Compassionate Love
Seventh Sunday of the Year. Fr Martin Ganeri preaches on the command to be compassionate as God is compassionate.
‘Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.’
In the Latin Bible of the Catholic Church the word translated by compassionate in the Gospel is misericordes. In the Latin Bible this word and the related noun, misericordia, are used in places when the Bible sets out the covenantal love of God for his people, the loving kindness of God, something that involves a readiness to forgive and show mercy. The word, misericordia, is often just translated as ‘mercy,’ but a better way of expressing the relationship it conveys would be ‘compassionate or merciful love.’ The compassionate or merciful love of God for humanity and hence the compassionate or merciful love that men and women should have for each other.
St Thomas Aquinas says of this ‘compassionate merciful love:
A person is said to have compassionate, merciful love when he has sorrow in his heart, being affected by sorrow at the misery of another, as though it were his own. Hence it follows that he endeavours to dispel the misery of the other person, as if it were his own, and this is the effect of this love. (ST 1.21.3)
‘…Being affected by sorrow at the misery of another, as though it were his own.’ This, then, is compassion in the basic meaning of the word, ‘to suffer with.’ But, in the form of compassionate or merciful love, such compassion does not just stop at the feeling of sorrow or pity for another. Rather, it moves on to ‘dispel the misery of the other.’ Compassion, then, in the form of merciful love, is a powerful force that acts to relieve the misfortunes of others, to dispel the things that compromise their welfare, and to bring about their full flourishing as human beings.
The supreme manifestation of this kind of divine compassion for humanity is found in the life and especially the Passion of Jesus Christ. Christ bears the weakness of our human flesh, he bears with the misunderstandings, the opposition, the rejection and insults of others, endures the agony of his Passion and Crucifixion, out of compassionate love for us, so that we can be saved, be liberated from the ways of thinking and the behaviour that compromise the lives God wants us to have.
Christ himself who is the one who exemplifies the teaching which we find in St Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, in which the perfection of Christian living is set forth. In St Matthew’s version we are called upon to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, while in St Luke, we are called upon to be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate. In Christ these two things complement each other. Christ manifests the perfection of the Father by manifesting the unconditional compassionate love of the Father for us.
Christ who is the one who embodies this and who enables us to do have it ourselves. So, when we are called to be compassionate as our heavenly Father we are not being told to get on with being as good as God, but without the power of God’s divinity, but, rather, we are invited to open ourselves to the presence and power of Christ so that we can manifest what he manifests. If we are open to Christ’s Spirit, we can show the compassionate love of the Father in our world.
The perfect life of compassionate love that we are called to manifest contains the same freedom and power that is found in Christ’s life. Christ freely chose to forbear the frailty and wrongs of others so that he could save them. He could have done otherwise, but he chose not to out of love for them. We are called upon, helped by Christ’s Spirit, to exercise this same freedom, a freedom not to exchange insult for insult, or wrong for wrong, but to act in whatever way manifests compassionate love.
The twofold definition of compassionate love given by St Aquinas is very important here. As he tells us, such compassionate love does feel the sufferings of others as our own, but it also works to alleviate those sufferings. Compassionate love always acts to alleviate the sufferings of others, to bring out their good and their salvation. So, we might accept the insult or wrong of others when we know that to do so we can bring about a better situation. I am sure that every parent, every sibling, every friend, has bitten their lip and accepted hurtful words, because they know that this is the best way to respond out of compassionate love, knowing that just to respond in kind would only make things worse.
God calls on us then to live a life that expresses His perfect freedom, as well His perfect love. We can only do this in imitation of Christ, if we let Christ himself work through his Spirit in us.
Readings: 1 Samuel 26:2,7-9,11-13,22-23 | 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 | Luke 6:27-38
Image: detail from a window in a former Unitarian church in Nottingham, photographed by Fr Lawrence Lew OP
