Empathy
Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you. 1 Peter 5:6-7 NASB
He cares – Peter writes to those who are anxious, suffering, and confused. They believe. They live according to their beliefs. The Messiah is their guide. But the world is a lonely place. On all sides, religious and secular, they are outsiders. More than anything, they need to know that God cares. Peter writes to assume them of God’s empathy for them—and for us. When you read this verse from a letter written thousands of years ago, do you hear the words as if they were also written to you? Do you know that God cares for you too? In fact, the absolutely unique fact of the biblical God is precisely this: He cares. This is the only God who expresses intimate concern for His creation, in every detail. If we could describe the God of Israel in just a single word that word would be empathy.
And that raises a critically important question for us. Do we care for God? Maybe this sounds a bit odd. After all, we’ve been trained to believe that God needs nothing, that He is utterly self-sufficient, existing in His fullness before anything else came into existence. But that’s the philosopher’s god, not YHVH, God of Israel. Heschel’s insight makes this distinction abundantly clear:
“The central achievement of biblical religion was to remove the veil of anonymity from the workings of history. There are no ultimate laws, no eternal ideas. The Lord alone is ultimate and eternal. The laws are His creation, and the moral ideas are not entities apart from Him; they are His concern. Indeed, the personalization of the moral idea is the indispensable assumption of prophetic theology. Mercy, grace, repentance, forgiveness, all would be impossible if the moral principle were held to be superior to God. God’s call to man, which resounds so frequently in the utterances of the prophets, presupposes an ethos based, not upon immutable principles, but rather upon His eternal concern. God’s repenting a decision which was based on moral grounds clearly shows the supremacy of pathos.”[1]
The caring God is a personal God. He is not an abstraction, a symbolic representation of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. He is someone who cares, and His caring often involves risk, rejection, heartache and regret. As Heschel notes, “Crime is not a violation of a law, but a sin against the living God.” Things are personal with this God. Ethics is not principles of behavior based on some standard. Ethics is empathy for God. Ethics is feeling how God feels and acting on those feelings. According to Brené Brown, “empathy is essential for building meaningful, trusting relationships, which is something we all want and need. Given its power to overcome shame and its key role in building many different types of connections, empathy is something we would all be wise to learn and to practice. Fortunately, empathy is something that can be learned . . . four defining attributes of empathy: They are (1) to be able to see the world as others see it; (2) to be nonjudgmental; (3) to understand another person’s feelings; and (4) to communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings.”[2]
Peter’s letter confirms God’s care for us, but we, individually, must assert our care for God. We must ask: Am I able to see the world as God sees it? Am I non-judgmental of God’s choices and decisions? Do I understand God’s feelings? Can I communicate my understanding of His feelings to Him?
Do I share His burdens, lift Him up, encourage Him, honor Him? Do I empathize with God? When you can answer these questions, you might want to reconsider what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Topical Index: empathy, care, 1 Peter 5:6-7
[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol 1, p. 217.
[2] Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t), p. 37.
