Seeing the crowds,
Jesus’ innards trembled with pity for them.
The Jews
and the Greeks could not succeed in making pity and compassion into a purely
mental act. It sounds archaic, hardly short of embarrassing, to say that
"Jesus saw the crowds and felt pity for them in his guts." But, in
fact, any translation that omits compassion's element of viscerality has
already betrayed the depth of Jesus' divine and human pity. Splanchna, the root of the verb here,
means "viscera", "bowels", life-giving "womb",
and in Hebrew rachamím means the same
thing.
We all
know how the strongest emotions—whether sorrow, fear, joy, or desire—are all
initially registered in the abdominal region, and this physiological reaction
is one of the proofs of the authenticity of our emotions. The same teacher,
herald, and healer who surpassed all others in these crafts finally reveals
himself in utter silence and inactivity in his deepest nature: the
Compassionate One who is affected by suffering more elementally than the
sufferers he sees around him.
If Mary's
womb was proclaimed blessed for having borne such a Child, we now see in the
Son the Mother's most precious quality: wide-wombed compassion. When we allow
ourselves to be moved in this way, we are already hopelessly involved with the
object of our pity: no possibility here of a distanced display of
"charity" that refuses to become tainted by contact with the stench
of human misery.
Jesus
looks at the crowds, then, and is viscerally moved. What power in the gaze of a
Savior who pauses in the midst of his activity in order to take into himself
the full, wounded reality about him! Jesus never protects himself against the
claims of distress. He is not content with emanating the truth, joy, and
healing power that are his: he must become a fellow sufferer. His loving gaze
is like an open wound that filters out no sorrow.
He has
already done so much for them; but as long as he sees misery, nothing is
enough; and so he wonders what else remains to be done. His contemplative
sorrow becomes a stimulant to his creative imagination. He nestles all manner
of plight within his person, and every human need becomes a churning in his
inward parts. He interiorizes the chaos of the surrounding landscape, but, by
entering him, it becomes contained, comprehended, embraced and saved.
Photograph by Father Emmanuel. Meditation by Father Simeon.
