God offers us supply of inexhaustible compassion

In response to my “compassion, part 1” column of two weeks ago, a pastor wrote to me about the compassion fatigue he noticed in many people. This could be when there are so many tragedies and not enough compassion to go around.

Newsmaking tragedy in our world is enough to create more than fatigue. It’s compassion exhaustion.

Then add in the heart-wrenching events just in our own communities and regions. The exhaustion seems to grow deeper and, well, more exhausting.

Two Gonzaga University students and a young man from Sandpoint died in two separate avalanches in the past week. We all know families whose lives are forever changed in too many maddening and saddening ways.

So, many of us live with compassion exhaustion. I wonder if God ever experiences compassion exhaustion.

As soon as I wonder that, I’m tempted to quickly dismiss it. That kind of wondering tends to imply human limitations for God. And we know deep down that God has no limitations. God’s compassion is endless.

Or is it?

Those who read the Gospels see Jesus occasionally described as “moved by compassion.” In classic Greek thinking, the word splagchnizesthai described an emotion that moved a man to the very depths of his being. This is the word that is used in Greek translations of the Gospels to talk about Jesus’ passion for other persons.

The intriguing thing to me about this strange, almost unpronounceable word is that it was not a word used to describe God. God’s son, yes, but not God.

The most respected thinkers of the golden age of Greek philosophy were the Stoics. They believed the ultimate characteristic of God is apatheia. Now, they didn’t mean apathy or indifference with that word. They meant incapability of feeling.

They reasoned this way: A person who has feelings of sorrow or joy is capable of being affected by another person. That power to affect someone else can be easily manipulated.

If God has feelings of joy or sorrow, then human beings have a strong, even manipulative, power over God.

Logic would conclude that means people can be greater than God. To prevent that, God can have no feeling. God must be by nature apathetic, devoid of feeling.

A divine creature who was moved by compassion was too hard to believe. (This synopsis comes from William Barclay’s “New Testament Words.”)

Greek thinkers like Socrates, Plato, Apuleius and Plutarch simply could not let themselves believe that God could really stay God if divine compassion was part of the equation. Furthermore – and this has a modern-day twist we might understand – the Stoics taught that people should seek to make themselves like God, should not care.

We use the word “stoic” to describe a person who is emotionally neutral on the outside, uncaring at least to the naked eye. We so often train ourselves, our children, our students and our congregations to be stoic.

We think we’re more under control of our emotions. Somehow that translates into being “more Christian.” But I don’t know how.

I am a man who learned from childhood to control my emotions. People who know me would likely say that I learned my lessons well, at least on the surface. I have preached, taught and modeled a life of measured response to anger, fear and pain.

I still believe that measured responses have a healthy place in our lives.

But I also learned, much later than I now wish, that self-control may too easily become stuffed-down emotion that is much healthier if it’s let out to play, pray or even rage.

Too many of us have played the Stoics’ game so well. We have somehow bought the line that being without feeling – or at least without a valid expression of feeling – means that we are more like what God wants us to be.

Contrary to the Stoics’ position, I cannot conceive of a God who isn’t passionately and compassionately involved in the daily lives of human beings.

How can we say “God is love” if we embrace a God who doesn’t know how to feel the tragedies of this world? I don’t think we can.

But that opens us to a more difficult question that has no real answer: If God is love, how can God “allow” the tsunami disasters, or wars for that matter, or all kinds of human tragedies?

I don’t have a final answer for this overwhelming, many-layered question. There are many short-term answers that attempt to glimpse the fuller truth of God’s nature and role in what happens in our world.

My own faint answer looks like this: While we suffer from compassion exhaustion, God does not. I know from experience I can draw on God’s inexhaustible compassion when I’m exhausted.

For now, that is enough for me.

What is enough to renew your compassion exhaustion?