The Littlest Ones
“The Littlest Ones” by Pastor Rosanna McFadden
Good morning! We are two Sunday into the Easter season, and this week I have been thinking about miraculous things. You can probably think of some yourself. If you were here last week, you heard Brandom Borem share how a stranger in the drive-through at McDonald’s prayed for him and he has hardly stuttered since. I had to pull a group of seven busy people together for a meeting, and was able to find not only a date but a time of day which worked for everyone on less than a week’s notice — this may not be supernatural, but it’s pretty remarkable. And this morning we dedicated a little boy who is somehow partly his mother and partly his father and yet completely his own little person. It isn’t that this has never happened before — it happens all the time — but it knocks me out every time. Babies are amazing. There are some pretty miraculous things built into that process by a Creator whose understanding is way beyond my own. Miraculous things are all around us.
Being in the Easter season means we are on the post-resurrection side of perhaps the most miraculous even in human history. As I noted last week, Jesus’ appearances after he arose from the dead were to small groups of people who already knew him, but there is a tinge of the miraculous to each of them — Jesus appears in a locked room, or his close friends don’t recognize him immediately. Our text for this morning comes immediately after a miraculous event, but I’m going to suggest there’s some pretty amazing stuff in the text Scott read for us as well. Here’s a little context: at the opening of John 21, a group of disciples, including Peter, Nathaniel, James and John and Thomas are gathered by the Sea of Galilee, and decide to go fishing. Familiar stuff — vocational, not recreational — to all or most of this group. They fish all night and don’t catch anything, and just after daybreak, some guy on the beach calls, “You don’t have any fish, do you?” They don’t. He tells them to fish on the other side of the boat, which is just silly, because fish can swim under boats. But whatever, they do it, and their nets are so full that they can’t haul them in. And this reminds Simon Peter of another miraculous catch on the Sea of Galilee, and he realizes who the guy on the shore must be. It’s Jesus, of course. Peter jumps into the water and swims to meet him, while the others drag in the net bulging with fish.
Peter and Jesus have some unfinished business, which is where our text for today picks up. The conversation is a little stilted, given the circumstances. The circumstances being that although Jesus has appeared to the disciples twice previously since being raised from the dead, Jesus and Peter have not really talked. And what they’ve not really talked about is the fact that Peter, whom Jesus previously identified as the future leader of the church — the Rock on which the church would be built — asserted forcefully, not once, not twice, but three times that he didn’t even know Jesus. What follows is this coded conversation, a kind of call and response where Jesus asks, Do you love me? And Peter responds, Yes Lord, you know that I love you, and then Jesus replies Feed my lambs, or Tend my sheep, or Feed my sheep. There’s no confession of wrong-doing or asking for forgiveness or absolution, but there is some sense of something being understood and resolved. Jesus gives a warning about Peter being taken where he does not wish to go — presumably to a martyr’s death — and then ends the conversation the way his very first encounter with Peter began, with the command, Follow me.
There is a poignancy in this conversation and Peter having the opportunity to tell his Lord three times that he loves him, and that Jesus is entrusting the flock of believers into Peter’s care. That group, as wobbly and vulnerable as a newborn lamb is going to need care and protection. Indeed, one of the distinguishing marks of the new church birthed in the book of Acts is their care not only for each other, but the most vulnerable members of their society — the widows and orphans, Jews and non-Jews alike. Compassion for the littlest one has been a mark of Christians since the beginning of the church; it was one of the things which attracted new converts to Christianity, even when Christians were a persecuted minority.
So I was surprised — not in a good way — when I heard about a book by Joe Rigney. Rigney is a pastor and professor of theology and his book is titled, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. Publicity for the book said, “When you reject the sin of empathy, you reject the manipulation of the media, the manipulation of family and friends, and most importantly, the manipulation of your own heart.” There is no doubt that caring about other people makes us emotionally vulnerable, and potentially open to manipulation. But I not see empathy as a sin, I have deep concerns about the alternatives to empathy. One of the reviews I read said that Rigney’s “sin of empathy” rhetoric has been taken up by several who argue that we should “properly hate” or “harden our hearts.” This may play into contemporary conversations, but I hope that “proper hate” doesn’t get traction in the church, because I think that once you give yourself permission and theological justification to hate other people, it’s hard to know when to stop.
Jesus had cause to hate a lot of people; the Jewish leaders who arrested him, the Roman leaders who ordered and carried out his crucifixion. We have nothing to indicate that most of them stopped being his enemies after his death, and yet Jesus asked his Father to forgive them. Jesus even had cause to hate Peter, the Rock on whom he planned to build the church. Peter was a trusted disciple and friend who denied that he even knew Jesus. The fact that Jesus predicted Peter’s betrayal ahead of time probably didn’t make it any easier. Jesus could have easily and justifiably decided to never risk trusting ex-fisherman with ministry again. It’s just so hard to care about other people and then have them let you down. Why care about people at all?
Hating individuals is corrosive enough, but lacking empathy for a whole group of people is dangerous indeed. Cpt. G. M. Gilbert, the US Army psychologist serving at the Nuremberg trials, said this:
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
If we love Jesus — despite our shortcomings and our bad behavior, our denials, our sin — if we love Jesus, we have to find it in ourselves to be compassionate to other people. I don’t know if we can do this without God’s help, because frankly, other people can be a pain in the . . . neck. For me, this is the miraculous part of this story of Peter and Jesus. Oh sure, 153 fish are amazing. But they’ll be gone in a few hours or a few days, while this conversation about compassion for the last the lost and the least will set the course for the early church and beyond. Jesus forgave Peter, but not only that; Jesus gave Peter the opportunity to forgive himself. Jesus said that love for him means taking care of others — especially those who are not able to take care of themselves. Jesus’ words about Peter being taken places he did not want to go is a fate which awaits those of us who may live and die in care facilities when we reach the final years of our lives.. If we can’t have empathy for others now, can we expect them to care about us later?
Mahatma Gandhi is quoted as saying, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” I believe this is even more true of the church. We model this with and for our children when we let them know that they are loved unconditionally. We accept them and teach them and nurture them not because they’re going to have to pay us back someday, but because we love them and want them to be healthy and whole. And part of being a whole person is supporting wholeness and health in other people — and yes, caring about others opens us up to the possibility of pain or manipulation or betrayal. There are no guarantees that our good intentions will be met with others’ good behavior. That is the risk of compassion. But if we can commit, as you did today, to support the littlest ones in our midst, that is an exercise in empathy. That is a way we respond to Jesus’ question, “Do you love me?” and that is how we care for the littlest lambs of God. Amen.