Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 “The Difficult Art of Empathy: Trump, Clinton and Us”

Last updated on: August 25, 2016 at 3:12 pm by John C Holbert

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 “The Difficult Art of Empathy: Trump, Clinton and Us” 2016-08-25T15:12:32-05:00 John C Holbert

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L'Orage_(The_Storm),_by_William-Adolphe_Bouguereau (Lectionary for September 18, 2016)

We live in hard and brittle times. The current presidential election cycle is too often characterized by personal assault rather than policy discussion. Donald Trump majors in language that belittles, attacks, and makes fun of any number of persons or groups: foreigners, women, the disabled, minorities. Hillary Clinton paints Trump with the broad brush of bigotry, racism, and misogyny. Though I tend to think she is quite often right about her opponent, as my earlier posts concerning the political contest have clearly demonstrated, nonetheless, I long for some substantive discussion of what each of these two persons intends actually to do once she/he enters the oval office as president of the USA. Surely, neither of them will continue such withering personal bouts after being elected, or at least we all may hope not! Whether we are Republican or Democrat, we do not wish to see our president reduced to continuous caterwauling against opponents, however much many of our fellow citizens appear to enjoy such frays.

No Bible reader can deny that the prophet Jeremiah goes in for a good bit of belittling and personal attack against his fellow citizens, especially in the first chapters of his long book. Just listen to him go after the priests, the interpreters of the Torah, the rulers of the land, and the so-called prophets; all of those attacks occur in one verse only (Jer 2:8)! If Jeremiah engaged each of these groups in public debate, hosted by CNN or FOX, I can hear his withering words shouted into the cameras: “Therefore I accuse you once more, and I accuse your children’s children” (Jer 2:9)! I imagine the screaming tone with the cords standing out on his neck as he bellows, “Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people (hear that sarcasm!) have changed their glory (even YHWH) for something (the Baals) that does not profit. Be appalled, O skies, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate” (Jer 2:12)! “Have you not brought this upon yourself by forsaking YHWH, your God, even while God was leading you in the right path” (Jer 2:17)? Neither Trump nor Clinton could match such arch and furious language against persons treated as pure enemies of Jeremiah and God. 308px-Bouguereau-Linnocence

So what makes Jeremiah still worth reading, if all he can do is descend to the level of a playground squabble as he claims to present the unadulterated word of YHWH? And how does anyone, beyond the most arrogant and presumptuous among us, imagine that they can speak like this about fellow human beings, accusing them of the foulest of evil deeds, the deepest and darkest of sins? What possibly gives anyone the right to talk like this?

The answer to these difficult questions appears in Jer 8:18-20: “My joy is gone, grief clings, my heart is sick. Listen! The outcry of my poor people from near and far, ‘Is YHWH not in Zion, its king no longer there? The harvest is past, summer ended, and we are not rescued.’ For the shattering of my poor people, I am shattered; I wail, horror has seized me.” This is a beautiful portrait of empathy, that astonishing human attempt to stand where another stands, that amazing willingness that a few people have actually to step into another’s painful shoes in order to feel what they feel. Such an emotion is rare, and, I fear, disappearing among us.

Empathy arises from two Greek words, en and pathos, literally “in passion” or “in feeling.” From these words two early German grammarians devised a word, einfülung, “feeling into,” from which arises the English, empathy. It is crucial to note that empathy is not sympathy. I can be sympathetic to a cause, but have no emotional connection to that cause. I can be sympathetic to the suffering of those far away from me, but have no genuine emotional connection to their suffering. Empathy, because it is quite literally a “feeling in” to a cause or a group or person, urges me, commands me, to stand with them, to walk with that cause, if I am to live out the true empathy I possess for cause or persons.

Empathy arises most easily toward those we are closest to. For example, when my wife is in pain, I can feel that pain with her, because my love for her is deep and real, and her pain becomes my own. Empathy may also arise in us for our dearest friends. Recently, a dear friend experienced the death of one of her sons, an unimaginable loss for her and her husband and their family. Of course, I went to the son’s funeral and expressed to her, however poorly, my own feeling of loss. I could never feel what she felt, but I can, and I hope did, feel her loss as somehow my own. This is empathy.

This emotion is what Jeremiah expresses in Jer 8:18-9:1. The very people who have served as the prophet’s targets, those who have, according to Jeremiah, rejected YHWH by turning to the pagan Baals, by refusing to help the poor, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, are now the very people with and for whom the prophet weeps. Just listen again to those famous words of Jer 8:22-9:1:

Is there no balm (no salve, no cure) in Gilead (a well known site of the healing arts)? No healer there?
Why has the health of my poor people not been restored?

If only my head were a water spring,

my eyes a fountain of tears,
that I might weep day and night for the dead of my poor people!

Again and again, Jeremiah names his fellow Israelites, “my poor people.” And because he continues to do that, he demonstrates an empathy with them that transcends his attacks against them. In short, all that he has claimed they have done to reject the will and way of YHWH, he accepts as things he also has done. He longs then to possess a head filled with water and eyes brimming like a fountain that he might weep day and night for them and thus for himself.

It is only such empathy that allows anyone to call into question the actions and words of someone else. Until one has “walked a mile in another’s moccasins,” as the hoary Native American line has it, one has little right to question the actions of others. Such a truth is especially true for pastors. Pastors of churches can only play the prophet with their people if they accept their place among them, as equally fallen and redeemed sinners.

Using this criterion of empathy, let us compare the two presidential candidates. Donald Trump, when asked some days ago whether he had anything to be forgiven for, could think of nothing. And after attacking for several days the speech of a Muslim- American whose soldier son had been killed in Iraq, claiming falsely that his wife, standing with her husband, could not speak because her religion had silenced her, Trump was asked what he had sacrificed to match the terrible sacrifice of that son’s life, and could only say that he had built many buildings and had given many people jobs. This was not empathy. It was not even sympathy!

And while Donald Trump was joining his father in real estate deals in 1970’s New York, Hillary Clinton was going incognito to southern grade schools to see whether or not African-American girls were being given a decent chance at an equal education with their white colleagues. That sounds like genuine empathy to me, standing with others in their suffering and potential humiliation to ensure equality before the law. If empathy is a criterion of full humanity, it is easy to see which of the two candidates presented to us has actually practiced empathy in her life. This by no means qualifies Hillary Clinton for sainthood, but it does demonstrate a part of her personhood that Donald Trump has no insight into, nor any apparent interest in.

A world where more “feeling in” is manifest would be a world more closely aligned to the purposes of God, and for those of us who are Christian, more aligned to the purpose and life of Jesus. Could it not be said that the very central claim of Christianity is that Jesus felt and demonstrated empathy for the entire cosmos, seeking its wholeness and oneness by the gift of his unmatchable life and modeling for each one of us the rich way of empathy at the same time?

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