Neighbors in need

Limitless Compassion

/ reverendjoannwhite / Leave a comment

Sabbath Day Thoughts — “Limitless Compassion” Luke 13:10-17

Jimmy has spent most of his life feeling invisible. Born with developmental disability and a host of physical issues, he spent most of his childhood in foster care. He attended school, riding in a special bus and learning in special classrooms. Other kids called him names: retard, freak, spazz, dumbo. Nowadays, Jimmy is largely ignored as he stands outside his group home to watch the cars drive past. Eyes look past him as if he isn’t even there.

Heather feels invisible. Every day at lunch she sits in the corner of the cafeteria by herself. She wears outdated hand-me-downs and packs her lunch in a re-used brown paper bag. In gym class, no one picks her for their team. When it’s time for group projects, no one wants to work with her. She sees cliques of friends laughing in the hallways and wishes she were part of that. Eyes look past or around her as if she isn’t even there.

Bert and Jean feel invisible. They had been retired for a number of years when the pandemic forced them to also step back from their civic commitments. Their phone used to ring off the hook. But now, not so much. Many of their friends have passed on. Their kids and grandkids are just so busy. Some weeks, the Meals on Wheels driver is their only conversation partner. They don’t get out much, but when they do, eyes look past or around them as if they aren’t even there.

The world is filled with neighbors who feel alienated, invisible, and alone. You might think that would awaken a mass wave of empathetic outreach, but it doesn’t. Social scientists say our disregard for vulnerable others is a psychological phenomenon known as “compassion collapse.” Dr. Caryl Cameron, director of the Empathy and Moral Psychology Lab at Penn State University, writes that “People tend to feel and act less compassionately for multiple suffering victims than for a single suffering victim…. Precisely when it seems to be needed the most, compassion is felt the least.”

There are reasons for that. We are finite beings with limited resources. We may feel that our action (or inaction) doesn’t make a difference, so we withdraw. Or, we sometimes don’t get involved to protect ourselves. In the face of widespread tragedy and need, it becomes crushing to take on the pain of others. We grow numb and feel powerless.

The bent over woman was invisible to her neighbors. She had felt alone and unseen for eighteen years. In the world of the first century, she was a marginalized person—someone who lived outside the community of the righteous because she was physically deformed, spirit-possessed, and a woman. Anyone who has ever had a bad back can imagine the terrible discomfort that she must have felt: muscle spasms; neck pain; difficulty in rising, standing, or walking; the inability to look up and out at the world around her. At some point in her long years of suffering, compassion collapse kicked in for her community. She stopped being a neighbor and simply become the “bent over woman.” She would not have been seated in church on the day that Jesus preached. Instead, she would have been excluded, waiting at the entrance, hoping that someone would see her and speak a kind word into her life of suffering.

Only one person in the synagogue saw the bent over woman. It was Jesus. As only Jesus could, he instantly knew her suffering and need, and his heart went out to her with a limitless compassion that stretched the bounds of what was socially and religiously acceptable in his day. Carolyn Sharp, who teaches Hebrew Bible at Yale, notes that what one could or couldn’t do on the sabbath day was hotly contested in the first century. In fact, the Mishnah Shabbat, a collection of rabbinic teachings, forbade 39 different kinds of labor on the sabbath: sowing fields, baking, building, traveling, and more. It did not forbid healing. In fact, rabbis generally agreed that in life threatening situations, it was acceptable to heal. The rabbis divided, though, over whether healing for non-critical conditions, like being bent over, was permitted.

That’s a long walk to say that Jesus saw the woman and chose to act in controversial, even scandalous, ways. First, he invited her into the sanctuary, into the community of the righteous—to the Moses Seat—where he had been teaching. Then, Jesus did something even more provocative. He laid his hands on her bent over back and raised her up straight, freeing her from the disability that had long held her in bondage. Jesus next concluded his sermon for the day with an interpretation of scripture that silenced the critics. If God would permit a farmer to unbind, water, and feed livestock on the sabbath day, then surely it was permitted to free a woman from the spirit that had long bound her. Jesus gave the bent over woman a proper name, “Daughter of Abraham,” a sister to all the worshipers that day.

The world is filled with invisible people. Like Jimmy, they live with disability. Like Heather, they are friendless school-aged kids. Like Bert and Jean, they are elderly and alone. They are the non-English speaking workers who clean our hotel rooms or pick our crops. They are the economically challenged neighbors who frequent the Food Pantry or collect the empty cans and bottles after rugby weekend. They’d like to be seen, but eyes look past or around them as if they aren’t even there.

