rest and compassion - friends or foes?
where do compassion and rest meet?
where do doing and being intersect?
where does kindness to self turn to seeking the kingdom and where does seeking the kingdom bring kindness to self?
mark 6:33ff makes me yearn for some approximation of an answer to these question
I used to read it and say, "see, God tells you when to rest. the disciples thought they were tired, but there was work to be done. there is always work to be done in the kingdom."
hmm...is God an American-style workaholic? Does God want to feed my workaholism, my doing for rather than being with? Do I believe that God is a God of rest? He healed on the Sabbath. Does this mean that there is no more rest with Christ? Did we recieve the Holy Spirit so that we could work over-time?
The disciples, though, didn't ask for rest - Jesus invited them to it.
Then, compassion came. The Greek word means to be moved to the guts. Jesus' heart was stirred and broken and the result was teaching, feeding, and healing - beautiful, but exhausting - nothing near the retreat he had teased his disciples with.
So, holding to a God who gives rest, and loving a God of compassion, I'm left truly asking and wondering, where do compassion and rest meet?
1 comment:
pardon my feeble comments, but I happen to think that rest is the foundation of compassion. compassion from us cannot happen unless rest finds us. "moral imperatives flow from redemptive indicatives". we cannot act unless we are first acted upon: "forgive others as you have been forgiven". being preceeds doing.
God is not a workaholic because he doesn't need sleep and he sees no distinction between work and leisure. what Jesus means by "rest" and what we often think are two different things. "rest" in the sabbath sense for God meant he ceased from creating. that doesn't mean it was hard, or labor, or was "his living". i mean, just look at the ministry of Jesus. he did what he wanted when he wanted to. there was no pattern or set hours. some days he sat back and kicked it with some people at their house, some days he went for walks with his friends, some days he gave lectures at the temple, some days he went off to pray alone. of course that's easy when you live in Palestine in the first century and are unemployed and homeless!
Post a Comment