Climbing into Their Skin
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
September 18, 2022
Good morning, Friends and welcome to Light Reflections. Today, we are continuing our fall sermon series on empathy. The scripture text we will be looking at is Matthew 20:29-34 from the New Revised Standard Version:
As they were leaving Jericho, a large crowd followed him. There were two blind men sitting by the roadside. When they heard that Jesus was passing by, they shouted, “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!” The crowd sternly ordered them to be quiet, but they shouted even more loudly, “Have mercy on us, Lord, Son of David!” Jesus stood still and called them, saying, “What do you want me to do for you?” They said to him, “Lord, let our eyes be opened.” Moved with compassion, Jesus touched their eyes. Immediately they regained their sight and followed him.
When our oldest son, Alex, was in high school, he spent a lot of time with the theater department. Often, he was behind the scenes working on tech and lighting, but one year he was encouraged to perform, playing Nathan Radley in the stage production of Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill a Mockingbird.
This happened to be a timely production for our small community of Silverton, Oregon who was openly struggling with issues of race, sexual identity, religious and political diversity.
I clearly remember a moment from the production (which is also in the book) where an inexperienced teacher punishes Scout unfairly on the first day of school. That evening, her father, Atticus, sits with her on the front porch of their home to explain empathy. Atticus says,
If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.
These truths are what has made “To Kill a Mocking Bird” so relevant still today. Sadly, this relevance has also produced a fear among some which has in turn listed it as a banned book in many states. Again, this shows how truth is often hard to swallow.
I think I have shared before, that when I was in my doctoral studies, I had a professor that had us spend time focusing on the human characteristics of Jesus. He believed that all the miracles and divine attributes took away from our ability to relate to Jesus and see him as a character we could emulate in our day-to-day lives.
When you take away the miracles and the divine, you begin to see a man who suffered a great deal more than we might expect and is much easier to relate to.
Just by exploring the human side of Jesus through the Gospel of John, I was exposed to three different types of suffering Jesus endured – relational, emotional, and physical suffering.
Jesus suffered relationally. He was unwelcome, heaped with unfair expectations, mislabeled, underestimated, gossiped about, plotted against, and abandoned.
Jesus suffered emotionally. He was misunderstood, criticized, mocked, belittled, constantly questioned, betrayed, and sentenced despite His innocence.
Jesus suffered physically. He was pursued by crowds when He was trying to be alone, and He was fatigued, stripped, beaten, spit on, made to carry the instrument of His death and ultimately crucified.
My professor’s point was clearly made, I was finally able to see the historical, human Jesus as one who could relate to our earthly condition and sufferings. Jesus had done what Atticus had encouraged Scout to do – to climb into someone else’s skin and walk around in it.
After finishing my master’s degree, I spent some time working as a professional grant writer for a parachurch organization in Wheaton, IL. Part of my job was to understand our ministries and know how to fully represent them in grant proposals.
One of our newest programs was focused on helping formerly incarcerated young women and men achieve their High School diploma or GED to be able to receive productive jobs in society. The two men in charge of the program realized I knew very little about incarcerated youth or the systems and policies that controlled their lives.
So, one day, the program leaders asked that I request security clearance to go with them to Juvenile Bootcamp, as well as, Minimum- and Maximum-Security Prisons. They thought I would have a much better understanding of incarceration and the youth within the system, if I met and interacted with them in person.
I put my grant writing on hold and for a few days went with the program directors into the jail systems of Chicago. I sat around tables talking with mere children who had been picked up for marijuana possession or stealing a handful of candy at a gas station, and all the way to a young man, whose eyes I will never forget, who had killed his grandmother in front of his mother because he was high on drugs and thought she was an intruder.
They each talked about the guilt they had, the desires to make real changes in their lives, and to have a semi-normal life again. Most were the age of the youth in my youth group back at my church.