Jesus’ scandalous actions in a crowded synagogue one sabbath morning call us to see our invisible neighbors, to welcome them into the heart of the community, to make a caring and healing difference in their lives. Thomas Merton wrote that compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things. We cannot find wholeness—shalom—apart from community, and communities cannot be whole until the outsider, the excluded, and the marginalized are welcomed, accepted, valued, and included. In a world where some characterize compassion and empathy as weakness, today’s teaching from Jesus is a bold contradiction and a call to action.

Of course, there’s only one problem: compassion collapse. In a world where need can be ubiquitous, our compassion can be overwhelmed. We say, what can one person do in the face of such large-scale pain? We grow numb. We close our eyes. People become invisible. What are we to do?

Peter W. Marty, editor of the Christian Century, says that he builds compassion for those who live in difficult circumstances through the simple practice of imagining what it’s like to walk in their shoes. He does this when he encounters people in daily life who perform jobs that he’s not sure he could manage or tolerate for even a day. Whether it’s an individual enduring dangerous work conditions, tedious assignments, a hostile environment, or depressingly low wages, Marty tries to picture trading his life for theirs. It quickly his alters perspective and shifts his assumptions about how easy or hard life can be for those who undertake hazardous or dispiriting work that often goes unnoticed, work for which we typically feel indifference.

Researchers David DeSteno and Daniel Lim have conducted research to learn how we can have more resilient compassion. Through a series of studies, Lim and DeSteno identified a few factors that enliven our compassion and enhance our capacity to act. It begins with the belief that small steps can make a difference. We can’t solve all the problems of the world, but we can make a simple difference in the life of someone who needs our encouragement and support. It also helps to remember our own experiences of adversity. Remembering our past challenges, suffering, or need motivates us to accompany others. Finally, our personal practice of prayer and meditation can help us to be present to those invisible neighbors. Taking the time to pray and reflect allows us to trust that our actions serve a holy purpose and God is with us. When we are clean out of compassion, we can borrow some of the limitless compassion of Jesus. The world may be filled with invisible people, but it doesn’t have to be. Jesus believes we can make a difference in the lives of those who feel that they are on the outside looking in, longing for care, connection, and community.  

This week, we’ll encounter them, those invisible neighbors. They’ll be sitting alone in Stewarts. They’ll be smoking outside their group home. They’ll be struggling to carry groceries to the car. They’ll fear they will miss that important doctor’s appointment because they don’t have a ride.

Let’s open our eyes and hearts. Take the time to see your invisible neighbor. Imagine what it’s like to walk in their shoes. Let’s remember our own experiences of adversity and isolation: that bitter break-up, the boss who bullied us, the health crisis we endured, the time we went broke. Let’s allow those suffering times to awaken our empathy for others and build our resolve to act. Undertake small compassionate acts and trust that they make a difference. Smile. Listen. Share a meal. Offer a ride. Bring someone to church. Finally, let’s ground our action in reflection and prayer. Remember Jesus, who healed a bent-over woman on the sabbath day and continues to long for the wholeness and redemption of our world.

Resources

Jared E. Alcantara. “Commentary on Luke 13:10-17” in Preaching This Week, August 24, 2025. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-21-3/commentary-on-luke-1310-17-6

Jeannine K. Brown. “Commentary on Luke 13:10-17” in Preaching This Week, August 22, 2010. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-21-3/commentary-on-luke-1310-17

Ira Brent Driggers. “Commentary on Luke 13:10-17” in Preaching This Week, August 25, 2019. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-21-3/commentary-on-luke-1310-17-4

Annelise Jolley. “The Paradox of Our Collapsing Compassion” in John Templeton Foundation News, Nov. 20,2024. Accessed online at https://www.templeton.org/news/the-paradox-of-our-collapsing-compassion

Peter W. Marty. “A Failure of Compassion” in The Christian Century, June 2024. Accessed online at https://www.christiancentury.org/first-words/failure-compassion

Carolyn J. Sharp. “Commentary on Luke 13:10-17” in Preaching This Week, August 21, 2022. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-21-3/commentary-on-luke-1310-17-5

Luke 13:10-17

10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” 13 When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14 But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.” 15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? 16 And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” 17 When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.

