Jesus politics of compassion
Answers
Answer:
For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in community. To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political. He directly and repeatedly challenged the dominant sociopolitical paradigm of his social world and advocated instead what might be called a politics of compassion. This conflict and this social vision continue to have striking implications for the life of the church today.
Explanation:
Purity versus Compassion
To see this, we need to look at the role that purity played in Jesus’ social world. He was often in conflict with his critics about purity laws and issues.
Purity was political because it structured society into a purity system. It took as its starting point a verse from the Book of Leviticus: “Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). As an imitation dei, the passage joins together an image of God and an ethos for the community: God is holy, therefore Israel is to be holy. Moreover, holiness was understood to mean “separate from everything that is unclean.” Holiness thus meant the same as purity, and the passage was understood as, “You [Israel] shall be pure as God is pure.” The ethos of purity produced a politics of purity – that is, a society structured around a purity system.
Purity systems are found in many cultures. At a high level of abstraction, they are systems of classifications, lines and boundaries [the concept of purity is central to all Urizenic, left brain religions – the logic of pure reason/impure world]. A purity system “is a cultural map which indicates ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’.” Things that are okay in one place are impure or dirty in another, where they are out of place. Slightly more narrowly, and put very simply, a purity system is a social system organised around the contrasts or polarities of pure and impure, clean and unclean. These polarities apply to persons, places, things, times, and social groups.
Most important for our purposes is the way “pure” and “impure” applied to persons and social groups in the first-century Jewish social world. The purity system established a spectrum of people ranging from the pure through varying degrees of purity to people on the margin to the radically impure.