To Lead is to Have Compassion

Text: Psalm 23
Other texts: 2 Sam 7:1-14a, Mark 6:30-34

There is a kind of restlessness in king David that makes him want to put God in a little house.

God objects. In all the years I’ve known you, God says to king David—and known the leaders who have come before you—have I ever asked you to build me a house? I have not lived in a house since the olden times in Egypt (and before that).

But David is uneasy, even when God reminds David of their mutual history. When David was a young boy in the fields, God chose him. God made him a great king over Israel. God vanquished Israel’s enemies by David’s hand, and created a place for Israel to be safe and to prosper. Yet David’s story has been one also of wandering, danger, and exile. God is with him now, but perhaps David is not sure whether God has always been so, and more to the point, whether God will always be. It may be that David is being generous to God in offering God a permanent temple. Or it may be that David just wants God securely and permanently nearby.

We share with David a legacy of Adam. Anxious restlessness and a sense of being beleaguered and urgent striving. We are creatures after the fall, knowing in the center of our beings that we are made for the better and wondering where sometimes—or often—where God is. We are missing something: peace of mind and peace among people, contentment, an ability to love without misgiving, knowing we are cared for and cared about.

Jesus looks at the crowds that increasingly surround him. Crowds of people, you get the impression from Mark’s reading, who are harassing him. He and his disciples need rest and food and some quiet time. But Jesus cannot turn away. The people come for healing, of course, and to see miracles. But it is not their illnesses that move Jesus in this passage. He has compassion on them, Mark says, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

It is this that draws the crowds to Jesus. It is more than healing, though I’m sure that was important. But healers then were a dime a dozen. It is the restlessness of David in them that responds to Jesus. The people see in Jesus someone whom they can trust to guide them as sheep trust their shepherd.

The twenty-third psalm is a treatise on our deepest needs and desires. It promises food for our bodies, and a break from our weariness. It promises water for our thirst, and peace in our busy-ness. It promises restoration of our souls and psyches.

Though it seems to celebrate God’s abundance, it more exactly celebrates God’s sufficiency. It promises not that all our hungers will be satisfied, but that we would be free from hunger. I shall not want, it says. The verb has no object. It does not say “I shall not want this or that.” It says, as it does here around the altar: I shall not lack. It says that wanting will no longer be a cause for worry. In that way, this is a psalm of grace. The promise frees us.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. The two phrases are joined without a conjunction because they each mean the same thing. Trust in the shepherd, and lacking nothing, describe one another. The sheep who trusts the shepherd does not worry. The sheep who does not worry can only so when trusting the shepherd. The guidance of the shepherd along the right paths is what makes the shepherd the good shepherd, the one to be trusted. It is the guidance we long for in our restlessness; the rest—the abundant life—follows.

The psalm is not a utopian vision. Grief and shadows of death are and will remain a part of our lives. The psalm does not promise to take us away from all that. It cannot, in this world. But it can weaken their power. I fear no evil, a word whose meaning here is more secular than cosmic. It is the evil and sorrow and suffering of the day to day whose presence remains but whose strength is obliterated.

It is God’s presence that makes this work. You are with me, the psalm says. These words are in the exact center of the psalm. With them the song changes from a description of the shepherd (he makes me, he leads me, he guides me) to an address to God (you set the table, you anoint, your goodness). It goes from a statement about God to one to God. From knowing about God to knowing God. From talking about a shepherd to having one.

The crowd of people in Mark long to be with Jesus because they are deprived somehow of the promise of the psalm. They have no shepherd. Jesus sees this. And because of this, Jesus has compassion on them. This is the other reason they are drawn in such great numbers to Jesus. They see he can be their shepherd. And they see he has compassion for them. This is not some mystical sensitivity; people are not easily fooled about others’ compassion for them. They know when it is bogus, an empty show.

Compassion means to suffer with, or to feel with. Like empathy. But more than that, because it is not something that can be done at a distance. It is not the same as pity. It is not intellectual or sentimental. The word that Mark uses means gut-wrenching. To be compassionate for someone means to hurt inside in body and soul. Jesus is compassionate because, just as God is in the psalm, Jesus is with the people. Compassion is like solidarity. One cannot be compassionate from a distance any more than one can be a shepherd from a distance.

Compassion is the heart of Mark’s Gospel and the heart of Jesus’ life. It is the “for us” that we say when we talk about the crucifixion plus the “with us” that we say when we talk about Emmanuel, the incarnation. It is a synonym and an implementation of the unconditional love that Jesus talks about. It is the center of the teachings of Jesus, the one whom we follow.

We seem to have lost our shepherd’s guidance. We seem to have been roped into becoming parties to an unfortunate agreement that the good life can come about through the means of violence and greed. That these evil forces can invisibly and magically yield good fruit, and if they have not yet, then they someday will. Compassion is an afterthought, a nice possible side-effect. But these are forces that, unlike compassion, operate most effectively at a distance. When near, they turn our stomach. We cannot easily endure in our bodies or our ethics the close-up suffering of others.

Our restlessness in the world can lead us to acquiesce to this deal. But it does not have to. We are made for better.

When we are baptized, as Miles just was, and when later we become part of a community of people who confess to following Jesus, we say we are born to a new life. One consequence of that life is that we become sheep of a sort, no longer deprived of the promise of the psalm. And as much as we are able, entrusting our fortunes to God, the Lord, our shepherd.