven last words of George Floyd as he lay with a police officer’s knee on his neck. George Floyd has been dead for over three weeks but these seven last words, in print and mailed by our artist friend to a hundred of her friends hit me in the gut. After weeks of reading, talking, protesting, tweeting, journaling, and reading and talking some more, the postcard was like a punch in the gut.

In the new testament, when Jesus is described as having compassion, the word is based on a Greek word that means, quite literally, “guts.” So to say that “Jesus felt compassion” is to say that Jesus felt as though he were punched in the gut by his own awareness of injustice and of others’ suffering. We know the feeling. When Jesus gets this gut-punch awareness, he usually follows up with telling his followers to go out and remove suffering. He gets all fired up and sends his disciples out to fight injustice.

It’s a tall order to think that part of what it means to be a disciple is to go out and relieve suffering and fight injustice. And yet, we’ve all felt that blow to the gut. That’s compassion. That’s the first step. That gut reaction to watching injustice inflicted upon others is part of the divine spark planted in us at creation.

Compassion is the starting point for everything Jesus tells his disciples to do: healing, casting out unclean spirits, enduring persecution and rejection, traveling light, all of it. We must begin with being compassionate with ourselves, during this tumultuous time when neither the church nor the world is what it should be or could be.

We are people of compassion, and God is with us in our compassion. If my friend’s postcard gets you in your gut, that’s your compassion talking. What will you do with it?