God’s Empathy

Christmas 2021

We’re approaching the end of the Covid-19 pandemic’s second year. Last summer, thanks to vaccinations, many of us believed it would be over by now, and our lives would get back to normal. But with vaccine hesitancy and the rise of the Delta variant, and now Omicron, our hopes were soon dashed. The restrictions this Christmas are less intrusive than last year – we had a Christmas market in Wiesbaden – but the unvaccinated were barred from stores and restaurants, even with tests.

The split in German society is worse now than last year. Many of the vaccinated point their fingers at the unvaccinated and blame them for the continuing pandemic. Many of the unvaccinated, in turn, argue that the vaccinated have a lack of empathy. And the reality is that vaccines provide a lot of protection but don’t prevent someone from contracting and spreading the disease.

Sympathy, compassion, empathy

Christians are called to love their neighbors as themselves. If our neighbor is suffering, we should understand and care for his or her suffering. That’s sympathy. We should go further and put this understanding and caring into action. That’s compassion. Empathy goes further: here we share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. That’s hard to do.

Some Christians even argue that empathy is wrong. In the conservative evangelical website Desiring God, for example, Joe Rigney writes that empathy is a sin. Adopting the persona of Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, he argues that empathy means losing yourself in the other’s feelings, giving up your own identity and judgment. Rigney compares it to seeing someone flailing in quicksand and jumping in with both feet. The result is that both go under. In contrast, compassion means keeping one foot on solid ground while reaching out to the other.

If Rigney’s definition of empathy is correct, then he’s right: when showing compassion, we must remain grounded in Christ. If we see a drug addict shooting up heroin, we must not inject it ourselves to be “empathetic”. But who describes empathy that way?

God’s empathy

God in the person of Jesus Christ gives us a different example of empathy. All people were lost in sin, falling short of the glory of God. There was a gulf, unbridgeable for us, between God’s holiness and our reality. But God loved us greatly and decided to cross over that gap. God’s eternal Word, His only begotten Son, was born to a virgin. Jesus began as an embryo, then a fetus, and finally was born in a stall. The Lord of the Universe had become a baby, whose first bed was a feeding trough for farm animals. C.S. Lewis picturesquely wrote, “If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.”

Jesus lived a simple life as a carpenter’s son in a small village in Galilee. He taught and worked miracles as an itinerant preacher. His family thought He was crazy.  He ran afoul of the religious and political authorities. Betrayed and abandoned by His friends, He was tortured to death on the cross, the most humiliating form of execution the Roman Empire knew.

Jesus had empathy with us. In His human nature, He felt the same things we do – cold, hunger, thirst, pain. Jesus went through this for many reasons. The Lord of the Universe lived as a poor man to elevate the poor, making the last first. He suffered betrayal and death as our representative to redeem us and the world. He didn’t have to go through any of that – but He did because He loved us.

Jesus felt the same things we did. He truly had empathy. But without sin. Rigney’s definition of empathy is wrong, I believe, but he’s right that in showing compassion, we must keep our allegiance to Christ and the truth. If we try to pull someone out of the quicksand, we still must keep one foot on solid ground. Our relationship with God gives us that ground.

Empathy for the unvaccinated

Those of us who are vaccinated must not demonize the unvaccinated. We should understand that many of them are truly afraid of the side effects of the vaccine, including those that are still unknown. And if an unvaccinated person gets seriously sick, we should reject any sense that it “serves them right”. Nor should we exclude them unnecessarily from participation in public life.

But we also have an obligation to others, including those who can’t be vaccinated or are at risk due to weakened immune systems. We should insist on frequent testing of the unvaccinated – and maybe of the vaccinated as well – as a condition for participation in public life. Masks in public spaces indoors should remain mandatory, and we should maintain social distancing.

Empathy, combined with truth, can heal our broken society. Jesus Christ showed us the way. As we celebrate His birth, we should ponder that His life, death, and resurrection served to reconcile us to God and each other. Let’s go about this work of reconciliation.