by The Rev. Elise A. Feyerherm
All Saints Parish, Brookline, MA
July 10, 2010
Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37
I confess I am not a news junkie, and that I am lucky to catch little bits of Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and All Things Considered from time to time to get a vague idea of what is going on in the world. I did catch a local Columbus call in show the other day in which the topic was the Supreme Court confirmation hearings concerning Elena Kagan.
In particular, the issue was President Obama's assertion that empathy was a quality he looked for in a judge, and that Kagan, and Obama's last nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, both possessed this quality of empathy. As far as I could determine, this is what the President said:
"I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives, whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation. I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes."
On this radio program, the host and guests were discussing the objections of those who don't want judges to have empathy because that would make them soft – they want someone who is willing to enforce justice. I wanted to know more about this problem with empathy, so I did a little research on what folks were saying about it.
A former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, Wendy Long, sees empathy as undermining our very system of justice. She said that "(Obama) thinks judges should have empathy for certain litigants who come before them. Of course if you have empathy for everybody who comes before you, there are two sides to every case. If you have empathy for both sides then that's the same as having no empathy at all. So what he means is he wants empathy for one side and what's wrong with that is it is being partial instead of being impartial. A judge is supposed to have empathy for no one but simply to follow the law."
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama asserted that "Our legal system does not allow such an approach."
As I listened to the radio conversation and later as I considered what people were saying about empathy and justice, I found myself wondering whether these folks really understood at all what empathy was about. I came to the conclusion that they did not, and here's why.
Empathy is the capacity to "feel in" someone else – to put oneself in their position, to begin to understand what they are experiencing, to see things from their perspective, even if one doesn't actually see it that way or agree with the person one is empathizing with.
Empathy is different from sympathy – sympathy implies agreement, feeling with, not just in. If you have the quality of empathy, you will not necessarily condone a person's feelings or actions, but you will be able to begin to understand them.I think that this is actually a very good quality for a judge to have. If one has empathy for one side, that actually means that one is also able to empathize with the other side, and it means that justice is more, rather than less, likely to come about.
More than that, we are talking about what it means to be human, not just what it takes to get on the Supreme Court. Empathy is in fact a fundamental human quality – the capacity to see and feel beyond our own limited experience, to put ourselves in other people's shoes. We have a name for people who lack empathy: we call them psychopaths. I don't know about you, but I would really hate to have a psychopath on the bench of the Supreme Court!
Empathy, it seems, has an awful lot to do with the quality of compassion, the ability to care for others as one would care for oneself. It makes the golden rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – possible.
This brings us to the parable of the Good Samaritan as the gospel text for this week – the classic story of – wait for it – compassion. A.k.a, empathy. Traditional interpretations of this parable tend to focus on the priest and the Levite as representatives of a corrupt and even decaying religion – i.e., Judaism, to which Jesus offers a pure and life-giving alternative.
The motivations of the priest and Levite who pass by the injured man on the road are attributed to their desire not to make themselves ritually unclean by touching what appears to be, or what could be, a dead body, thereby placing ritual purity above the Torah's command to love the neighbor.
This actually makes very little sense, since the priest and the Levite are going down from Jerusalem, that is, they're going home from performing their duties at the Jerusalem Temple. Any ritual uncleanness would have been relatively easy to deal with, if not with other ritual acts, or simply with the passage of time. Attributing their callousness to their Judaism even the Judaism of the past, is dangerous and unwarranted ground. Jesus is not criticizing Judaism, or the religious establishment, or even lawyers for that matter. It would be easier if he were, at least for those of us who are not Jewish, clergy, or lawyers! But as much as we'd like to point the finger elsewhere, it is in fact directed at all of us.
For we cannot distance ourselves from the apparent callousness of the priest and the Levite, as much as we would like to. If we look closely at the parable, we discover that what distinguishes the priest and the Levite from the Samaritan is not that they are traditional Jews, or that they are too wrapped up in their own religious institutions; it is, rather, their capacity for, or lack of, empathy; their inability to feel or show compassion.
The priest and the Levite can hardly be blamed for passing the injured traveler by. This parable places us in the midst of a dangerous world. Robbers frequented the road from Jerusalem to Jericho; what happened to the unnamed man, being attacked, stripped, robbed, beaten and left for dead was a real and present danger for anyone traveling along that road. We are not explicitly told that the priest and the Levite were afraid, but these men who did not stop to help had every reason to fear for their lives.
While we are not told why the priest and the Levite failed to stop, it is significant that we are told why the Samaritan stops: he was filled with pity, or compassion for the suffering of the wounded traveler by the side of the road. And the other two men – apparently they lack this quality, or if they do possess compassion, they are for some reason unable to bring it to the surface and bring it to birth.
I do believe that somewhere, inside, the priest and the Levite do have access to empathy. I believe that human beings are hard-wired for compassion, because that is part of what it means to be created in the image of God. We are created for compassion because compassion is at the heart of God's being, as scripture, tradition, reason, and our experience tell us. Jesus' parables, especially in the gospel of Luke, tell us the same thing, that God is the One who cannot help seeking the lost, loving the unlovable, forgiving sinners.
The figures of the priest and the Levite call us to search our own hearts for what threatens to choke the compassion that God has created within us. These basically good men mirror our fear of those around us, our capitulation to self-interest, our inability to be moved, really moved to action, by the needs of those around us. But the figure of the Good Samaritan rescues us from becoming trapped in this distortion of the image in which we were created.
As a model for our own behavior, the Good Samaritan serves primarily as an indictment of our failures. As ethical example, the Samaritan confronts us with the daunting realization that to act with compassion requires not just a change of mind, but a change of heart, a complete transformation of the inner self. Something of which we, curved in ourselves, are simply not capable.
But this Samaritan is also something else: he is a symbol of Divine compassion, and as such he becomes a window into the kind of grace and possibility described in our reading from Colossians this evening. As an image of God, he stands for the undeniable truth that in Christ, we have already been given everything we need.
The author of Colossians writes with confidence and assurance:
"May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power ...
while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins."
So it is already there, within us. We have everything we need. We have been lifted up, transported to safety, our wounds tenderly cared for and all our wants supplied. Compassion is possible, not because we are required to practice it, but because on the road to Jericho we have been rescued from the darkness in Jesus Christ.