You’re watching your friend, spouse, whoever, drive nails in fence boards. Suddenly you see the hammer slip off the nail and land on the thumb that is holding it. Your reaction? Before you rush over to inquire, offer help, etc., if you have seen clearly what happened it’s likely you yourself will wince with pain, maybe even before the other person cries out, swears, or whatever. According to (somewhat controversial) neuroscience, that’s the structure of your brain at work in what’s called the mirror neuron system.
When we perform actions and experience feelings and emotions, neurons in our brains fire in certain patterns. The amazing thing is that, apparently, mirror neurons in our brains fire in similar patterns even when we merely witness those actions or feelings in others. Some scientists believe mirror neurons constitute the brain biology which supports our understanding of other people’s actions, thoughts, and feelings. That means they help us feel empathy and compassion when others around us are hurting.
The very words we use to describe the experience of feeling what others feel demonstrates a recognition of something like “mirroring” going on. The Greek roots of “sympathy” mean “suffering together.” The Latin roots of “compassion” suggest something like “co-suffering.” However, the word translated “compassion” in verse 34 our Gospel text for this Sunday, Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 is an even more graphic, literally visceral, way of suggesting a shared pain. That word is ἐσπλαγχνίσθη, esplangchnisthe, which derives from σπλαγχνoν, splangchnon, which denotes one’s bowels or entrails. It’s used in Acts 1:18 to tell how, when Judas fell in death, his “bowels gushed out.”
So the word for compassion in the text implies a shared pain or sorrow that is actually felt with one’s body, in the “pit of your stomach,” if you will. That internal bodily movement of shared feeling is what we’re told Jesus experienced in regard to the crowd that met Him and the disciples as they landed at a deserted place along the lake in the hope of getting some rest.
The proximate cause of Jesus’ compassion in verse 34, we’re told, is His perception that the crowd was “like sheep without a shepherd.” Here all the shepherd imagery of Scripture boils up for us, like Psalm 23 which we will recite together, and the promise in Jeremiah 23 that God will give His people good shepherds in place of the evil ones who have been harming them.
In any case, we then get to see Jesus’ response to the compassion He felt. Focusing on the feelings and needs of the people before them, He first, as is often pointed out, fed them spiritually by teaching, then fed them physically in the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Jesus let what He did be motivated by the lost and hungry feelings of the people that were mirrored by His mind rather than being driven by the need for rest He Himself felt along with His disciples. Compassion moved Him to action.
As we read it from the lectionary, we skip over both the actual feeding of the five thousand and then Jesus walking on the water as the disciples in a boat rowed away from that place. We simply pick up in verse 53 with “When they had crossed over,” only to find that people there too recognize Him and came rushing to Him, this time to be healed. What follows is a description of a great, comprehensive ministry of healing that seems to have left out no sick person in villages, cities or rural areas throughout the region.
In this age of self-protectiveness, acknowledging valid concerns for self-care, can Jesus’ response to compassion be a model we may truly follow in some way? How can we let ourselves be more receptive to the suffering of others, feel it in our own guts, and reach out with teaching, sharing of basic needs, and healing for those around us? That seems more and more like an important question to ask ourselves in these times.