Does Happiness Require Apathy to Others’ Sorrows?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Welcome to a new week on the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:00:08.080 | We head into Thanksgiving in a few days
00:00:10.480 | and Pastor John, there was recently a discussion online
00:00:13.660 | among non-Christian philosophers
00:00:15.880 | and it started out with an old Woody Allen line
00:00:18.620 | he once said in a movie.
00:00:19.640 | He said this, "If one guy is starving someplace,
00:00:23.240 | it puts a cramp in my evening," end quote.
00:00:26.800 | Which raises this question, can a person truly experience
00:00:30.960 | happiness without ignorance and apathy
00:00:33.680 | of the suffering of others?
00:00:36.380 | To be completely insensitive to suffering in this world
00:00:39.400 | is to be a sociopath.
00:00:41.800 | To be completely sensitive to the suffering of others,
00:00:44.620 | you would pretty much die of grief
00:00:46.760 | from the collective suffering of the world.
00:00:49.360 | So if empathy means you cannot enjoy dinner
00:00:52.120 | with a starving child staring at you near the dinner table,
00:00:56.020 | yet your dinner can resume normally
00:00:58.020 | if that starving child exists behind a wall,
00:01:01.500 | does it seem that ignorance then
00:01:03.240 | is an important requisite for happiness?
00:01:06.480 | So here's the question, Pastor John,
00:01:08.640 | does my happiness require ignorance or even apathy
00:01:12.940 | with the suffering of others?
00:01:15.280 | - I doubt that I have a fully satisfying answer to this,
00:01:20.280 | even for myself, and I'm not sure there is
00:01:23.800 | a theoretically satisfying answer that deals
00:01:28.120 | in quantities of knowledge and apathy and happiness.
00:01:33.120 | I suspect that the answer to this is found
00:01:38.240 | in becoming a kind of person in the image of Christ
00:01:42.700 | who learns how best to love within the limitations
00:01:47.700 | in this world of suffering.
00:01:51.040 | But having said I'm not sure there is an answer,
00:01:55.320 | here's my best effort to say something helpful,
00:01:57.800 | at least this is what I preach to myself.
00:02:00.320 | Number one, the way I've approached this question
00:02:05.120 | in the past is to note that Paul said in Romans 12, 15,
00:02:10.120 | "Rejoice with those who rejoice
00:02:12.920 | and weep with those who weep."
00:02:14.480 | And there are people who are weeping right now,
00:02:19.040 | and there are people who are rejoicing right now,
00:02:21.880 | even in our own circle, not to mention the millions
00:02:26.880 | who are weeping and rejoicing around the world.
00:02:30.180 | And my answer to that paradox has been
00:02:33.720 | that Christians are always sorrowful at one level
00:02:38.720 | and happy at another level, and we give expression
00:02:44.860 | to the one or the other according to whether we are
00:02:48.480 | at a wedding or a funeral, even though we know
00:02:51.000 | at the wedding that a family is at the hospital right now
00:02:53.920 | during the wedding with the dying wife and mother,
00:02:57.060 | and we'll be there in a few hours probably,
00:02:58.840 | and we're not gonna ruin the wedding.
00:03:00.360 | One of the most important pastoral verses in the Bible
00:03:03.320 | is 2 Corinthians 6, 10, where Paul says,
00:03:06.540 | "He is sorrowful yet always rejoicing."
00:03:09.900 | That's what I mean by saying Christians carry
00:03:12.680 | in their souls a sadness in this life that never goes away.
00:03:18.520 | And they carry a joy in this life that never goes away.
00:03:22.960 | So that's my first observation from Romans 12, 15
00:03:27.080 | and 2 Corinthians 6, 10.
00:03:28.640 | Here's a second set of thoughts.
00:03:31.080 | The parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10
00:03:34.160 | is relevant to the issue of dealing with the suffering
00:03:38.920 | of the world that's far away and near at hand.
00:03:41.440 | Jesus tells the parable in response
00:03:43.760 | to a man's self-justifying question,
00:03:45.760 | who is my neighbor, because he realizes
00:03:48.480 | he can't love everybody the way he loves himself.
00:03:51.880 | And so he's trying to figure out,
00:03:52.960 | well, who don't I have to love like this?
00:03:55.120 | And Jesus doesn't like that question.
00:03:57.200 | He's not happy with the way this man posed the question.
00:04:01.320 | So he tells the story of the man who's beaten
00:04:06.320 | and left for dead on the side of the road,
00:04:08.400 | and the priest goes by on the side and doesn't help,
00:04:10.920 | and the Levite goes by and doesn't help,
00:04:12.560 | and a Samaritan stops and he helps him.
00:04:15.560 | And Jesus ends the parable like this.
00:04:17.960 | Which of these three do you think
00:04:20.320 | prove to be neighbor to the man?
00:04:23.080 | He switched the question.
00:04:24.040 | Prove to be neighbor to the man who fell among robbers.
00:04:27.640 | And the man said, well, the one who showed compassion.
