The Rev. Jonathan B. Hall has a quick retort to people who demand we “Keep Christ in Christmas.”
“There is a quieter, graver danger that does not wait for December and does not end when the lights come down: Taking the Christ out of Christian,” Hall wrote for Religion News Services. “That happens whenever we subtract empathy from discipleship, whenever the self narrows our field of vision until we can no longer see the plight of our neighbor.”
Empathy is the pulse of the Christian, argued Hall. And to call it a sin is to “confuse the selfishness of self with the self-giving love of Jesus.”
“Many in Jesus’ day grew angry precisely because his heart was too open,” Hall said. “He touched those deemed untouchable, ate with those labeled unworthy, healed on days deemed inconvenient and noticed people that others learned not to see. The complaint then — even from his own disciples — was that he was too near to the wrong people.
“The complaint now in some corners,” Hall continued, “is that Christians are ‘sinfully empathetic.’
Hall cited Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” as a winter parable about “our capacity to look away.”
“It asks each of us, softly but insistently: Would I have stopped? Would I have knelt? Or would I have tightened my scarf and quickened my step? These questions are not meant to shame; they are meant to awaken,” aid Hall. “Empathy is the discipline of pausing long enough to imagine, ‘What if that were me? What if that were my child?’ It is not agreement with every choice; it is the willingness to feel another’s ache long enough to ask what love requires.”
“Such empathy is not weakness,” said Hall. “It is holiness with hands.”
“There is, to be sure, a temptation in every age to harvest the political or social capital of Christianity without undertaking its cruciform work. In subtle ways, we can turn ‘Jesus is Lord’ into ‘Jesus is useful,’ wearing the mantle of faith as a veneer for our own authority.”
But empathy can be costly, said Hall.
“It unsettles our schedules; it tugs at our resources; it asks us to carry one another’s burden. But the answer to compassion fatigue is not compassion famine,” Hall said.
Read Hall’s Religion News Service essay at this link.
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