The Great Commission & the Cultivation of Compassion
The Great Commission & the Cultivation of Compassion
Richard K. Stephens
2,060 words (plus notes)
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[T]he Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.” [C. S. Lewis] [1]
My purpose in this article is to make a single, important point, and to do so as clearly and concisely as I can manage. It is a confusion-creating topic, despite the fact that the scriptural language is crystal clear.
I want to examine Jesus’s final command before his Ascension, often called The Great Commission [2], and decide what the proper response ought to be to it. I will show how the Great Commission leads directly to the “The Twofold Commandment” (or, “The Great Commandment”). [3] I will present an argument whose conclusion is that Christ-followers ought to make use of sound methods with which true compassion may be successfully cultivated.
We will take the portion of the Great Commission that is often overlooked seriously, follow its logic and determine what Jesus is instructing -- then come to terms with how that instruction can best be honored. That overlooked portion is this: teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. (Mat. 28:20)
Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” [Matthew 28:16-20; NIV]
The disciples were given an assignment to go to gentile peoples and make more disciples. What did making more disciples consist of? Doing just what Jesus did to make disciples, announcing the Kingdom of Heaven, commanding repentance (which is what was done before baptizing someone) and then teaching them the content of all of Jesus’s commands, and, because knowing what the commands are is not obedience to them (or, observance of them), the novices are to be instructed in the how of obedience to them. After all, Jesus had spent three and a half years patiently instructing the eleven who are hearing the commission in the difficult, error-prone, transformative, training process of learning how to obey all this commands.
Which of all the commands Jesus delivered during his ministry is paramount to be taught? That would be what The Twofold Commandment because the two commandments are regarded as insuperable because to learn to love God one must learn to love the image of God: Adam and his descendants, or, or “neighbors” of all nations.
[O]ne of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test [Jesus]. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" [Jesus] said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." [Mat. 22:35-40]
The ranking of these among all the commands that Jesus has given is clear. Here is “the greatest” command and the one that “is like it.” “All the law and the prophets” are dependent on them. This message from Jesus is clearly meant to be taken with absolute seriousness.
It follows that, if we modern gentiles do indeed decide to take the Twofold Commandment seriously, we are compelled to ask: How is it that we learn to accomplish this?
Perhaps, in the Israel of two thousand years ago the answer would be obvious. But Jesus is commissioning disciples too go to gentiles and teach them commandments -- which, unlike with the Jews -- they’ve never before heard.
The Gospel of Luke gives part of the answer, by offering the illustrative parable of the Good Samaritan. Timothy Keller has taken apart the action of loving one’s neighbor that are shown in the Samaritan’s behavior and revealed its nuts and bolts. Keller explain the movement of compassion as a 5-part engaged process. [4]
1) Notice - “looked at him” - took deliberate notice.
2) Examine - “contacted the man, touched the man, came to be where he was.” - this is close examination, (there could not be asking and active listening as would ordinarily be the case)
3) Feel - “felt his misery” - this is empathy.
4) Interpret, decide - “thought about the needs of the man” - interpretation, creative problem solving.
5) Act - Treated the wound, put the man on his horse, took him to an inn, paid for his room and board - effective action.
Presbyterian pastor Timothy Keller’s model, based on the words of Jesus Christ, is fully consistent with the descriptions of the compassion process that are given by today’s leading research psychologists and neuroscientists who have studied how brain processes operate during compassion states.
In the sermon in which Keller includes this 5-point model of the Jesus’s illustration of compassion points out, he goes on to point out the seriousness of compassion -- and the seriousness of the absence of compassion by comparing it to the Jesus’s allegory of the sheep and the goats [Mat. 25:31-46], which is not about “works,” handouts of food, clothing, provision of homeless shelters, prison ministry -- but about the transformed, ”reborn” heart that causes his followers to manifest compassion without prompting, without institutional structure.
Although Dr. Keller explains Jesus’s illustration of compassion accurately -- and in a manner consistent with current science -- he does not, in the sermon, discuss how one becomes compassionate in the confident, brave and costly way Jesus commands us to be.
