Empathy: Knowing How to Be All Things to All People

5 Epiphany B  February 7, 2021
Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39

Paul as an apostle and an evangelist believed that if he wanted to share the Gospel with someone, he had to pass over into the lives of the people with whom he shared the Gospel.  In short, he knew that evangelism required empathy.  He expressed evangelical empathy in this way:  "I have become all things to all people so that by all means I might save some."

St. Paul had to have a conversion encounter with the Risen Christ in order to achieve such profound evangelical empathy.  The very meaning of the life of Jesus Christ is expressed in empathy.  St. Paul understood Jesus Christ to be the ultimate expression of the empathy of God with humanity.  God crossed over into humanity as evidence of divine empathy.

In Jesus Christ, God became all things to all people.  The poetic Paul believed that in Jesus, God was emptied into human life completely.  St. Paul even said that Christ was made our sin so that we might be made the righteousness of God.  And in the death of Jesus, God had complete empathy with the human experience of death.  But God did not want death to be the end of the meaning of human life.  In the resurrection of Christ, God offered humanity the opportunity of empathy with an after life.  In the life of Jesus and in the life of the Holy Spirit, we can find that the promise of eternal life ministers to us in the midst of some very difficult times.

Eternal life expressed in the oft harsh conditions of the disharmony in the free conditions of life is seen in events of salvation, events of knowing what health means.

The Gospels presents the empathy of God in Christ in the healing stories of Jesus.  Why are the healing stories important teaching stories about Jesus?

They are important because one of most heart wringing situations of life is to experience one's own sickness or the sickness of the one's we love.  Health seems so wonderfully normal, that when we lose it, we feel deprived of what seems to be a basic right of life.  When wholeness is taken away, when disharmony within the human systems of community, nature or biology occurs, we lose the experience of health.

Health is very personal and health is very social because the sickness of one person has a ripple effect within the sick person's community.

Simon Peter's mother-in-law fell ill.  Jesus restored her and she immediately got up and served.  Peter was a follower of Jesus and the illness of his mother-in-law affected the life of his family.  Can you imagine Peter's wife asking him if Jesus would stop in and see her mother?

The Gospel of Mark presents Jesus as healing all who came to him, so many that it seemed he needed to go out to a deserted place to pray and to get recharged.  Many of the healings of Jesus involved a psycho-spiritual healing which the Gospel writers understood to be the interior whispering of the souls of people who were inwardly tortured.  

The message of salvation for us in these healing stories is that the Risen Christ is with us in the times when we do not feel well.  

Today, we need to know that the Risen Christ is with us in the midst of the pandemic, in the midst of so many suffering from this disease and so many dying from this awful plague.  What has the pandemic exposed in terms of our human response?

It has exposed the fact that as a society we have failed to live the Gospel values of caring for each other.  We have been slow to respond to the reality of the illness.  We have failed to adjust our economies to help people survive during this illness.

The healing of the Risen Christ for us does not mean that God zaps instant cures; rather God has given us the opportunity to love and care for one another and adjust everything in our lives for the health and safety of everyone, especially the vulnerable.

The healing power of the love of the Risen Christ has been given; but we as a nation and a world have been very slow to respond.  We have wanted "business as usual," even when the pandemic has been saying to us: "Stop and care for each other."

After the prayer time of Jesus was interrupted by his disciple, he said, " let's get going, let's get the message out."  The Gospel does not mean zapping cures in this world through faith healers; it means the conversion of people to the practice of open, honest, caring behaviors of one another.

Think about it, what would we want to do over regarding the pandemic?  We'd want the people near the origin of the virus to be immediately honest about the severity.  We'd want leaders to trust the brute facts of science about this disease.  We'd want social agreement about intervention and prevention of the spread of the disease.  We'd want leaders without egos to lead us to make the hard choices to care for each other.

And in our failure to embrace the healing care that the Risen Christ, always already offers, we can now hear the words of Jesus from the cross, "Father forgive them, for they did not know what they should have done."

We have not known what we have been doing in the failure to practice the healing life of the Gospel of care of Jesus Christ.

Let us arise from asking for forgiveness in our failure to care, and seek to be restored in the healing Gospel of Christ.  This is not "faith healing cure zapping;" rather it is Gospel of caring for each other in community.  The Gospel of care is the best health of prevention.

May God restore us in the Gospel of the health of care through Jesus Christ today.  Amen.