Bigger than Life

Tenth Sunday of the Ordinary Time

June 9, 2013

Luke 7: 11-17

“When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her… (Luk 7:13)”

The keyword in today’s Gospel is compassion. Jesus was moved by compassion and then raised the boy up. Jesus teaches us not to fret death. There is something bigger than death, even greater than life itself. It is compassion.

However, if we look closely at the totality of the story. Even the town’s people also had compassion to the widow whose only son just died. They perhaps tried to comfort the woman and accompanied her to the grave. They even hired a band of professional mourners to accentuate their sympathy for the widow. 

Jesus definitely had the power to raise the son from the dead. Yet, the townsfolk did their part as well to express their compassion. So, what is the difference between Jesus and the people?  From a deeper perspective, the Gospel is not actually highlighting the power of Jesus over life and death, but Jesus’ critic to His fellow Jews. There was a serious misconception and mishandling of compassion. It is an enormous power, yet without proper understanding, it just turns to be devastative and deadly. The action of Jesus is primarily to bend the stream of compassion that simply flows toward a graveyard. “Hi, stop! You move toward a wrong direction!”

Optimus Prime, the leader of Autobots, once said that human is a being capable of great destruction as well as of great compassion. Indeed, the rise or fall of humanity depends on our compassion with our fellowmen and women. Why does poverty persist? It is not simply a problem of lack of resources or generosity. In a deeper sense, the reason can be traced back to compassion. Some people no longer feel compassion that they steal even from those who do not have, and some others even manipulate the compassion of those who eager to share. The rest of humanity seems at loss in expressing their compassion. It is a serious issue of mishandling our compassion. 

We might be like the town’s crowd that has sympathy for the mother whose son died, but our feeling just leads them to nowhere but the graveyard. It is a radical mind-shift to understand how Jesus expresses His compassion. It is a compassion that touches and changes a life (and death) in a most profound way. It is a life-giving compassion in the complexity of our world. It is compassion that dares us to critically ask ourselves, “Have our compassion become bigger than life or nothing but marched toward our graveyard?”    

   Br. Valentinus Bayuhadi Ruseno, OP