Compassion is the Key March 9, 2025
Dr. Roger Ray
I began teaching at Drury University about 25 years ago under their old curriculum when they were still, at least marginally, a church related college that had at least one required class in religion. The title of that class was the rather pretentious sounding: Life and Teachings of Jesus. When I took on the task of teaching this class, I didn’t want to talk about what the church said about Jesus, I wanted to try to drill down into what Jesus said and what made his teachings unique.
For those of you who have Christian faith roots, what would you say was the unique thing that defined the life and teachings of Jesus? What sets Jesus apart from other early common era preachers?
If you turn to the gospels and you ask, well, “what did he do?” The first answer isn’t very satisfying because he started off by exorcising demons but, you know, he wasn’t the only demon exorcist running around Palestine at that time. Exorcisms feature prominently in the gospels but they are mostly a bit embarrassing in the modern church. Not many of us ever identified with the cult of the holy exorcism. Exorcism might get you movie rights in our day but back then, exorcism was as common as chiropractors and with similarly controversial reputations among other professionals.
I’m not saying that casting out a demon or adjusting your spine has about the same amount of science behind it, unless, of course, that is exactly what I’m saying.
But I digress . . .
Jesus did exorcisms, and so did a lot of other people. Jesus did miraculous feedings. Stories of miraculous feedings were abundant in that era as well as in the Hebrew bible. He was said to have had a miraculous birth, that certain miracles were attributed to him, he was even described as being the son of God . . . none of which, I am afraid to say, was uncommon in the first century. After meeting my rather puritanical mother, an old girlfriend of mine concluded, “I don’t care how many children that woman has, I don’t believe that she has ever had sex.” So, at least in her eyes, I and my three siblings were also virgin births . . . which is sort of how these myths get started.
A careful reading of the Jewish Histories written by Josephus in the late first century can yield the names of about 50 Jewish messiahs with various claims to the sort of things we find attributed to Jesus. So, I ask again, what is the unique aspect of what Jesus did that gives him a job description that is different from all other messianic characters of the time?
When I went to seminary in 1980, I was sure that I knew, as most of us who grew up in more evangelical, or Orthodox, or Catholic settings, were sure that we knew: Jesus died on the cross for our redemption, becoming our savior from a richly deserved eternal sentence in hell, giving us the hope of attaining to heaven.
And I understand that would still be the answer for a whole lot of people and I don’t want to be the one who goes around to Kindergarten classes telling 5-year-olds that there is no Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and there is not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
People generally come to these realizations as they are intellectually and emotionally prepared to allow themselves to figure out the difference between imagination and reality.
In grad school, when you are forced to put your Kindergarten faith under the microscope, you begin to realize that the biblical gospels were ancient religious narratives that had very little to do with the actual historical Jesus. Gospel writers recorded events of Jesus healing and even raising the dead, to connect him to certain Hebrew fables about Elijah and Elisha. That stories about Jesus feeding the multitudes and walking on water were simply derivations of the stories about Moses providing manna in the wilderness and dividing the waters of the Red Sea.
And if all of that wasn’t obvious enough, the gospel writers even invented this transfiguration story in which Jesus was standing on a mountain top talking with Moses and Elijah. It is a literary technique, similar to Obi Wan appearing to Luke in movies after the first Star Wars movie in which we saw Obi Wan killed. It is literature, it isn’t a historical account.
I know that I make people mad when I say that sometimes because it is not what you were told in years and years and years of church going but before you send me hate mail, let me ask you this: Who you should you be mad at, the people who filled your head with fairy tales and lies for years or the guy who is finally telling you the truth? You might want to think that I making this up or exaggerating but I assure you that there is nearly 200 years of the best of biblical scholarship behind
what I am saying to you and some amazing historical examples of insightful philosophers and historians through the centuries.
There is a core to the historical Jesus tradition which is profound and unique and later generations attempted to fatten up his resume by heaping up claims and titles on him that they took from other religious and political figures of their time.
Roman coins of the era called the Caesar “Lord,” and “Savior,” and tradition had it that he was a son of god, born to a virgin. The early enthusiasts for the Jesus tradition didn’t want him to be second to any Old Testament prophet or current ruler and they put him up on a literary pedestal above all others. But what a real scholar, an honest seeker wants to know is “why?” What was so unique about Jesus to inspire this kind of adoration?
I am grateful to the late author, Marcus Borg, who so conviincingly articulated an understanding of the historical Jesus that gives back to the name of Jesus some of the credibility it loses with all of the magical and superstitious attributions that have been heaped up on him for most of the past two thousand years. When you look past the later myths, the exaggerations and the obvious additions of later church leaders . . . when you look at what may be actual quotes from Jesus, or at least the echoes of what he taught, you do find a unique message. Borg says that the job description that Jesus filled was just this: he was a teacher of radical compassion.
In fact, if you look at the conclusions of the hundreds of scholars involved in the Jesus Seminar over the past two generations, the one statement in the gospels that almost every agrees actually came from Jesus, the one verse you can imbue with some real academic certainty is a fragment of this verse from Luke, chapter 6, verse 27: Love your enemies.
