Compassion and social revolution

Brueggemann again. He writes as if power were necessarily oppressive, but with some qualifications he has a profound point:

“The replacing of numbness with compassion, that is, the end of cynical indifference and the beginning of noticed pain, signals a social revolution . . . . The capacity of feel the hurt of the marginal people means an end to all social arrangements that nullified pain by a remarkable depth of numbness.”

Jesus’ compassion embodies this opposition to the “dominant culture”: “the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief . . . . The imperial consciousness lives by its capacity to still the groans and to go on with business as usual as thought none were hurting and there were no groans. If the groans become audible, if they can be heard in the streets and markets and court, then the consciousness of domination is already jeopardized . . . . Newness comes precisely from expressed pain. Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulated grief is the gate of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into pain and giving it voice.”