The Deliberate Task of Disciple-Making
The late Dallas Willard was the most articulate voice promoting the unexpurgated Great Commission. He devoted a 2006 book to the topic titled The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship. In it Willard argued that churches have largely failed to honor the Great Commission’s call for Christians to "make disciples of all the nations." They responded instead by making "Christians," not "disciples." [5]
Churches focus on worship and the study of scripture, which are religious activities distinct from the making of disciples. Indeed, the Great Commission is explicitly about spreading the message of Jesus’s three-and-a-half-year-long ministry, his death, and his resurrection to the gentiles of the world, while worship, studying Hebrew scripture (or the not yet extant texts of the New Testament) are not part of his final orders. Alan Hirsch makes this point which frequently surprises those who hear it, pithily.
Jesus never commands us to worship him, but he does call us to follow & to obey. Obedience & discipleship is the way we truly worship Jesus. [6]
Willard devoted his later career to promoting methods to make disciples. He died in 2012, at the age of 77. Though he did live to see the radical changes, changing at an accelerated rate, Willard, like all leaders of his generation had no way to predict or prepare for the tsunami of change brought on by the internet. Thus, we ought to forgive him for not having a spiritual formation program ready to address short attention span, narcissism as a cultural norm, celebrity worship, intensified consumerism and post-modernist political ideologies that violate science and common sense.
How to become a “Little Christ”
Remember C. S. Lewis’s declaration in our epigraph -- that becoming something, being something, is all that matters: that something being a “little Christ.” That is the sole purpose of the activities we call the Christian religion.
Since the early days of Christ-following, there have been spiritual practices which cultivate compassion available to Christ-Followers as with the Desert Fathers of the 3rd century onward. In the mid-20th century a revival and promotion of these practices took place within the Catholic church.
In the 21st century, however, something unexpected and unprecedented has come to pass. I call it “The Compassion Renaissance.” By this, I mean the growing field of affective neuroscience, whose research on compassion has led to the creation of a range of practices that offer effective means of cultivating compassion, and, which studies the effectiveness of these compassion practices -- a movement that is growing exponentially. The Compassion Renaissance is profoundly is influencing pedagogy, business, medicine, psychology.
So far, Christianity (with rare exceptions) has not only not embraced The Compassion Renaissance but is generally completely unaware of it. It is the greatest irony of our age -- that so many Christian institutions have moved so far away from Jesus’s plain teachings and commands that the most reliable contemporary method by which to learn how to actually do what Jesus said is most important for us all to do is being taken up by secular culture and has not piqued the interest of professed Christians.
How about that rare exception I mentioned? It is little known, but it is extraordinary, beautiful, well-developed and ready to be championed and spread everywhere.
Over the millennia, many Christian institutions seem to have forgotten the “how to” aspects of “the way Jesus prepared his disciples to transform hearts hardened from the assaults of life into compassionate hearts.” [7] 21st century affective neuroscience asserts that “it is possible to learn to be genuinely compassionate; compassion can be taught,” [8] and so does the Christian organization, Center for Engaged Compassion (CEC), founded in 2010.
Co-founder, Frank Rogers Jr. in his book presenting the Christian Compassion Practice as developed by his team at CEC, is offering the “how” to the most fundamental commandment:
The core teaching of Jesus shows us that to become fully compassionate is to turn appropriate understanding and care-filled feeling into powerful, caring actions. . . . Genuine compassion is not limited to moments of suffering, offering an empathic connection only as long as others are in pain. Genuine compassion takes as much delight in others’ flourishing as it feels pathos for their pain. Indeed, pathos, when soaked with compassionate care, gives rise to the yearning that wounded persons flourish with abundant life. [9]
This spiritual truth is what the parable of the Good Samaritan was meant to illustrate, it is what is referenced in the judgement of the sheep and the goats. Jesus’s command to be compassionate is an invitation to join him in a way that is what is meant by “believe in” Him, that is to follow His firm direction. It is a process, this cultivating of compassion. The Holy Spirit is the power behind the growth and transformation of mind and heart, but we cannot just passively expect the Spirit to do our spiritual sit-ups for us. As Dr. Rogers frames it:
[C]ompassion needs to be cultivated if it is to grow and become second nature to us. A way to accomplish this is through the transformation of our mind (Rom 8:9-11; Col 3:10) this process of renewal deepens our capacity to discern the will and working of God over and against the prevalent zeitgeist. In other words, we begin to imbue the “mind of Christ” that reflects in thoughts, words, and character God’s compassionate heart towards a broken and suffering world. [10]
Christianity needs to relearn the how part of “teaching them to obey all I have commanded you,” the paramount of which would be the second most important commandment. Teaching the content without teaching the how is worthless -- No, it is worse than worthless; it is hypocrisy.