Luke sets it in a narration, “But I will tell those who will listen; love your enemies. Do good to those who harm you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you.” Jesus may have just said, “Love your enemies,” but Luke wants to drive the point home. . . love your enemies, do good for people who have hurt you, bless those who cuss you out, and have good thoughts about the people who have abused you.
Before the empire prostituted the name of Jesus to be a salvation cult that kept
slaves obedient and hard at work so they could go to heaven when they died, before the gospel writers buried the message of Jesus in silly miracle stories and magic carnival shows, he was the teacher of radical compassion and by radical, I mean, undeserved, counter intuitive, maybe even bordering on neurotically excessive . . . forgiveness, generosity, kindness.
Am I the only one here who kinda wishes he hadn’t said that? When my father died 15 years ago my older brother, John, asked me, “Do you want any of dad’s guns.” And I immediately answered him, “I don’t want to own a gun because I know too many people who deserve to be shot.” I don’t think I would ever do it, even if I owned a hundred guns. But I don’t want to spend any time fantasizing
about revenge against liars, users, socio-paths, child molesters, wife beaters, or murderers.
We are a people who believe in revenge. After 9-11, we bombed out almost every structure that was in the country where Al Qaida had hidden training camps and when decimating Afghanistan didn’t satisfy us, we attacked a whole other country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with it at all. We are big on revenge.
There may be countries where the penal system is designed to reform criminals but
ours isn’t. Our prison system is designed to make criminals “pay a debt to society,” and by that they mean exacting an eye for an eye. Our jails and prisons are set up to make inmates feel that they are subhuman and that we have a right to treat them like garbage. In this sense, our institutions are a reflection of what is in us, collectively, as a community of individuals.
We prefer revenge to reform. We would rather get even than to choose to forgive. What made Jesus stand out from almost every other religious and political voice of the day; what made him unforgettable, even when you honestly would kinda like to
forget him, was that he insisted that we love our enemies, that we pray for our abusers, that we return kindness in response to hurt.
Jesus introduced the radical idea that revenge doesn’t work, that evil doesn’t end evil. . . what the modern twist of Old Testament ethics says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leads to a blind and toothless society.” As Martin Luther King said, “Darkness doesn’t drive out darkness, only light does that.”
A rather witty social media meme asks the question: Why insist on teaching the Bible in schools when teaching the Bible in church doesn’t seem to make people any better? I can even confess that I had read every page of the Bible years before I understood any of it because I was reading it looking for some kind of superstitious salvation. It is sort of like one of those “where’s Waldo” puzzels. Once you have seen Waldo in one of those busy pictures, every time you look at the picture, your eye goes straight to Waldo.
Once you realize that what is unique and important about Jesus is that he was a teacher of radical compassion, then, when you read the gospels, it is impossible not to see it. But, sadly, religion, on the whole, has gone off the rails. Traditional Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have lost their way, expressing their faith in excesses of militarism and a preference for a fascism all over the globe.
Richard Neibuhr made the observation that “religion makes good people better and makes bad people worse.” It is true. Healthy religion inspired spiritual people to start hospitals, homeless shelters, domestic abuse shelters, emergency food and medical services. It is a healthy spirituality that gives us relief agencies like Doctors without Borders, Habitat for Humanity, and countless congregations who care for their own elderly, infirm, and troubled individuals, who encourage healthy marriage, loving and stable families, and ethical behavior.
But you can’t say that without being aware that there is unhealthy religion, often sharing the same pews with healthy religion. There are people who, in the name of Jesus, teach their own gay and lesbian children to loath themselves to such a degree that they have become the largest single reason for teen suicides. They
teach the kind of misogyny that keeps our spouse abuse shelters filled with the victims of domestic violence. And they foster the kind of paranoid exclusivism that makes them turn away Muslim, Mexican, and other brown refugees who come to us seeking our aid. Unhealthy religion denies reality, preferring instead a magical and superstitious world view that is leading to a too slow response to pollution, climate change, and destruction of our eco-system and the extinction of many forms of life on our planet.
The good that is done in the name of religion does not obliterate the bad that is done by unhealthy religion. We cannot, in the name of tolerance, simply avert our eyes and pretend that whatever someone else chooses to believe is their business any more than we would ignore it if Campbells started putting a lethal dose of cyanide in their tomato soup. We know the difference between healthy faith and toxic faith, and it is our obligation to teach the former and extinguish the later.
As Karen Armstrong wrote: The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.
The mainstream church is still refusing to give up on the “die and go to heaven in Jesus’ name” scam. And we have to keep trying to find another way to say it, to be more persuasive, to be more insistent. . . beyond your fear of hell and lust for heaven is a real faith, a faith in a man who was not just a man, because he was a man who was willing to say what no one else would say and most of us didn’t want to hear: love your enemies. None of us will ever find any semblance of salvation until we can do just that.
