In today’s Gospel Jesus brings back to life a child who is actually dead. On the three occasions recorded in the Gospels when Jesus raises someone from the dead, He demonstrates extraordinary compassion. Jesus raises the young man at Nain because of his pity for the widow. He raises Lazarus because He feels compassion for his two sisters. In today’s story, He raises Jairus’ daugther from the dead because He was compassionate to her parents.
There are two aspects of compassion. We could call them the heart and the hands of compassion. Compassion means both the emotion experienced when a person is moved by the suffering of others, and also the act of entering into the suffering of another person with the purpose of relieving it. Compassion is more than a desire: it is also an act of will – a decision to become actively invilved in alleviating a person’s suffering. Jesus’ whole life demonstrated compassion. Jesus cured not just to prove He was God, but because He was God, abounding in love and compassion. Sinners, the sick and relatives of the dead flocked to Him because He reached out to touch them.
Compassion is the emotion that links us outside ourselves. It enables us to go beyond ourselves to the beating pulse of the rest of the world. Compassion is a key dimension of what it means to be fully human, the ability to feel pain that is not our own. We might call it the divine glue of the human race. So what can you and I do to make compassion more apparent in a world where we see great suffering every day? First, we can learn to be silent enough to listen, to hear the cry of the other, to attend to someone else’s needs. Listening is the centre, the very core of compassion. But listening is not enough. Second, we have to be willing to remember the sharp edge of our own past sufferings. To ignore pain or to deny it or suppress it does not prepare us to respond well to what we hear from others. On the contrary, this is exactly what leads us to tell other people to get over it, to ignore it, to offer it up. The third dimension of compassion is experience. To get that, we have to step outside our comfort zone – to find our way into the lives of those who suffer until their sufferings scrape away our indifference to it. And fourth, we can develop a positive approach to humanity: identifying our hopes from human community, our ideas about the will of God for all humankind and our commitment to translate compassion into action. The Church, and we as individuals, can demonstrate God’s love for the world through our own actions: sharing our wealth with people in need, developing a simpler lifestyle and challenging injustice and violence.