heart matters

Everywhere I look I see broken hearts. You can always tell a broken heart. The pieces cut you when you try to pick them up. They can’t help it. I think this is the way Jesus saw everyone. That’s why he was Compassion. I don’t accept any portrayal of God if he is not compassionate. To me that is so crucial in distinguishing love from all that parodies love.

I was talking with a couple of friends the other night about the compassion of Jesus, especially with broken hearts and shattered lives. He was the friend of sinners. You never heard Jesus speaking harshly to seedy types like tax collectors or prostitutes or social outcasts like lepers or beggars. You see Jesus dignifying their lives. On the other hand, he was harsh, scathing the religious and the well-to-do types with his fiery words. He didn’t judge them, but he had a mouthful about the way they treated others, particularly the way they kept them under their thumbs. It was like Jesus expected so much more from them, so much better than that from people who had better access to God through education and free time and wealth. His words were meant to challenge them, and I wonder…perhaps even to break their hearts?

Jesus, after all, came to bind up the brokenhearted. And yet here were these people who had so insulated themselves from the world that their hard hearts were there on display—in the form of a whole heart, looking as if they were unbroken, untouched by the great fall. So here comes Jesus throwing rocks. It’s as if Jesus felt like every heart should be broken. Or maybe it was more like Jesus realized that every heart was broken, and for anyone to deny that, to piece it together and prop it up and encase it within togetherness, was to deny the way things really are, to deny the divine narrative, to deny God.

I am sick to death of people pretending they are fine. I am also sick to death of people telling others to get over it, as if a broken heart is something you just shrug off and move on. Time doesn’t heal, and there is no strength to be found in the shards of shattered hearts. If time healed, Jesus wouldn’t have come to bind up—God would have kept out of our business and just let the magic of time heal all wounds. And to suggest that it’s good for someone to charge forward with half a heart laying on the ground as fine people pass by and casually crush it under foot is evil. That is not the heart of God for broken hearts. At all.

It is odd how Jesus came speaking and doing. He taught that if your eye or hand causes you to sin to pluck it out or cut it off, because it would be better to enter eternal life without that part of your body. Yet Jesus was constantly healing blind eyes and withered hands of known sinners. On the other hand, Jesus came telling people to love with all their hearts. Yet when he saw hearts that weren’t broken he threw stones at them. When he verbally assaulted the Scribes and Pharisees about their practice of religion, that was very hurtful. You could imagine being a banker or financial planner who had devoted your life to helping churches get their finances in order to be right with God and man, and Jesus came accusing you of knowing nothing of money or God, and of mishandling both. I don't think I'm overstating this—they were well aware that Jesus was a teacher come from God, as one of them said. It is almost like Jesus wants to make sure that everyone feels their chest cave in, and tastes those bitter tears that trickle out of a collapsing heart. It is almost like Jesus wants to make sure that everything that can be broken is broken.

The struggle for me is to see that when Jesus breaks my heart it is his compassion that motivates him. When my dreams lie in pieces all around me, when my desires fade into a mist and burn off in the heat of cruel daylight, can I believe that the God who let this happen to me (or makes this happen to me!) loves me still? Could I even believe that this is the proof he loves me? When I wonder if my heart was created just so it could be broken, can I be satisfied when the answer is yes? Can I accept and even believe that my broken heart is the cornerstone for a relationship with the healer of broken hearts?

If anything of me matters to God it is my heart—more than my actions, more than my words, more than my mind, more than my body, more than my soul. It’s hard to believe that when my heart breaks once again. I don’t know. Maybe it’s in these times that God wants to show me some more of His compassion—some that my heart wasn’t ready for until it was broken.