Sermon by:
The Very Rev. Pamela Dolan
“The Compassion of God“
Dec 8, 2024
In the Monastery of the Cross, an Eastern Orthodox monastery in the city of Jerusalem, there is a medieval fresco depicting two men. One is elderly, with a long gray beard, wearing the rich robes of a priest or temple official. The other is younger, wearing animal skins and a rough outer cloak. Their faces are uncannily similar and bear the same stern, somewhat pinched expression; if this looks like a family resemblance, that’s not a coincidence, as the men pictured are Zechariah and his son John, also known to us as John the Baptist.
In the Gospel of Luke, Zechariah is the speaker of the Benedictus, the beautiful canticle we shared this morning, and it is worth briefly reviewing his story. According to Luke, he was a priest in the Jewish temple, married to a woman named Elizabeth. The couple was childless, which in the context of that time and place was considered puzzling, given that they were such good and righteous people.
Luke tells us that when the angel Gabriel visited Zechariah to announce to him that his wife was going to have a son, and that that son would be a great man who would “make ready a people prepared for the Lord,” he was met with a disbelief that was uncharacteristic of the priest. Zechariah, declaring that he and Elizabeth were too old to have children, asked for a sign that would confirm the truth of the angel’s message. In response, Gabriel caused Zechariah to become mute, a condition that would only end when his son was born and given the name of John. And so it came to pass.
These beautiful words of the Benedictus are the first words uttered by Zechariah after his nine months of enforced silence. They form a poem-prayer of lasting prophetic power, one that has been a part of public worship in the church since the early Middle Ages and that many of us regularly recited in the Daily Office. To my mind, this passage contains some of the most memorable and deeply comforting language in the Bible: “In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
Compassion. Perhaps this is not a word that usually springs to mind when we conjure up our caricature of the wild-eyed, wild-haired, slightly unhinged John the Baptist. And yet, I’d like to suggest that compassion is central to understanding John’s role in the Gospel, especially as it relates to these early events leading up to the birth of Jesus. I am using compassion here both in its literal sense of “suffering with,” but also in the larger sense of seeing, knowing, and understanding other people and creatures, especially those who are hurting in some way. Compassion is how we bridge the gap between persons, reminding us that we are all children of a single, compassionate God.
Let’s look first at the silence of Zechariah in the months leading up to the birth of his son. We can assume from the little we know of him that Zechariah was a respected man, a person of status. How strange it must have been for him to be silenced against his will! And yet, perhaps that was an education in compassion for him. It is often when we have some aspect of our identity or power taken from us that we recognize how fortunate we are and may even, by the grace of God, become more aware of those who are less fortunate.
Maybe that is why when Zechariah was finally able to speak, his words are not about himself but about the people of God. They ring out with the promise of liberation, redemption, and salvation. His loosened tongue reveals a heart broken open with compassion, especially for those who “dwell in darkness and the shadow of death”: the poor, the sick, and the lonely among them.
Zechariah’s son John, in turn, also shows himself to be a man whose heart is set on God and God’s people. We do not know exactly why this longed-for, beloved child went to live in the wilderness, but we do know it speaks to a deep, embodied wisdom. We know, for instance, that he was a deeply grounded, authentic human being, not because of his unconventional appearance or behavior but because, when he was threatened with the powers of the state threatened brutal retaliation against his truth telling, he chose to continue to tell the truth anyway, even at the cost of his life. In a symbolic parallel to Zechariah’s time of silence, I imagine John’s time in the wilderness to be a kind of apprenticeship in humility and compassion, a necessary journey of transformation before he went out and preached to others about the need for repentance and forgiveness.
Both these men are schooled in compassion, and they both help usher in the life and ministry of Jesus, who is God’s compassionate presence made manifest in the world. Zechariah’s name means “God remembers,” and his role in Luke’s Gospel is to assure his people that God remembers his promises and keeps them, no matter how outrageous and impossible those promises seem. Based on his own experience of a divine promise kept, Zechariah foretells a time when God’s tender compassion will come to full fruition, when the “dawn from on high shall break upon us”—in other words, when Jesus the anointed one will break into human history, ushering in the dawn of a new era.
Following in his father’s footsteps, John the Baptist also tells of a time when the world will be turned upside down by the coming of the Messiah, the promised one. He assures us that God will ultimately do away with anything that threatens to stand in the way of all flesh seeing the salvation of God—no mountain or valley, no ocean or river or army, nothing will come between us and the love of God, made manifest in the One whose advent John foretells with such passion and love.
On the first Sunday of Advent last week, we talked about prophets, because prophets are truth-tellers. I argued that the ultimate truth teller is Jesus, the one who comes to set us free from all the lies and half-truths that keep us from living as fully and abundantly as God created us to live.
In much the same way, the full reality of God’s compassion is only completely realized and revealed in the person of Jesus. It is out of compassion for us that God chooses to become human, to live as we live and to suffer as we suffer. It is because God wants more than anything to bridge the gap between us, to make straight the crooked pathways and make straight the high ground, that God came into the world as a human being, and that God continues to come into the world in word and sacrament, in the beauty of creation, and in our relationships with one another.
In turn, of course, we are called to be people of compassion, following in the footsteps of Zechariah the priest and John the wilderness prophet. Joined to Jesus himself through the sacrament of baptism, we promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to love our neighbor as ourselves. When we do that, we become part of the dawning of a new reality, part of bridging the gap that separates us from God and when another. In our own small way, we can all be beacons of God’s tender compassion. We can help shine the light of Christ on all who live in darkness and the shadow of death, as our feet are guided, step by step, along the way of peace. Amen.