But that long-lost understanding of the how is now reclaimed and easily available to us once again.
Here are the three best sources. Each is brief and clear. I recommend beginning with either the Rogers book (which contains the most complete notes on the Practice itself) or the Nolasco book (which gives a brief theological analysis and scientific explanation).
- Frank Rogers Jr., Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus, Aug. 1, 2016, Upper Room Books, 167 pages.
- Rolf R. Nolasco Jr. & Vincent McDonald, Compassionate Presence: A Radical Response to Human Suffering, 2016, Wipf and Stock, 138 pages.
- Andrew Dreitcer, Living Compassion: Loving Like Jesus, Nov. 1, 2017, Upper Room Books. 161 pages.
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NOTES:
[1] C. S. Lewis, BBC radio broadcast, March 28, 30, 1944; book: Beyond Personality, Ch. 8. “Is Christianity Hard or Easy?”; (1945; collected in Mere Christianity, 1952.
[2] The Gospel of Matthew does not specifically use such a term. In fact, the phrase “Great Commission” does not appear until late in Christian history. Some scholars argue that it was coined by Baron Justinian von Welz, a 17th-century Lutheran nobleman, who argued that the words in Matthew 28 meant that all Christians were required to spread the faith, not just Jesus’ closest disciples. [Mathew Schmalz, “What is the Great Commission and why is it so controversial?” The Conversation, Feb. 8, 2019]
[3] The Great Commandment (or Greatest Commandment) is a name used in the New Testament to describe the first of two commandments cited by Jesus in Matthew 22:35-40, Mark 12:28-34, and in answer to him in Luke 10:27. Most Christian denominations consider these two commandments to be the core of correct Christian lifestyle. It is derived from Deuteronomy 6:4-5 "Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." and Leviticus 19:18 "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord." [Wikipedia]
[4] from: Timothy J. Keller, “Neighbors,” from series: “The Meaning of Jesus,” Part 2; “Following Him,” February 23, 2003; (43:13) 2:37-43:13; Scripture: Luke 10:25-37. See: R. Stephens, “Jesus’s Compassion Command : Excerpts from Timothy Keller,” The Compassion Renaissance, Dec. 8, 2021 - https://compassion-renaissance.blogspot.com/2022/03/jesuss-compassion-command-excerpts-from.html
[5] The last command Jesus gave the church before he ascended to heaven was the Great Commission, the call for Christians to "make disciples of all the nations." But Christians have responded by making "Christians," not "disciples." This, according to brilliant scholar and renowned Christian thinker Dallas Willard, has been the church's Great Omission. "The word disciple occurs 269 times in the New Testament," writes Willard. "Christian is found three times and was first introduced to refer precisely to disciples of Jesus. . . . The New Testament is a book about disciples, by disciples, and for disciples of Jesus Christ. But the point is not merely verbal. What is more important is that the kind of life we see in the earliest church is that of a special type of person. All of the assurances and benefits offered to humankind in the gospel evidently presuppose such a life and do not make realistic sense apart from it. The disciple of Jesus is not the deluxe or heavy-duty model of the Christian -- especially padded, textured, streamlined, and empowered for the fast lane on the straight and narrow way. He or she stands on the pages of the New Testament as the first level of basic transportation in the Kingdom of God." [publisher promotional copy]
[6] Jesus never commands us to worship him, but he does call us to follow & to obey. Obedience & discipleship is the way we truly worship Jesus. [Alan Hirsch, Twitter, Nov. 2, 2018]
[7] Publisher blurb, Upper Room Books for Frank Rogers Jr., Cultivating Compassion: The Way of Jesus, - “the way Jesus prepared his disciples to transform hearts hardened from the assaults of life into compassionate hearts.”
[8] p. 13 Andrew Dreitcer, Living Compassion: Loving Like Jesus, Nov. 1, 2017, Upper Room Books.
[9] pp. 23, 33; Frank Rogers Jr., Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus, Aug. 1, 2016, Upper Room Books.
[10] p. 59, Frank Rogers Jr., Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus, Aug. 1, 2016, Upper Room Books.
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