Mass readings for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Exodus 19.1-6a Psalm 100.1-5 Romans 5.6-11 Matthew 9.36-10.8
Empathy has been celebrated in our culture as the premier virtue – this has crept into our culture, perhaps being first seen openly when former U.S. President Bill Clinton said, “I feel your pain” – For as many who rolled their eyes at that remark, so many more thought him a sensitive, and so a caring man who ought to be the leader of the Free World. But politicians are often challenged by popular “feeling” and too often led by it themselves. And while there are often short-term satisfactions in appeasing the empathetic impulse as individuals and as societies – it takes away the discomfort of seeing someone suffering, but even more it gives us the sense that we are good for responding to suffering – there is a huge problem with ordering our lives, our civilization to empathy. Indeed, a new phrase has entered our language: suicidal empathy: the tendency to prioritize compassion over reason and long-term consequences.
In the Gospel passage today, Jesus looks out over the crowd gathering to hear him teach and preach, and this thought comes to him: they are like sheep without a shepherd. We sense the tenderness in that, the heartache of it; there is empathy. Jesus may have emotional sensitivity toward these people, and sense how spiritually lost and confused they are, but he does not act to satisfy a human emotional need to immediately take away their suffering. His concern is real, but he will address this by doing what is best for them, not what they might want right at that moment. He will lay down his life for these sheep through the sacrifice of the cross. He will continue to be a shepherd to us through his body, the Church, of which he is the head. For those who belong to his flock, who listen for his voice of guidance, they are made safe. What about those who think they are essentially part of the flock of gentle, loving Jesus, but do not gather with, well, us who clearly identify ourselves as the Church? For a great many there is the conviction that we can be good outside the moral discipline of Christianity, reducing the Christian faith essentially to empathy. For those who disagree with the empathy-driven take on issues, they are branded as unfeeling, uncaring, selfish and cruel – indeed, if Christian, we are said to be bad Christians.
Likening us to sheep is neither an insult nor a compliment – it’s simply an apt comparison. Sheep aren’t entirely passive and defenseless creatures. They have useful instincts, including that of self-preservation. That instinct is not in itself a strength or weakness, but rather a signal to do something. Like all instincts, they have an emotional dimension: panic is an emotion that prompts us to save our lives, but it can send us running right into danger, just as hunger prompts us to feed, but when ravenous we can often eat til we’re sick and suffering indigestion.
So, there is nothing virtuous in living by our instincts. Indeed, St. Thomas Aquinas was quite pointed in telling us that our emotions, anger, pity, fear, desire, these can never be counted as virtues, even those that seem to reflect something good. Empathy is popularly understood as something all good people have; they feel the pain of others and then act upon that feeling. But empathy is like anger, pity, fear and desire, a feeling. It is a capacity to identify with another person’s emotional state, especially their suffering. And it demands satisfaction, but that is where there is danger. To respond to empathy in a way that immediately makes us feel better, can often lead the person who is the object of our empathy to disaster. We can indulge their vices, their addictions, lifestyles that are destructive; we fail to teach self-control, temperance, emotional continence. On the societal level, this can lead to even greater disaster. The celebrated Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor once said that, “kindness without God leads to the gas chamber.” And some people are confused by that – but we must recognize that when a society acts from undisciplined empathy, it responds then to those who are most effective in appealing to our emotions, who are loudest in claims of suffering, injustice, deprivation – the true good of the whole community is then forgotten. Indeed, when we think about the horrors of National Socialist Germany of the 1930s and 40s who operated gas chambers to murder by the millions, we must also recall the beginnings of it all in euthanasia of physically and intellectually handicapped people. This was couched in compassion for their supposedly intolerable suffering. And when we get to the more monstrous attempt to exterminate the Jews, well, the rationale was that it was Jews who were the cause of the German nation’s suffering. And to those who don’t believe this line of thinking can ever succeed again, one need only look at the alarming growth in antisemitism in the Western World of late.
Empathy must be governed by higher principles. That is why we turn to Christ: he is the Logos, the Word of God, the reason of God – and so, his concern is to bring about the greatest good, and not merely alleviate our discomfort in the face of an individual, or a group of people all making claims of suffering and injustice to which they expect us to respond.
What is best for us is not in what Jesus could do to make us happy and safe immediately, but rather what is truly best for us eternally. He could have responded to what he saw that day, looking at the crowd, by wiping out all sickness forever with a wave of his hand; he could have ended the brutish Roman Empire and instituted by divine fiat his kingdom. He could even now take away all our difficulties in this life. However, that would have infantilized humanity then, it would make of us now children, and spoiled children at that. We would not grow spiritually, we would not have faith, learn to trust; and I rather think, we’d find some way to mess it up again – do a repeat of Adam and Eve in the garden where everything was provided for them, yet they fell from grace.
Ungoverned empathy played into so much public discussion and political decisions in our own country in recent years: COVID policy, the Residential Schools issue, Transgenderism, censorship of the internet, speech restrictions on university campuses, Gaza, and so on. These hurt us even as the decisions made by authorities were and are made expressly to address and reduce suffering, lessen social tensions, abate political divisions, keep us safe. Yet all those things have grown worse.
Now, the Church sees all of these controversial issues, as being far more complicated that most appreciate, and so, best dealt with according to a less passionate but more patient consideration of them. That is, as with the teaching of Church Fathers such as Thomas Aquinas, we can recognize that we have emotional responses and instinctive reactions, but we then need to be careful in our actual actions to address them. In retrospective analyses of recent crises many have described them as causing “moral panic.” And panic is never a good thing to be guided by. There were those who took advantage of this panic to the detriment of our life as a national community, affecting us right down to the level of family, neighbors and friends.
Christ is the antidote to panic, to unrelieved anxieties that can drive us into the arms of the enemy. Jesus is all compassion and caring, but he is not ruled by empathy, but rather by the higher call to do actual good for others, even if they would prefer that he simply give them what they want.
We might ask about the miracles he did for people, aren’t these immediate responses to suffering. Well, read carefully, and you see that Jesus isn’t responding to suffering, but rather to the person’s faith. His miracles were signs that, indeed, they’d found what they were looking for: God. And as is often observed, everyone he ever healed, exorcised, raised from the dead, eventually went on to die; and we trust that with the faith they had found, are now with our Lord, forever.
Jesus laments that the harvest is great, but the laborers too few. How much we need now to be out in the world, evangelizing and gathering into the flock all those people, those often derided as “sheeple” to come under the protective care of Christ. To cease to panic over the crises of our times, but instead, by grace, be shepherded through the wilds of this world, to go from valley to valley, where the lambs will graze peacefully, until brought at last home, and into an everlasting and true safety in God.
Amen.