Luke 21:1-4 (CEV)
1Jesus looked up and saw some rich people tossing their gifts into the offering box. 2 He also saw a poor widow putting in two pennies. 3 And he said, “I tell you that this poor woman has put in more than all the others. 4 Everyone else gave what they didn’t need. But she is very poor and gave everything she had.”
He Saw
I was in junior high when images of the gang riots in L.A. flooded the news.
The six days of violence that followed the Rodney King trial resulted in 63 deaths, 2383 injured and over 12,000 arrests. Although the most stunning display of gang violence the city had seen in decades, the riots merely unmasked for a few short days the scale of a problem that L.A. dealt with on a daily basis.
In one of the poorest neighbourhoods in L.A. – a neighbourhood overwhelmed by extreme poverty, gang culture and the flip-flop life of crime and prison – was a young priest. His name was Father Gregory Boyle.
When he had first arrived in L.A. in 1986 he had taken time to get to know the people in his neighbourhood, learning about their hopes and fears, their hurts and dreams. As he heard about how hard it was to get work for those who had been previously incarcerated, he decided to try to create jobs for folks who wanted to leave the gang life.
Like many who have worked with other at-risk groups, Father Gregory found that jobs only took people so far. Hope of a future only took them so far. But there had to be more than just a job and some hope for the future if people were going to weather the monkey wrenches that life was to throw at them.
So he started Homeboy Industries and with it, introduced an idea he calls ‘radical kinship’.
‘Kinship’ to Father Gregory, means that “there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’ – there is only a community where everybody belongs. … Part of that means coming to terms – being friends – with your own brokenness and your own wound. Because if you aren’t – if you’re a stranger to your own wound – then you’re going to be tempted to despise the wounded.”
Today, Homeboy Industries serves more than 15,000 people per year who want to ‘reimagine’ their lives. The organization has taken a 70% rate of return to prison and turned it into a 30% rate of return – an extraordinary accomplishment, and one that he says comes from expanding the circle of belonging until everyone is included.
Father Gregory claims that in 30 years of working with gang members he’s “never met an evil person. Never. Because the minute you start to know what people carry, it breaks through, and you stand in awe of what folks have to carry, rather than in judgment of how they carry it. Everybody belongs. It’s where you begin. And so you imagine a circle of compassion and then you imagine nobody standing outside of the circle. That’s what we try to disrupt – the notion that there just might be lives out there that matter more than other lives. We stand against it.”
This idea of seeing another is incredibly radical – but it’s not new. For Father Gregory, for Mother Teresa, for thousands of followers of Jesus going back now 2000 years, this idea that we are called to see the shared humanity of the person in front of us through our understanding of ourselves as broken, wounded people, this is the heart of the Gospel.
And this is the heart of what I hear in this passage.
In a world so like our own that many if not most of Jesus’ original audience may have been looking at this poor, bedraggled woman with pity – if not derision – Luke tells us that Jesus stops and sees her.
He sees what she has to carry.
He lets the pain of her heartache of poverty and loss and social isolation and ostracization fill him to the point of compassion.
And then the God of the Universe, in human form, steps back in awe and wonder and compassion for this woman’s act of faith and obedience and says, “she is inside the circle”.
Journal Questions:
- Draw your circle of compassion.
- Who is inside this circle?
- Who is not inside this circle?
- Father Gregory claims that “human beings can’t demonize people they know.” Do you need to build any intentional relationships this year with people who have traditionally been outside of your circle of compassion?
- What would it look like for you to look at these folks with Jesus’ eyes?
- To see what they have to carry?
- To let the pain of their heartaches fill you to the point of compassion?
- To step back in awe and wonder and to welcome them in to the circle?
- To say that we belong to each other?
