Overview:
Saturday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time
A Reflection for Saturday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time
When Jesus disembarked and saw the vast crowd,
his heart was moved with pity for them,
for they were like sheep without a shepherd;
and he began to teach them many things. (Mark 6:34)
Find today’s readings here.
Elon Musk, speaking last year on the Joe Rogan podcast from which apparently all contemporary wisdom flows, shared what I’m sure he considered a devastating and astute observation: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
It is this weakness, this surfeit of empathy that was to blame for America’s acceptance of immigration, which he likened to a kind of civilizational suicide. Left unasked by Musk or Rogan: Is a civilization willing to turn its back on the vulnerable and the abused, the widow, orphan and sojourner, the hungry and the thirsty, worth preserving?
Empathy has become a bad word somehow over the last half decade. That thing by which they will know we are Christians seems to have become caught in too many craws. We cough up something stony and toxic in its place.
On the most positive end of the empathy skepticism currently espoused in some Christian circles is the concern that unrestrained empathy leads to exhaustion and burnout. On its paranoid end, the empathy-resistors say empathy tricks people into accepting things they otherwise would and should reject, with gay marriage or trendy transgenderism frequently noted among them.
In today’s first reading, Solomon is richly rewarded because he asked the Lord not for riches or a long life but for wisdom sufficient to lead his people. Did the Lord really make Solomon more wise? In his choice of what gift to ask for, wasn’t he already exhibiting wisdom?
We seek the wisdom to know what is right. Don’t we already have it? We often already know in our gut what the right thing to do is, how we should show generosity or offer mercy, but we find ways to talk ourselves out of it, to explain away our first instinct to do the right thing by exploring the potential dangers of extravagant compassion, mercy run amok, empathy unleashed.
In today’s Gospel, so excited by the presence of Jesus and eager to hear his words, content not to live by bread but by every word from his mouth, the people of Galilee hurry off after Jesus and the disciples, heedless, unprepared, sheep pursuing their shepherd. When he encounters them in such a state, bereft of food and water in a place where that will be difficult to find, desperate for guidance, for wisdom, Jesus is moved to pity, not for the first or the last time.
He will in the next verses intervene miraculously to feed these thousands, a redistribution of what resources the disciples and the people themselves have managed to bring along with them to this barren place—that all may remain to hear him but none be left in hunger or thirst.
And perhaps that is our charge today, not to resist the empathy that comes so naturally to us or rationalize it away to dodge our accountability and obligation, but to embrace it and consider the best way to turn empathy to action.
Who will accuse Jesus of debilitating empathy? He is not worried about how mercy unbridled might diminish the civilization he inhabits. Let it dissolve, let it fade away, let it be overwhelmed and overcome. He is building a new kingdom of God out of the husk of the old.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts