1 Corinthians 12.12-31a, Luke 4.14-21
Bridestowe, Lydford, Epiphany 4, 27/1/2013
When the Word became flesh, where did he flesh out the Word? Once God gained a body, where did he embody himself to show the world the sort of God he was?
Where you choose to put your body, what you choose to do with your body, demonstrates the person you are.
According to Luke, at the beginning of his ministry Jesus first placed himself in the wilderness, to battle with the devil, and then he made his way home, to Nazareth, where he went to the synagogue and read out a passage from Isaiah which some commentators now call The Nazareth Manifesto, for Jesus used this as his declaration of intent: about where he had chosen to put his body, about what he had chosen to do with his body.
‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,’ he said. And so the people now knew his intentions:
- he was going to place himself among the poor - to bring them good news;
- he was going to place himself among the captives - to proclaim release to them;
- he was going to place himself among the blind - to announce the recovery of their sight;
- he was going to place himself among the oppressed - to let them go free;
- he was going to place himself amongst all these suffering ones, and announce to them the year of the Lord’s favour - the year of Jubilee, the year in which all those who had lost out in life would have their financial and material status restored.
Now this announcement shook the listeners because they weren’t the poor, they weren’t captives; they were not blind or oppressed - they were respectable synagogue-going citizens who thought they had earned their Jubilee through their sabbath observation year by year. Jesus, who was one of them, was now speaking like a messiah, and they were in awe at the power of his Manifesto because it showed that Jesus empathised with others who were not like him, and not like them, the synagogue-goers.
Now we begin to see how God embodies himself. He places himself among people not like him, and acts for them through empathy.
Now notice I say empathy, not sympathy. Sympathy is something one can do from a distance; but empathy requires close engagement with another. Sympathy requires you to use your imagination to put yourself in the place of another to appreciate their situation; empathy requires you to actually place yourself with the other person and to gain understanding by engaging with them deeply. When a politician says, ‘I feel your pain,’ as Bill Clinton famously did, in response to the pleas of an activist [1], they are expressing sympathy, and will form policies based on their own understanding of the situation at hand. But when a politician spends days listening to the detailed stories of a particular situation told face-to-face by those most directly involved, that gives them an understanding of the other that they could never imagine themselves, and puts them in a position of empathy.
Now neither sympathy nor empathy alone can reduce the distance between the people involved. Whether sympathetic or empathetic, an MP has their £65,000 p.a. job, while those whose situations they address might be on or below the breadline. The difference between sympathy and empathy is this - that the sympathetic person mistakenly imagines that their sympathy breaks down the differences between them; whereas the empathetic person recognises their differences and takes the other person on their own terms.
Jesus wasn’t among the poor in his society, he came from an artisan’s family, he read at the synagogue. So how could Jesus know what would be ‘good news’ to the poor? He would know by putting himself among them, listening to them, observing their lives, engaging with them, recognising the differences between him and them but taking the poor on their own terms. This is where the parables came from - Jesus’ retelling the stories of the everyday struggles of the poor in ways which opened up the good news of the Kingdom of God to them.
Now, how we live with people who are different from us is one of the greatest challenges facing our society today. With an international labour market and splintered patterns of work we live in an age of increasing differences - racial, ethnic, religious, economic differences - and we tend to avoid socially engaging with people who aren’t like us. Modern politics tends to emphasise unity and similarity, the politics of the tribe, hence UKIP, rather than addressing the complexities of our differences. [2]
We need to learn how to live together not just sympathetically, for sympathy barely scratches the surface of our differences, but empathetically, for empathy is a powerful tool of cooperation between people who are different, and cooperation is a craft we can practice so as to become more skillful in dealing with others. [2]
In this, I draw from the work of Richard Sennett, a sociologist who insists that we humans have the skills to make a life together; we are craftsmen and women; we are gifted in cooperation. The inequalities and isolating situations of contemporary life have de-skilled us. Many are so anxious about sharing life with others who are different, that we shy away from those others altogether; and our culture becomes increasingly homogenised, as architecture, clothing, fast food, popular music, hotels, have the same neutral look the world over. [3]
But we develop the skills of cooperation from an early age, we just need to rediscover them. In this, we can learn from ourselves as we remember how we were in childhood, out in the street or in the playground with children who were often quite different from us, but with whom we learned together the rules of those games in which we cooperated. And not long after, you might recall, we learned how to negotiate those rules, as different people brought different ideas about how the game should be played.
Of course not all playground negotiations ended happily. ‘Cooperation [is] a craft,’ writes Sennett. ‘It requires of people the skill of understanding and responding to one another in order to act together; but this is a thorny process, full of difficulty and ambiguity and often leading to destructive consequences.’ [4]
This is the territory Paul was on when he wrote his celebrated passage on The Body. In a church riven by conflict and faction Paul’s concern was to bring about unity in diversity. His metaphor of the body’s members working together in mutual dependence is a model of cooperation - though different, each of the members had learned how to work with the others to function fully as a whole. As far as Paul is concerned there can be no avoidance of each other in the Body of Christ; nor homogenization. And so in the Church as in the wider world, unity requires work; the skills of cooperation, empathy among them, function like the blood and the nervous system to enable all the different parts to fully function well together.
And so, today, factionalism is not an option in the body nor in the wider world, if we are to fully function as human beings together. We must re-learn the skills of cooperation, spend time with those who are different from us so as to properly appreciate what might be the good news to them. Those who stand on the other side of the debates about gender and sexuality in the church, in society, in marriage: we need to spend time standing with them, not just sympathising with what we think are their views, but committing ourselves, with them, to turn debate into discussion and dialogue.
We can do this: for the Spirit of the Lord who was upon Jesus is the same Spirit who lives in us; we can do this: for - as Luke demonstrates over and over again in his gospel, Jesus brings people of difference together around a meal table, and our communion (though it is a pale reflection of the original raucous, generous, lengthy feasts over which Jesus himself presided) is one of those rituals which Richard Sennett, a secular commentator, recognises as a form of cooperation which makes us more skillful in dealing with others.
Though we are many - and varied - we are one body. As we take our communion together. So let us each celebrate our particular part in that body, and be prepared to be placed where Jesus wants his body to be placed - among people who are different from us, so that in our empathy and cooperation we might learn together what the good news is for each of us, and give ourselves to it.
Notes
[2] Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, liner notes.
[3] Sennett, p.8
[3] Sennett, p.x
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