Jesus circled back to the poor man he healed at Bethesda with an unexpected parting word: “’See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.’” (John 5:14). Contemporary pastoral practice would recommend helping him explore the soul-wounds four decades of physical pain and social isolation inflicted on him, not to mention questions of God’s troublesome delay. Healing his legs, after all, didn’t address his deeper wounds which were no doubt legion.
It’s not at all clear that the newly mobile man was okay with that. After his second encounter with Jesus, he immediately returned to the Jews to answer their question about who the Sabbath breaking healer was. He didn’t know before, but he knew now. He also knew that the new rabbi had a challenging message to go along with his miracles.
Only the most blind naivete would have been unaware of the Jews’ suspicions, yet he used the legs Jesus restored to head straight to them. Things got worse from there. Did he know what he was doing? Make your own decision, but I think so. It appears that as welcome as Jesus’ empathy was, his critical analysis of the man’s issues was less than satisfying.
But as essential as empathy is for true agape, the Bible doesn’t need us to make it more empathetic.
The Gospels are full of stories just like this that compelled the Church to show up at the world’s Bethesdas with healing and practical help. Our cultural moment has much to say about whether we’ve done that. No doubt we should do more, but a fair reading of history tells a 2,000-year story of world changing faithfulness as well as failures. So how do we respond to claims that our message and ministry have been too harsh? Empathy is obviously a big part of the answer. Jesus shows us empathy, the Scriptures demand it and hurting people long for it. But as essential as empathy is for true agape, the Bible doesn’t need us to make it more empathetic. What does it look like when we try? Here are some examples.
The act of genuinely reading Scripture invites a full array of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual challenges. We don’t simply read the Word. The Word reads us back and that encounter can get emotionally “kinetic” when we’re challenged. We all resist Scripture in places, but “wrestling with the text” is only helpful if the text wins, and the text wins when we accept its message regardless of our sensitivities. Increasingly, the interpreter’s authentic skirmish with a difficult doctrine serves as a validation of their conclusion, as if what really matters is that we encounter the text with existential integrity. If we check that box, all that’s left is to wrap our interpretation in sufficient linguistic-theological validity.
The interpreter’s goal is to submit to Scripture, not simply encounter it.
It’s increasingly common for Christian leaders to justify their (usually new, less restrictive) views by assuring their followers that they didn’t come to them lightly. That’s good, of course. No one should change important views casually, but it’s not enough. It can be difficult to accept a counter cultural passage written millennia earlier, but the exegete needs to aim higher than the authenticity of their struggle with it. The interpreter’s goal is to submit to Scripture, not simply encounter it.
In a famous scene from “The West Wing”, Exegete and Chief Jed Bartlet responds to a talk radio host who cites Leviticus as a case against homosexuality. The President is not impressed,
“Chapter and verse. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here. I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?”
That’s just the start. From there he asks the sorry Evangelical to help apply Pentateuchal codes like Sabbath laws and unclean food to White House staff schedules and sports fans. He sure got that guy! We expect that kind of thing from Hollywood but staged debate victories aside we can acknowledge that those passages raise questions that deserve answers.
Yet, it’s common to hear Evangelical teachers use Bartlet’s faux-hermeneutic as a prelude to what’s invariably a more culturally acceptable treatment of the Scripture.
There’s no need, however, to do that by freeing ourselves from the Bible’s supposedly antiquated moralism. The Scripture answers the questions it raises. This isn’t the place to unpack the covenantal context and didactic significance of those passages or their fulfillment and current applications, if any. It is enough, or should be, no one is helped when Christian leaders lazily dismiss once binding, but later eclipsed covenantal stipulations in order to mitigate historic orthodoxy. There are sound biblical reasons why we can eat pork while we quote the Bible about sexual ethics. Yet, it’s common to hear Evangelicals use Bartlet’s faux-hermeneutic as a prelude to what’s invariably a more culturally acceptable treatment of the Scripture.
Redemptive Trendlining is the practice of identifying patterns of progressively looser ethical restrictions and then extrapolating them as indicators that redemption was progressing toward undoing them altogether. The result of Redemptive Trendlining is, not surprisingly, to nullify historically more conservative views. For example, Jesus’ inclusion and empowerment of women among his inner circle is rightly celebrated as a counter-cultural affirmation of their importance to the community of faith. Sadly, the Church still has much to learn from his example. Jesus had influential female disciples and his decision to make his first Resurrection appearance to women provides a substantial affirmation of women’s place in the witness and ministry of the Church.
Identifying that trend should compel the Church toward empowering women, but redemptive trendlines don’t rise in a covenantal vacuum. Like everything else in the Bible they find their meaning and usefulness in the rest of Scripture, which sometimes limits and other times redirects them, but never contradicts them. In this case, using Jesus’ inclusion of women to mitigate Paul’s apparent limitations of their ministry says more about how we see these issues than how Jesus and Paul did. It’s far more likely that they would wonder why we see any tension.
This creates an interpretive impulse to reframe passages in ways our age perceives as more affirming and enlightened.
Jesus has the “very words of life” as Peter said, so when His words come to a dying soul there is always healing and life. But the Word is also “a sharp two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12) and like the surgeon’s scalpel it sometimes wounds in order to heal. Empathy as hermeneutic naturally avoids interpretations that intensify one’s struggles, especially in areas where the Church has hurt them in the past. The logic is simple. Doctrines with a history of harshness don’t align with a Gospel that helps and heals. This creates an interpretive impulse to reframe passages in ways our age perceives as more affirming and enlightened.
This isn’t new, preachers have always preferred to preach peace whether or not there was any. Thankfully, we have peace with God through Christ, but parts of our soul still harbor enmity. When the Word of Peace speaks to those places, the liberation it offers can sound and feel like an attack. That’s a challenging place to be for both sheep and shepherd. But it’s not the business of interpreters to make the message less threatening at the gates of the soul’s rebellious fortress.
This is the globalized version of the preceding characteristic. Just as the Empathy Hermeneutic is inclined to reframe doctrines that hurt individuals, this hermeneutic style tends to use interpretation as a means of Ecclesiastical Repentance. It goes something like this: The Church has a history of X sin (God have mercy, there are plenty to choose from) that has misused Y doctrine. To turn from this history, the Church must change its view on that matter. Of course, very few teachers would put it that way. It’s more likely to hear that honest reflection on the Church’s lamentable past forced them to re-examine the doctrine. When they did, they discovered a better interpretation that avoids the pitfalls the first led us into. How the Church managed to totally miss it for two-thousand years is seldom addressed, but when it is the answer is at the ready. We hadn’t yet admitted our sin. Although the motive is humility and repentance, this hermeneutic seeks repentance in the wrong place. Instead of calling the Church to repent from how it uses a doctrine if it has misused one, Ecclesiastical Repentance has the Scripture do the repenting for us.
Thank God, his empathy feels the pain we feel at depths only Incarnation could experience.
In closing, we need to ask one more question about the encounter at Bethesda. Was Jesus’ parting word empathetic, after all? The man didn’t seem to think so, but unless his heart went randomly cold, Jesus did. His empathy knows the pain we feel at depths only Incarnation could experience. But there is something worse than 40 years of disability, or divorce, or loneliness, or poverty, or even oppression. Jesus feels those pains and is righteously indignant at our casual contempt for the hurting. But his empathy isn’t restricted to the list of wounds and threats of this life. Jesus also anticipates our eternity. He didn’t warn the man about sin because he ran out of empathy. He warned him because he overflowed with it. Empathy is a virtue. It is not a hermeneutic.