Photo by Chris F on Pexels.com

Blind

/ reverendjoannwhite / 1 Comment

Sabbath Day Thoughts – Mark 10:46-52

The girl was so wild that they kept her in a cage.  She bit and scratched, screamed and spit.  They didn’t know what was wrong with her, but the Tewksbury State Poorhouse was the end of the line for the orphaned and the indigent.  There was no place else to send her.  She was eight-years-old.  Her mother had died of tuberculosis.  Her father, overwhelmed and unable to cope, had surrendered her and younger brother Jimmie to the state.  Jimmie had died within months of their arrival at Tewksbury.

If it hadn’t been for the kindness of an elderly maid, Annie might have stayed in the cage.  Seeing the little girl so cruelly confined, the older woman felt compassion.  It didn’t seem right that a child should live like that, even if she was disturbed.  The maid baked a little cake.  She left it outside the cage, just within Annie’s reach.  The suspicious child devoured the cake and a bond was forged between the little girl and the old woman.

With the calming influence of the maid, doctors examined Annie.  They learned that she suffered from trachoma, an eye disease that had left her almost totally blind.  All at once, Annie’s behavior made sense.  She was a terrified, grieving eight-year-old, unable to cope with the death of her mother, the abandonment of her father, and the loss of her brother.  The doctors treated Annie’s trachoma and operated on her eyes, restoring some of her vision.

We don’t know how Bartimaeus lost his vision.  Perhaps it was gradual, the world dissolving bit by bit into shadows and darkness.  Perhaps it was all at once – a blow to the head or a workplace accident that robbed him instantly of his sight.  We don’t know how long Bartimaeus had sat roadside, earning his living in the only way left to a first century blind man: wrapped in his cloak and begging, depending upon the kindness of neighbors who might share a few alms.

We do know that Bartimaeus had heard of Jesus.  Maybe, one day a leper had come through the Jericho gates, boasting of the healing he had known at the hands of the Lord.  Perhaps disciples, who had once followed John the Baptist, had hurried past Bartimaeus on their way to Galilee, whispering that the Messiah had come at last.  One day, news had come to Bartimaeus that Jesus had healed a blind man in Bethsaida.  Jesus had spat into his hands, rubbed the blind man’s eyes, prayed powerfully, and the man had then seen everything clearly.

As the Passover drew near, a rumor came to Bartimaeus from pilgrims traveling down the Jordan Valley.  Jesus was coming to Jericho.  Jesus and his followers were going up to Jerusalem for the Passover.  From his seat on the Jericho Road, Bartimaeus, who had long ago given up hope, began to imagine that his life could change if only Jesus would pass by.

We tend not to see them until they trouble us.  Dressed all in black with big boots and a leather jacket, she shouts obscenities into her phone non-stop while her dog poops on our front lawn. 

In Kinney Drug—or was that Stewarts, he stands in front of us in his grimy jeans with a mask pulled down below his nose.  We look at our watch while he buys about a billion lottery tickets and some smokes. 

She hasn’t left her house in years.  Her son brings her the essentials and Meals-on-Wheels makes weekday deliveries.  I hear she has cats—lots.  Sometimes you see her scowling from the porch, turning away when you say, “Hi.”

He squats in a doorway with unkempt hair and a wild beard.  He’s always having an argument in a garbled voice with someone who isn’t there.  They’re everywhere.

She might have been legally blind, but Annie could see that the Tewksbury State Poorhouse was a one-way ticket to a life of poverty and misery.  Occasionally, children left.  Those who showed promising intelligence were sent away to school, but Annie was legally blind.  Where was the promise in that?  When the State Board of Charities sent a commission to investigate the awful conditions of the poorhouse, Annie saw her chance.  She told the commission that she wanted to go to school.

As an illiterate fourteen-year-old, Annie was sent to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston.  There Annie found that her struggles would be greater than her visual impairment.  Institutionalized from the age of eight, Annie lacked social skills, table manners, and appropriate hygiene.  She alienated her fellow students, and her quick temper put her at odds with her teachers.  Despite her difficulties, Annie was tremendously bright and hard working.  She put her prodigious gifts to work and excelled.  Six years later in 1887, Annie took top honors as valedictorian upon graduation from the Perkins Institute.

