I’VE BEEN THINKING...

Sympathy is cheap... and usually not all that helpful. Empathy is something else; it is often costly.   If you know the Broadway musical A Chorus Line, you may remember the song “Nothing.”  The important line in the song goes, “Six months later I heard that Clark had died, and I dug right down to the bottom of my soul and cried... because I felt nothing.”  Sadly, some people actually feel nothing when they see or know of suffering, even when they politely respond by saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”  Also sadly, the little phrase that has slipped into common parlance, “I feel your pain,” isn’t a sign by itself that the person who says it feels anything.  When we come unexpectedly upon someone suffering, it’s easy to say quickly and sympathetically, “I’m sorry,”  before we tuck tail and run to the nearest exit because suffering is uncomfortable to experience or to witness.  Sympathy is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have called “cheap grace.” Empathy usually isn’t cheap or quick. Empathy almost always costs something, sometimes more than we want to pay. 

Because it’s something most of us want to develop in ourselves and in our children,  how does empathy develop in an individual?  Is it encoded in the DNA of some people but not in others?  Does empathy/sympathy fit somewhere in Darwin’s hypothesis about natural selection which the economist Herbert Spencer called the survival of the fittest.  Do some of the fittest people quite naturally stay safe and emotionally strong by being careful to limit their responses to the suffering of others? Do the strongest people, those who seldom cry, only occasionally allow themselves to express sympathy  and rarely or never allow themselves to experience empathy?  How has the person who is empathic somehow learned to enter into the suffering of someone else even when doing so is clearly against self interest? Are both empathy and sympathy learned responses? How does altruism fit into human striving for survival?  These questions must be addressed consistently and honestly if what we truly seek is social justice. 

The religion with which I identify got its start with a radical maverick Jewish Rabbi two thousand years ago, a man who reacted to the suffering of people around him differently from the way his religion and his culture generally taught people to react. Levitical Law was central to the culture and religion into which Jesus was born.  For First Century Jews a well defined religious establishment made clear which behaviors and which people should be avoided. Beginning with ten supremely important commandments, the religion of the Hebrews was basically a set of rules. In addition to the ten basic commandments, the sacred texts gave people who wanted to be considered properly religious many more rules that must be observed.  Levitical Law provided clear instructions about how people should relate to each other, what they should eat, and what they should wear (or more specifically what they should not eat or wear and which kinds of people they should avoid). Jesus, the unusual rabbi, seems to have refused to follow the rules. He talked freely with people he was supposed to ignore.  He encouraged people to do what they intuitively knew to be the right thing to do regardless of what the Levitical Law required.  He touched people, like lepers, who were considered to be unclean. He let people touch him... even women... even prostitutes.

 After he died, a new religion developed around the stories that were told about this man who ignored religious requirements. He obviously had decided the traditional responses to suffering by leaders of his religion were not helpful and mostly complicated the lives of sufferers and their families. His uncharacteristic empathic behaviors and the stories about what he did and what he said were dramatically out of the ordinary.  It’s not surprising that the new religion developed around an idea that Jesus, the man,  must be more than just a man... that he was at least partly god.  Eventually the writings regarded as “Holy Scripture” included speeches by Jesus in which he says he is the “Son of God.”  There is no way of verifying he actually said in the Aramaic language which he spoke that he was the son of the god.  By how he reacted to people who were suffering or alienated from society, e seems to have stressed that we are all God’s children.  Actually, the language of the New Testament in which the stories are written was not Aramaic but Greek.  How much of him was man and how much of him was god was then and still is a matter of much controversy within the various permutations of the religion which goes by the name Christian, which was given to the movement  because they said he was the Christ (from the Greek Χριστός, anointed), the Messiah, who the old religion said would come to set the world right.  Considering the Greco-Roman world in which it was developing, it’s not surprising that leaders in the new religion claimed Jesus was god who became man through a process that included impregnation of a virgin by the father God.  To bolster the idea that his birth was not just unusual but miraculous and made to happen in a magical mysterious way by God, a requirement of belief that his mother was a virgin was included in creeds written a couple of centuries after he died.  Unfortunately, virgin birth is stressed as proof of his divinity... often presented as more important than Jesus’ central teaching about the importance of responding empathically to our neighbors, indeed to every person in every situation.

  

Bible stories tell of his empathic responses to people who were suffering.  The stories tell of his saying that we must put ourselves in the place of others when we are trying to figure out how to response to them.  He said, “Always treat others as you would like them to treat you: that is the Law and the prophets.” (Matthew 7:12)  Later he said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. Love your neighbor as yourself.  Everything in the Law and the prophets hangs on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22: 37-40)  He obviously wanted no part in inflicting pain on anyone, even on those who made life difficult for other people.  Urging people to do to others as they would have others do to them,” he pointedly rejected punitive laws; even though the traditional religion of his people explicitly demanded “and eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth.”  The implication of the old religion of laws was that only by making people afraid of the consequences for behaving badly can justice be served. Jesus rejected that idea.

So my thesis is this:  Empathy as the basis for moral action and social justice was introduced by the Rabbi Jesus more than two thousand years ago... that to love God is to act empathically toward others who are living in the world with us.  Furthermore, any creed or catechism which substitutes laws and/or rules or mere sympathy in the place of empathy fails to meet the standard for moral living stressed by the man whose life and teachings are the basis for “the Christian life.”