Today, we welcome our first guest contributor to Evangelically Departed. Rev. Dr. Richard Topping is President and Vice-Chancellor of the Vancouver School of Theology. He has been instrumental in helping the school get to increase enrollment and community participation. We have interviewed Richard on Rector’s Cupboard and have worked with him on the VST podcast, Bruderholz.
Richard was Minister at Zion and Knox Presbyterian Churches in Muskoka, Ontario from 1993-1996 and at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul in Montreal, Quebec, where he was Assistant Minister from 1997-1999 and Senior Minister from 2000-2009.
About a year ago, I was in my car and listening to CBC Radio. They were replaying a recorded convocation address from York University. The woman giving the address was the Canadian opera star, Teresa Stratas. She rose from humble beginnings as the child of a poor immigrant family from Greece, settled in cabbage town in Toronto. She made it to the Metropolitan Opera and took time out of her career to work with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and an orphanage in Romania. And then, in 1995, she underwent a surgery that was botched. Her voice was ruined. Her singing career abruptly ended. “What will she say?” I wondered, and pulled over to listen. She said:
It would be very easy to stand here and tell you that life is about great successes, professional achievements and singing at the Metropolitan Opera and being world famous and falling in love with another human being. I have had those things. I have all those things. But the richness of my life lies in finally having learned to have the ability to face – and to embrace – my fears, my failures and my tragedies and to learn from them. These are the things that have opened my mind and lit my spirit and filled me with compassion. I always had passion. I learned compassion, and this is what has connected me with every member of the human family of the world. This has informed my life and work. This is the richness of my life, and I am blessed.
Listening to Ms. Stratas pulled me back to the New Testament. So many stories we love turn on compassion – the Prodigal son, the Good Samaritan, the Unforgiving Steward. The ministry of Jesus gets up close and personal when he feels compassion for broken lives, for human indirection, for those ostracized by communicable diseases. He is moved by their strife. He goes all-in for proximity and welcome and healing, and that takes Him all the way to the cross. He willingly and mindfully gets mixed up in what poet R.S. Thomas calls “the muck and phlegm of life.”
God felt compassion. The Father sent the Son. In the ministry of Jesus, we do not see unbridled passion (think ambition, when I say that) but compassion for the broken, twisted, malformed human condition. Maybe during these days of COVID-19, rather than languishing, what those formed by the gospel might experience is compassion, a kind of voluntary solidarity with the fragile, with the broken desperate condition of our neighbours and our world.
New York Times columnist, David Brooks, says that we are told annually by commencement speakers: “follow your passion, march to the beat of your own heart, you do you.” And that plays into the cult of productivity and efficiency, the claws of hustle culture, searching to outmaneuver the competition. That worries me. It feels competitive and individualistic. It feels ambitious to the point of creating winners and losers, a passion that celebrates the former regardless of achievement and disparages everyone else, regardless of their virtue. Compassion goes unlearned.
I think there may be no greater sign of the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ than this: “he was moved by compassion.” He saw them – the crowd, the bereaved, the crippled, the hopeless and aimless – and he was moved by compassion. He didn’t blame them. He wasn’t embarrassed at human fragility and neediness and desperation. He wasn’t moved by contempt or exhaustion or suspicion but by compassion. He taught and touched and accompanied and healed them. Compassion took him all the way to the cross, and his compassion did not end there. As the Quaker William Penn said, “For though our Saviour’s passion is over, his compassion is not.”
By virtue of baptism the Spirit enfolds us into Christ’s ongoing ministry of compassion. But our participation does not seem just automatic. It does not just happen. “I always had passion,” Teresa Stratas tells us. “I learned compassion.” Our teacher is the Spirit of Jesus if we don’t grieve him.
The gospel of compassion is required and is to be learned by whole communities. As biblical images remind us – the human heart can turn to stone, unmoved by the call of God or the needs of the neighbour; “clenched in a state of mute rebellion to God’s will,” says Augustine scholar Peter Brown.
I have reimagined my way through the story of the Good Samaritan on this point. A not-so-good Samaritan could have passed by the man in the ditch as others did if, instead of compassion, he allowed suspicion to take hold.
Who lives in a ditch? Is he a plant by ruffians to trap a traveller? Hey, don’t forget, we Samaritans opposed the move to build a temple up there in Jerusalem, a power-move that excluded us. We have our own temple in Gerizim.
Suspicion, in this example, kills connection in an instant, and undermines the response that engenders compassion. Suspicion embraces dismissal, it institutes a posture of disengagement rather than of love, it rebukes reverence and empathy. In academic life we revel in the hermeneutics of suspicion, in some cases critical thinking is coincident with suspicious thinking, which is understandable and, to a point, necessary in the process. But our work, human work, God’s work, is to build things, to construct communities, not only to disassemble.
Perhaps the most haunting line I have read about how suspicion closes us off from loving our neighbour, even when that neighbour is the text of Holy Scripture, comes from the feminist literary scholar Rita Felski. She speaks of “the barbed wire of suspicion” which sets up a barrier against our being contaminated by the words or people we encounter. She asks why we think a well-educated person is hyper-articulate in their criticisms and “so excruciatingly tongue-tied about their loves.” Suspicion, she contends, may soon devolve into paranoia.
How different are the words of St Barnard of Clairvaux, who said the Bible is the wine cellar of the Holy Spirit, and that’s why we engage and revel in it, why we want to converse with it, why we ingest it, and why we are intoxicated by it. That is the language of love.
Or, what if the not-so-good Samaritan felt contempt for the man beaten? He’s not one of ours. He deserved it for travelling alone. He should have known better. Racism could rear its head here, so this man is no neighbour, he’s some lesser undeserving person. He’s not of our group and therefore a threat. Some cultural commentators are noticing how we used to disagree more charitably, but now – at this polarizing moment - different points of view need to be torn apart, our opponent vanquished, even if it leaves the neighbour without a voice.
John Calvin answers:
People are indeed worthy of God’s care, if respect be had only to themselves; but since they bear the image of God, he deems himself violated in their person. Thus, although they have nothing of their own by which they obtain the favour of God, he looks upon his own gifts in them, and is thereby excited to love and care for them. This doctrine is to be carefully observed, that no one can be injurious to his neighbour without wounding God himself. Were this doctrine deeply fixed in our minds, we should be much more reluctant than we are to inflict injuries.
Or, what if the not-so-good Samaritan was moved by something more benign, say by distraction. What if he was like the fellow who gets twitchy when he’s not multi-tasking and working several devices? The one in a relentless hurry. As George Costanza on Seinfeld opined, “Always look annoyed, all the time, and people think you’re busy.” That works. We can all be in this mode, our eyes wide open but without seeing, without paying attention since that could lead to someone else making a claim on our lives.
Anne Lamont says, “Unlike watching or looking, seeing is why we are here.”
Against all of this, we have God’s promise, as spoken in Ezekiel, “A new heart and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone.” My experience is that that promise needs to be claimed by the church. We pray, Veni Spiritus Sanctus – come Holy Spirit.
In his wonderful essay, “The Grace that Changed my Life,” Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff documents his journey from theoretical commitments to justice and to action on behalf of others. He says that it was through meeting and befriending those who suffer — in Palestine and in South Africa — that moved his formed faith to compassion, so that he began to act in solidarity and love. He writes:
Empathy is what gives the struggle for justice its most powerful emotion. Some people might experience empathy from their arm-chair reading – but it comes to most of us powerfully when we are confronted by the faces and voices of those who are vulnerable and suffer injustice.
“Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples,” people like us, “the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers (compassionate workers) into his harvest field.”