May 13, 2022

Job 12: 5 (NIV)

“Men at ease have contempt for misfortune as the fate of those whose feet are slipping.”

When people are little more than a punch line, it’s hard to honestly claim you love them.*

I have a friend who used to be homeless – well, she lived in a tent – but now she is employed and housed and enrolled in college. She is also a Christian but she admits that she sometimes struggles with finding compassion in her heart for her former associates in the down-and-out community. It’s sad but true: the further removed we are from our misfortune, the more our compassion fades. If we have overcome a difficult past, we tend to look down on those who are still wallowing in the same difficulties. We can be downright harsh when we see someone who has “brought it on himself.”

It’s even worse for those of us who have never walked in those hand-me-down shoes. What is our problem? Do we think it’s contagious . . . that we can catch bad luck by looking at it? No, I can’t relate to my friend’s life on the street. I don’t know what it feels like to lose a child or suffer with a lifelong illness. But I do know about failed marriage and the loss of a career.  Do I deserve contempt because those heartbreaks resulted, at least in part, from my bad choices? 

One Bible commentator says that it is a “universal trait of our fallen human nature” to despise the unfortunate.* God forgive me for all the times that I have felt superior to another and thought “There but for the grace of God go I” in the snottiest sense of the phrase. Jesus knew every loser’s backstory, saw through every liar’s lies, and foresaw every sinner’s slip back into the old life, but he loved them anyway. And good for me that he still does because I am that loser, that liar, that sinner. 

We can’t sit back at ease, feeling contempt for those whose misfortunes are the inevitable result of their poor choices and call ourselves followers of Jesus. Followers of Jesus demonstrate compassion and perhaps, in time, we learn to feel it, too.

Love moves towards others in the spirit of self-sacrifice: fear shrinks from others in the spirit of self-preservation.*