When Jesus and his friends passed Bartimaeus on the Jericho Road, the blind man knew that this was his big shot.  Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, and odds were good that he wasn’t coming back.  If healing was going to happen, it had to be now.  So, Bartimaeus began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!  Hey, you!  Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 

Bartimaeus made the biggest scene imaginable.  It was embarrassing.  The neighbors told him to pipe down, but the more they told him to stop, the more he yelled.  Folks began to look away.  They turned to one another and shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders as if to say, “Can you believe this, guy?”  If the neighbors had had their way, Jesus wouldn’t have stopped.  Instead, the good people of Jericho would have cheered Jesus on and sent him up to the Holy City where meaningful and important things were surely waiting.

We don’t know if it was the “Hey, you!” or the “Son of David” or the “Have mercy on me,” but I’m sure everyone was surprised when Jesus stopped.  As Jesus called Bartimaeus over, the neighbors, who had been so anxious to silence Bartimaeus, had a change of heart.  Suddenly, they were all help and smiles.  “He’s calling you!  ‘Atta boy!  Get up there!”  For his part, the blind man was so confident of his impending healing that he leapt up and left behind the tools of his trade.  His cloak and begging bowl were forgotten on the roadside.

One day, we suddenly knew we were blind.  We were volunteering at the Food Pantry when she came in with her dog in a stroller.  We cried when we heard that her folks had put her out and her dog was sick and she couldn’t afford the vet bills. 

One day, we had a flat tire and he pulled over to help us.  He got out of his rusted-out pick-up, followed by the miasma of cigarette smoke and unwashed hair.  While he helped change the tire, he told us how his grandparents raised him after his Dad ran out, and he never really learned to read, and he does odd jobs to make ends meet, and that’s ok.

One day, we saw the police and paramedics go in after the ambulance arrived without any siren.  Later, we saw the stretcher come out with its quiet, shrouded contents.  The EMTs talked to the cops while the cats cried piteously.  Last spring, the house sold, but they say it was a nightmare to clean out.

One day, we read an article in the paper about mental illness. and we realized how impossible it is to find decent care for big-time disorders in the North Country.  Folks just flail until they become a danger to themselves and others and the police get involved, which may get them off the streets for a couple of weeks, but healing never happens.

One day, we opened our eyes.  One day, we knew that we had been blind to the hidden world of need all around us.

The head of the Perkins School helped Annie find a job after graduation.  The Keller family of Tuscumbia, Alabama had written, looking for a governess who could help with their daughter Helen.  A high fever at the age of eighteen months had robbed Helen of both vision and hearing.  Helen was every bit as wild as Annie herself had once been.  No one knew how reach the child, how to help her communicate with the outside world.  Annie Sullivan went to Tuscumbia.  With patience and persistence, she taught Helen Keller.  Most of us may remember the powerful scene in the award-winning play and film The Miracle Worker when Annie signed “water” into Helen’s left hand while holding Helen’s right hand beneath the bright, wet flow gushing from a hand pump.  Suddenly, a light turned on and Helen Keller, who would never see, finally saw what Annie was doing, and the world opened up for her.

We don’t know how Bartimaeus’ eyesight returned.  It could have taken a few minutes, like a darkened theatre that slowly brightens as the audience rises to leave.  It could have come back all at once—a bright, mind-blowing flash of sun and sky, landscape and people.  It could have started with a bright point of light that grew until the whole world was illuminated like a kaleidoscope shining all about.  Afterward, Bartimaeus, who was no longer blind, saw everything clearly.  So clearly in fact, that when Jesus told him to “go,” he knew he had to come.  He knew he had to follow Jesus, even if suffering and death awaited them in Jerusalem.

Maybe someday we’ll see what Jesus saw all those years ago on the Jericho Road.  Maybe someday we’ll know what Annie Sullivan knew when she walked into the Keller home in Tuscumbia, Alabama.  A hidden world of need is all around us—all the time.  We can be blind, or we can choose to make a healing difference.  Can we see? Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on us.  Amen.

Resources

Jarvis, Cynthia. “Pastoral Perspective on Mark 10:46-52” in Feasting on the Word, Year B, vol. 4. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.

Galloway, Lincoln E. “Homiletical Perspective on Mark 10:46-52” in Feasting on the Word, Year B, vol. 4. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.

–. “The Story of Helen Keller & Anne Sullivan” in The Helen Keller Society.  Accessed online at http://helenkeller.org.za/HK1/index.php/about-us/the-miracle-and-miracle-worker

Biography.com editors. “Anne Sullivan Biography” in Biography, April 2, 2014.  Accessed online at https://www.biography.com/activist/anne-sullivan

See the source image
Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker (1962) from Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Image accessed online at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056241/mediaviewer/rm4062820864/