Jesus repeatedly enjoined his followers to “be compassionate as God is compassionate.” Each time God appears in Scripture, the first words are “Do not be afraid.” If something frightens you, you can be sure it’s not from God. Fear of the Lord is healthy since it is more about reverence. That fear is more that we might hurt God, not that God might hurt us.
Compassion is central to all authentic religions, it’s the penultimate invitation since it’s the medium that takes us to our last invitation, which is union with God.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” – an impossibility for human beings in the Greek-rooted sense in which we understand perfection, meaning “without flaws.” But in Hebrew thought, perfection means compassion. Luke’s Gospel reflects this by saying, “Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate.”
Scripture scholar Dr. Walter Brueggemann, said that proper prayer and proper practice were seen as the essence of religion in Old Testament times until the prophets came and said, “God doesn’t care so much about all these rules; God cares about the poor.” They said, “The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of your justice; the quality of justice will be judged by the treatment of the three weakest groups – widows, orphans and strangers.”
Jesus explained that God lets the sun shine on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. If you tease that out, God loves the saints in heaven and the devils in hell equally; God loves Mary in heaven and Lucifer equally; God loves pro-life and pro-choice equally; God loves Catholics and Protestants equally; God loves Christians and Muslims equally; God loves us when we’re bad and when we’re good equally.
Fr. Richard Rohr said, “There isn’t a single thing you can do to make God love you more, and there isn’t a single thing you can do to make God love you less. That’s the way I want you to be compassionate. Your compassion must extend to everybody, not just to the worthy, or whoever gives you a room, and so on.”