I may not have actually put myself in their shoes, but I walked away from these experiences with a much different view of what I needed to write grants about to get them real help after they were released from jail. I also went back and did a lot more study on incarceration among minorities in our country. I learned how Mass Incarceration of minorities soared during Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton’s administrations becoming big business in this country.
Overall, the experience changed me and my empathy for these young people grew. That experience is why today I am a big supporter of Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative – which you can read more about in his bestselling book, “Just Mercy.” Another banned book that teaches about both empathy and justice.
Bryan Stevenson says that achieving a more just society and fostering an ethic of mercy requires individuals from all side to become more empathetic.”
It is why I take my family to Civil Rights sites when on vacation and continue to educate myself about race and the truth of injustices for minorities in this country. I am trying to grow my empathy and the empathy of those around me – and it is not easy.
Now, let’s return briefly to Jesus. As I explored the humanness of Jesus, I also was gripped by how clearly empathetic Jesus is throughout the gospels. I believe Jesus is a model of what Mario Boies calls, integral empathy – meaning Jesus exemplifies the fundamental and essential qualities of empathy.
And Boies breaks that into congnitive, affective, compassionate, and pro-social, saving and spiritual empathy.
Cognitive empathy is Jesus deeply understanding the difficult social situations of the marginalized who turn to him for relief from their suffering, and healing from their illnesses.
In our text for today, Jesus sees (like Thoreau’s quote from last week) and realizes the pain of the two blind men of Jericho who suffer from the rejection and intolerance of the “crowd that rebuked them.” So, Jesus “puts himself in their shoes” and chooses to stop and listen to their suffering. As soon as he stops, I am sure people included him in the taunting and rejection.
Emotional empathy is Jesus welcoming the sick and feels their suffering with his emotions and feelings.
Therefore, with his question, “What do you want me to do for you?” in our text, Jesus demonstrates an unconditional welcome and an empathetic listening, letting his heart be touched by the cry of despair and anguish of these men.
Jesus did not say, “Here is what you need” or “Let me fix it.” Instead, his empathy includes space for their desires, and thus they respond by saying, “Lord, may our eyes be opened!”
The empathic, cognitive, and affective understanding of the suffering of the blind moved Jesus. So deeply that some translations say he was moved “in his innards.”
This deep guttural feeling triggers in Jesus, his compassion and a visceral motivation to give meaning and hope to these two blind men’s lives.
Therefore, the expression “Jesus had compassion on them” which appears throughout the Gospels, clearly reveals this compassionate empathy of Jesus.
Finally, there is the Saving, Spiritual, and Pro-social empathy. This is where Jesus’ compassion led him to perform genuinely empathic actions and gestures aimed at relieving these men of their suffering, but also to bear witness to the fact that the kingdom of God is not in the future or when we die, but is in the present.
Thus, in the case of the two blind men, Jesus’ saving, spiritual, pro-social empathy is manifest in the act of healing or their regaining of sight: Our text says, “He touched their eyes, and they instantly recovered their sight and followed him.”
Now, whether you believe our text was a real miracle or simply a metaphor for coming to some insight out of ignorance, there is a saving, spiritual and pro-social quality to this empathetic response.
I have learned in scripture, salvation can be as simple as giving someone a cold cup of water or noticing, acknowledging, and seeing people who are suffering and seeking a way to bring healing. This kind of salvation is pro-social and meant for us now in our families, communities, and our Meeting, not just when we die.
So, Jesus’ integral empathy thus becomes an inspiring model for our daily lives.
We too should be aware and working to grow our cognitive, emotional, compassionate, and saving, spiritual, and pro-social empathy for the benefit of those who are suffering around us.
To begin to work on this, I would like us, as we enter waiting worship this morning, to consider someone we know who is suffering in our lives. Then ask yourself the following queries:
· Do I see and understand their suffering?
· Do I feel their suffering deeply in my emotions and feelings?
· Am I being led to have compassion on them?
· Is there a way I might bring relief to their suffering in the present?