00:04:30.400 | And Jesus said, you go and do likewise.
00:04:32.600 | And that's the end of the story.
00:04:33.720 | That's the end.
00:04:34.560 | He's not gonna deal with this man anymore.
00:04:35.960 | In other words, it seems like you don't solve the problem
00:04:39.000 | of the commandment, love your neighbor,
00:04:40.600 | by figuring out who qualifies and who doesn't.
00:04:42.800 | Like, who can be excluded?
00:04:43.880 | Who are my non-neighbors?
00:04:45.720 | Good, I don't have to worry about them.
00:04:47.360 | Rather, you become a kind of person who can't pass by
00:04:52.360 | on the other side of the road
00:04:55.760 | when there is suffering within your touch.
00:04:59.000 | Take the opportunities to love and serve at hand,
00:05:02.760 | and you will prove to be a kind of person
00:05:06.480 | that God wants you to be.
00:05:09.400 | Jesus healed people in his past.
00:05:12.040 | He didn't heal the American Indians.
00:05:15.200 | And he didn't heal the Chinese.
00:05:16.680 | And he didn't heal the people in India in his day.
00:05:18.960 | He healed the ones along the road who cried out
00:05:22.720 | that he could reach out and touch.
00:05:25.640 | And then with a clear conscience,
00:05:27.840 | he sat down and feasted with the publicans,
00:05:30.880 | because even there, he was a physician,
00:05:34.200 | meeting with people because he loved them
00:05:36.280 | and wanted to do them good, even at their parties.
00:05:40.600 | So that's my second cluster of thoughts around Luke 10,
00:05:45.440 | the parable of the Good Samaritan.
00:05:47.440 | One more set of thoughts.
00:05:50.080 | Yes, it is necessary that we be ignorant
00:05:53.200 | in order to be happy.
00:05:54.600 | But what I mean is that it's necessary
00:05:57.000 | that we accept our finitude.
00:05:59.160 | Only God is not ignorant.
00:06:01.920 | Only God knows all the suffering in the world.
00:06:04.760 | If we knew all, we would be contenders for deity,
00:06:09.560 | and we know what happens to contenders for deity.
00:06:12.320 | They lose.
00:06:13.400 | So ignorance, accepting our finitude,
00:06:16.600 | is essential for our creaturehood
00:06:18.960 | and therefore for our happiness.
00:06:22.080 | The reason God can be infinite in knowledge
00:06:25.800 | and infinite in happiness
00:06:27.960 | is that only God has other infinite attributes
00:06:32.960 | that make it possible for him to handle infinite knowledge.
00:06:37.680 | Only God has infinite wisdom and infinite goodness
00:06:41.480 | to see how all the suffering of the world
00:06:43.880 | will someday fit into a plan that makes sense of it all.
00:06:47.120 | We don't.
00:06:48.000 | We don't have that capacity.
00:06:49.440 | Therefore, we can't handle that kind of infinite knowledge.
00:06:53.000 | So in our case, I would put it like this.
00:06:56.000 | The more our knowledge of suffering increases,
00:06:59.080 | and today it does,
00:07:01.240 | the more the other godlike attributes must increase,
00:07:05.400 | not to make us God, but to be more like God.
00:07:07.920 | The other godlike attributes have to increase
00:07:11.400 | lest we be crushed under the weight
00:07:14.640 | of simultaneous multiplied empathies
00:07:17.760 | or hardened with self-protecting indifference.
00:07:22.200 | These other attributes that I'm thinking about
00:07:24.840 | are things like greater capacities for mercy,
00:07:29.000 | greater capacities for compassion, on the one hand,
00:07:32.760 | and a growing grasp, this one's really essential,
00:07:36.880 | a growing grasp of biblical truth
00:07:40.720 | that gives some meaning to the suffering of the world,
00:07:44.160 | even the suffering we can't reach
00:07:46.040 | and what is happening to people out there
00:07:50.360 | and what meaning that might have.
00:07:53.480 | If these other godlike attributes don't increase in us
00:07:58.480 | in proportion to our awareness
00:08:01.120 | and our experience of suffering,
00:08:02.480 | we're gonna be overwhelmed.
00:08:05.280 | So in the end, my sense is that we should all
00:08:10.280 | immerse ourselves in the life and the teaching
00:08:14.680 | and the work of Christ so that we learn with Him
00:08:19.680 | in real experience what it is to be sorrowful
00:08:23.840 | and yet always rejoicing,
00:08:27.200 | always seeking to spread that joy to as many as we can.
00:08:33.080 | - Yes, thank you, Pastor John.
00:08:35.520 | And this leads me to ask another philosophical question
00:08:37.880 | about happiness, and that is,
00:08:39.760 | are smart people less happy?
00:08:42.440 | Ernest Hemingway said so,
00:08:43.760 | but I wanna hear from you, Pastor John, tomorrow.
00:08:45.840 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:08:46.720 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:08:49.320 | (upbeat music)
00:08:51.900 | (upbeat music)
00:08:54.480 | [BLANK_AUDIO]