Compassion and Mercy

Sermon preached at Whitkirk Parish Church

Trinity 11 (Proper 16 - Year B) - 23rd August 2009

It seems that in some circles compassion and mercy have become dirty words.  Those who are convicted must pay for their crimes and be seen to pay for them.  They must suffer; they must rot and fester in their suffering.  Any signs of humanity shown to them are signs of weakness and betrayal.  The court of public opinion, surely the most fickle court that ever existed, will judge very harshly if it is annoyed.  And annoyed it has been by the release this week on compassionate grounds of the Lockerbie Bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.  It wasn’t helped by what was described as a hero’s welcome when he arrived back in Libya.

Well some are not pleased.  This is of course not a straightforward case.  There are families of American victims from that ill fated flight 21 years ago who are seething with anger at his release.  There are families from Lockerbie, where the wreckage crash-landed into houses, who have never been convinced of this man’s guilt and so think it was right for him to be shown compassion and released.  So there is a clear difference of opinion between equal parties, people equally entitled to anger and bitterness, to hatred and outrage.

It’s the use and abuse of compassion that interests me here.  I have no special insight into whether the man was involved or not.  Clearly he couldn’t have been alone if he was and there are many unanswered questions around it.  It was Winston Churchill, though, who said that a test of a civilised society is the quality of its prisons.  The conditions we keep those who offend and who are found guilty of offending say a great deal about the values of our society.  People who do the worst, behave the worst, expose quite a lot about what kind of people we really are.  This ‘court of public opinion’, a phrase which Harriet Harman seems to have set free, judges in two directions.  It judges those it tries and it judges the judges – the public whose opinion is stirred up.

Compassion is a very powerful emotion.  It is a strong awareness of someone else’s suffering.  It is an ability to pity someone else in their state and be so concerned for their wellbeing that you want to do something about it.  When Jesus had compassion he turned that into action and made a difference.  To be stirred by compassion means that you will put something of yourself on the line for the other.  You will expend part of yourself to relieve the suffering that you see.  Compassion implies an emotional connectedness between you and the one you are compassionate towards.  Employers will give compassionate leave in certain circumstances like bereavement because they see that the employee is in no fit state to work and needs time off, to either put some affairs in order or recover.  So to release someone on compassionate grounds reminds us that we remain connected to that person, to their humanity.  The crime has not severed that link.  This is itself a powerful and challenging notion.

The link with mercy comes when we allow compassion to overrule the natural consequence of someone’s actions.  A crime deserves punishment.  Mercy acknowledges this but stays the hand.  Jesus did this with the woman caught in adultery.  At no point does he say that what she had done wasn’t wrong, but he says ‘go and sin no more’.  He tells her, you have a reprieve, now don’t waste this second chance.  A murderer forfeits their right to life.  But we don’t kill for a variety of reasons: miscarriages of justice being one and the Lockerbie case has had some significant questions raised around it.  We also don’t kill because it says something about the values we live by.  This court judgement reveals who we are too.  We are a people who live by compassion, justice and mercy because we believe in a God who is himself compassionate, just and merciful to us.  If God wasn’t, who could stand!  Living by compassion means the fundamental connectedness between us remains and we cannot break it.

Our first reading, from the letter to the Ephesians (6:10-20) was famously quoted and abused in a court case some years ago.  This is the passage that the former MP Jonathan Aiken used when he rather arrogantly took on the Guardian newspaper and ended up being sent to prison for perjury, for lying in court.  He maintained that this armour of God would protect him.  Well the belt of truth certainly tightened!

What this reading does is set down values which being inspired by the Spirit, the truth of God, guide and protect us in the murky world from the corrosive effects of evil, from the damage it does to who we are and our outlook.  But they only protect when we truly adopt and allow them to infuse us.  They don’t when we think they can be harnessed for our own ends because that is to abuse God by trying to turn God into some kind of puppet and makes prayer a kind of magic trick.  When the going gets tough, and this passage was written at a time when the going was extremely tough, then we find out just what our character, collective or otherwise, is really like.  When the sayings are difficult, perhaps too difficult, then we find out just how much we are really convinced by this following Jesus lark.

And our Gospel showed us that Jesus was not exempt from the fickle nature of the court of public opinion (John 6:56-69).  Many found his teaching about the bread of life, which was about so much more than filling their stomachs, so much more than meeting cravings, many found this too hard to handle.  But the key comes at the end of the passage.  Simon Peter, who so often delivers the punch line without really knowing the full force of what he has said, blurts out: ‘to whom else can we go, you have the words of eternal life’.  That is what all of this bread stuff has been about.  Jesus offers the way, the truth and the life.  Sometimes that is difficult to understand and sometimes it is blindingly obvious.

Compassion and mercy are part of what comes with following Jesus.  But they are much more than just trivial ‘oh go on then’, as if all we are dealing with is a nagging child pestering parents for a biscuit.  When Jesus shows compassion he is moved with emotion, with empathy for where the person is, but also with confronting fully what has happened.  The crowd baying for the blood of the woman caught in adultery are judged by their own judgements of condemnation.  The woman is judged and given a second chance, being told not to waste it.  Compassion always leads to action and confrontation of what is really at stake.

The man released on Thursday will have to face the ultimate judgement soon enough as we all will.  He is dying.  Under the circumstances nothing further is served by his incarceration and he seems to have carried this compassion with good grace saying to those who bear him ill will that he does not return it.  Whether it was right to release him on compassionate grounds may depend on whether you think there has been a miscarriage of justice.  But compassion remains a vitally important ethic to live by.  Through it we are reminded that we remain fundamentally linked with him and one another.  We seek to sever that at our peril and to our own impoverishment.  Justice cuts both ways and we are judged by our own judging.

The compassionate heart is actually our best defence against terrorism because it is itself the antidote to the distrust, fear and hatred that terrorism brings.  This is the ‘armour of God’ that was mentioned in that first reading, the armour that enables us to stand firm in hope and love.  Compassion and mercy are the ‘shoes’ that ‘make us ready to proclaim the gospel of peace’ (Ephesians 6:15).

© Ian Black 2009