Empathy: Doing Theology in a Hard-Hearted Situation

We’ve entered into Holy Week, the most significant time on the Christian liturgical calendar. But before I talk about it, I suppose I’d better talk first about the week before.

The week before saw President Trump begin what seemed to be a comprehensive overhaul of this immigration policy by making sweeping changes to his immigration strategy.

Kirstjen Nielsen, head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), resigned after enduring criticism from the President, as did Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting head Don Vitiello.

‘Ron's a good man’, Trump is quoted as saying, ‘but we're going in a tougher direction. We want to go in a tougher direction.’

Nielsen had likewise been regularly criticized by the President for not being aggressive enough.

Considering that both of these people have been overseeing this administration’s chaotic, cruel fiasco of separating migrant parents- legal or illegal- from their children, then deporting large numbers of the parents without their children, then not documenting the children’s whereabouts, and then announcing it might take upwards of two years to reunite them, one can only shudder and wonder what the President means when he talks of a ‘tougher direction’.

The President is in a quandary and is striking out like a hysterical child. Using cruelty as a deterrent hasn’t worked; people are still fleeing poverty and rampant violence in Central America. Now what?

‘Get crueler’ seems to be the answer…

We’re seeing a massive human migration. A crisis of the magnitude that the US is currently enduring at the southern border require levels of leadership, strategic thinking, purpose, authority, and vision that the President has never given any indication of having.

The President keeps threatening to seal the border, but walls and locks won’t solve the problem of people fleeing poverty and violence and asking for asylum. It’d be like locking the doors of a hospital during a flu epidemic in the hopes that people will stop getting sick.

He’s threatened to cut off aid to the Central American nations the people are fleeing from… denying funds to programmes that are working to alleviate poverty and address criminal violence. I am not making this up.

‘The system is full’, the President said on a recent trip to the border’, ‘we can’t take you anymore. Whether it’s asylum. Whether it’s anything you want. It’s illegal immigration.’

So… it’s clear that the President doesn’t know the difference- or refuses to make a distinction- between an illegal act (crossing the US border without a valid entry visa) and a legal act (presenting one’s self at the US border and asking for asylum).

He doesn’t know the difference between a criminal and a victim… and it’s becoming clear that anyone who tries to explain the difference to him is sacked.

All of this shows- in the President, much of his administration and his supporters- a lack of empathy, and for a bunch of people who bluster about how Christian they and their version of America are, that's a problem. 

Empathy is markedly different from sympathy, which is feeling pity or sorrow for another’s misfortune.

Empathy involves the ability to understand the feelings of another, to feel what they must be feeling, to be able to place yourself in their experience.

What must it be like to live without security, without safety, to have no options?

What must it be like to have to flee, to flee terror and violence, to grab what you have and run?

Most Americans- and certainly the majority of white, middle-class Americans- have never had to flee- they’ve never fled poverty, disease, war, or a nightmarish combination of all of three.

The radio, television, or word of mouth has never broadcast to them, ‘we are coming, and if you are still in the city by morning, we will kill you, you and your families.’

Most Americans have never had an armed group show up at their door, shoot the husband, rape the wife, and steal the TV.

Worse, many Americans have utter contempt for those people who have had to flee.

‘Why don’t they improve their own country? Why don’t they stand and fight? I would! Why do they expect help from me? Go home and take care of yourself!’

I and my colleagues who have done post-conflict work in places like Northern Ireland, Rwanda, the Balkans… we can introduce you to people who have been forced to flee. We can tell you their stories- of torture, rape, the death of their children, siblings, or entire families;

Of losing your home, of ending up in another part of the world;

Of not being welcome;

Of being shown no empathy…

The God of the Bible is an empathetic God.

‘I have certainly seen the oppression of my people… I have heard their cries of distress… Yes, I am aware of their suffering’ (Exodus 3:7);

‘When (Jesus) saw the crowds… he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’ (Matthew 9:16);

‘You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book’ (Psalm 56:8).

Holy Week is the culmination of Jesus’s incarnation, the ultimate cosmic action of empathy on the part of God- to become the sufferer, the hungry, the oppressed, the fleeing…

There is no way to be a Christian without identifying Christ in one’s neighbour, particularly that neighbour who is suffering or in need.

Once again, we are brought face to face with the true nature of the Gospel- radical, revolutionary, transformative.

By fostering a theology of empathy, we align ourselves with God’s heart for justice and the inherent worth of every human being that we see throughout the biblical text culminating in the incarnation of Jesus- becoming human to save and empower humanity.

Biblically, the antithesis of a theology of empathy is hard-heartedness:

But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up ill for yourself on the last day when God's righteous judgment will be revealed (Romans 2:5)

They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart (Ephesians 4:18)

A Gospel of empathy and compassion stands as the antithesis of the mindsets behind the current rise of far-right, nativist, and nationalist movements around the globe, and acts as a theological resistance to it. In fostering it, we expose the current rise of small-minded and cruel actions of  (to name but a few) Trump at the southern border, Netanyahu in the Palestinian territories, China’s growing racist repression of ethnic Uigers, and the targeting of Muslims after 9-11 up to the present day.

All of these oppressors, repressors, and marginalizers rely on relentless ‘other-ing’, rejecting a common humanity, and focusing on ‘us’, ‘our’ needs, ‘our’ agenda, ‘our’ culture and the zero-sum idea that a gain for ‘them’ is a loss for ‘us’…

In Christ’s incarnation, God becomes wholly ‘other’, the ultimate action of empathy.

Christ made himself human, and not simply human but crucially, in our historical and political context, he made himself a migrant at the southern border;

A Palestinian in the occupied territories and Gaza;

A Uiger in China;

A demonized Muslim ;

A bullied transgender young person;

A refugee in a European city…

If we cannot summon empathy for these situations and turn that empathy into action, we do not know Christ and our Christianity is nothing but a nativist cult.

Let this Holy Week be a long reflection on a theology of empathy, and may that reflection become resistance…

Leaving Lapidation (or, how to love God without stoning people to death...)

Do you know what 'lapidation' is? Neither did I.

But a whole lot of people in the Southeast Asian country of Brunei are terrified that their about to find out...

Let me back up for a moment; 

Five years ago I wrote a piece for the Feast of St. Stephen (26 December).

Since Stephen is described in the biblical text as a young man stoned to death for holding different religious beliefs than the majority (Acts of the Apostles 7), I used the day to reflect on the global issues of torture, prisoner abuse, and cruel and unusual methods of capital punishment.  

The news that Brunei has become the latest nation to declare that it will use stoning as a method of execution for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality brings the issue back to critical importance once again. 

It’d be difficult to think of a more brutal way to execute someone than by throwing rocks at them until they succumb to blunt trauma. Yet stoning (or, if you want the fancy name, ‘lapidation’) is a legal method of execution in 14 countries, and an extrajudicial method in several others. 

In practice, the practical process of stoning someone to death usually involves burying a man upright up to his chest (or a woman up to her shoulders). Islamic law dictates the stones be of a size not so large as one or two strikes would result in death, but not so small that the stoning would take an undue amount of time. Preferred stones are therefore about the size of a hand; the process can take up to 20 minutes.

Although the countries and legal systems which utilize stoning are predominantly Muslim, this is by no means simply an issue within Islam. Several extremist Christian groups in the US and elsewhere, as well as individual clergy, laypeople, and politicians (posting or commenting on social media where, bizarrely, they seem to think no one can hear them) have expressed their desire to reinstate stoning as a 'biblical' punishment for a raft of crimes. 

Needless to say, actual pro-stoning Christians are rare. But in browsing around the internet for Christian views on stoning, it appears that, because stoning is mentioned in the Bible- as a divinely-inspired method of execution, no less- few Christians seem willing to completely rule it out.

One site called ‘Got Questions’ put it this way:

Stoning is a horrible way to die. That particular manner of execution must have been a strong deterrent against committing the sins deemed offensive enough to merit stoning. God cares very much about the purity of His people. The strict punishment for sin during the time of the Law helped deter people from adopting the impure practices of their pagan neighbors and rebelling against God. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), and Israel was given a stern commandment to stay pure: “You must purge the evil from among you” (Deuteronomy 17:7) 

That a Christian commentator could, after the 20th century’s totalitarian horrors of genocide, mass deportation, and ethnic cleansing, so blithely write about the need to ‘purge’ and ‘purify’  almost perfectly encapsulates the type of theology Walter Wink bluntly dismissed (in 1973, no less) as ‘bankrupt’:

I use ‘bankrupt’ in the exact sense of the term. A business which goes bankrupt is not valueless, nor incapable of producing useful products. It still has an inventory of expensive parts, a large capital outlay, a team of trained personnel, a certain reputation, and usually, until the day bankruptcy is declared, a facade which appeared to most to be relatively healthy. The one thing wrong — and the only thing — is that it is no longer able to accomplish its avowed purpose for existence: to make money. It is in this precise sense that one can speak of the historical critical method generally... It is bankrupt solely because it is incapable of achieving what most of its practitioners considered its purpose to be: so to interpret the Scriptures that the past becomes alive and illumines our present with new possibilities for personal and social transformation.

Another site called ‘What Christians Want To know’ put it like this:

To look back at the Mosaic Laws and to ask why God allowed certain things is to make ourselves the judge of God and I won’t go there. These seem harsh to our thinking but in a society where there were no civil police forces that patrolled the nation of Israel, God had to institute His laws as a device to check or prohibit crime from ever happening. The severe punishment of stoning was instituted for this nation to deter crime and was intended to prevent it from becoming rampant and keep the entire nation from self-destructing or imploding upon itself. If we don’t understand something in the Bible or what God taught, we must simply trust the Creator Who has every right to govern in the way that is best to Him for who can question God. I can’t. 

So… God instituted stoning because there were no police? By that logic, why didn’t God just institute police rather than stoning? Plus, stoning people to death was ‘to deter crime’ and ‘keep the entire nation from self-destructing’? Does the author honestly think that is a proper prescription for crime prevention and national security, then or now? Are we to assume the author thinks it’s still an effective method of doing both?

He or she doesn’t explicitly answer that, falling back instead on the weak exegetical trope whenever coming across something horrific in the biblical text and not wanting to question it for fear that this entails throwing out the entire Bible as a whole:

‘Oh well, God must have known what he was doing’…

Theology can do better. When people are being cruelly murdered for being who they are- being who God created them to be- it must do better. 

When Jesus was confronted with a woman that Jewish law deemed worthy of stoning, he transformed the entire issue, refusing to confirm the sentence and instead forcing the crowd to reflect on who could possibly think themselves able to commit such an act;

‘Let the one who has never sinned cast the first stone’;

If you, being the person you know yourself to be, could inflict this on another, throw…

Many over the years have mused about what Jesus was writing in the dirt when confronted by the mob wanting to stone the woman to death.  

We’ll never know, of course.

I hope it was ‘don’t stone people to death, ever.’

Please support Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in their efforts to ban torture, cruel and unusual punishments, and the death penalty worldwide. 

Holy St. Stephen, pray for us...