“Since our sweet Jesus is so good, compassionate and kind, why should you despair? We seek one small thing from Him, and He gives us so much! We ask for one beam of light, and He gives us Himself as all Light, Truth, and Love. So humble yourself and rest all your hope in Him.” Elder Joseph the Hesychast
The Bible often tells us that God is compassionate, but in the person of Jesus it shows us. Jesus’ whole ministry could be summed up in this one word. He felt compassion toward those who suffered physically. Listen to these excerpts from the gospels: “Moved with pity he stretched out his hand and touched him” (speaking of a leper, Mark 1:41). “Jesus in pity touched their eyes” (of two blind men outside Jericho, Matthew 20:34).
“He had compassion on [the crowds] . . . and he healed their sick” (Matthew 14:14). Jesus also felt compassion for people who were suffering emotional distress. One day while walking past a little village Jesus saw a funeral procession in which a widow was going out to bury her only son. “When the Lord saw her his heart broke” (Luke 7:13, The Message), and Jesus restored the woman’s son to life.
Compassion alludes to kindness and sympathy, but there is something deeper, something even more profoundly powerful, in its meaning.
Most of all, Jesus had compassion on people who were suffering spiritually.
Jesus did more, though, than just look at the crowds of suffering people. He also felt for them. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them.” There is that word again: compassion.
For us, a good way of translating it would be to say “Jesus’ heart went out to them” or even “his heart broke for them,” because the heart is the organ that we identify with compassion, or caring or love.
For the Hebrews compassion was also identified metaphorically with an organ of the body. But they located it a bit lower. To them compassion was something you felt in your intestines. So when Matthew says that Jesus had compassion on the crowd his expression literally means that Jesus’ guts were churning as he saw these suffering people.
The origin of the word helps us grasp the true breadth and significance of compassion. In Latin, ‘compati’ means “suffer with.” Compassion means someone else’s heartbreak becomes your heartbreak. Another’s suffering becomes your suffering. True compassion changes the way we live.
Shepherd-less Sheep
Matthew adds one other thing , an explanation that underscores why Jesus felt compassion for the crowds—because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” In other words, as much as Jesus felt pity for physical suffering, what most roused his compassion for the people around him was their spiritual confusion and disorientation.
Jesus feels for ordinary folks like you and me, people who are stumbling along through life, who are in trouble because of wrong choices or bad decisions or just plain moral weakness. His heart goes out to us.
I really think the biggest human problem of all isn’t cancer, or unemployment, or broken families, or war—as real and terrible as all those things are. I think our biggest problem is that without Christ, we’re lost. We’re wandering around, looking for answers, wondering what went wrong.
Why can’t we seem to make life work? Why are we so prosperous, yet so unhappy? Jesus felt for the crowds, says Matthew, because they were “like sheep without a shepherd.” How’s that for an apt description of the crowds in our own world? Mind you, these people were religious.
They had plenty of religion. What they didn’t have, though, is a relationship with Jesus himself. Their deepest, most basic need was to know Christ, because he is the Good Shepherd. Only he can save.
Think about this: Christian mission begins with the fact that Jesus feels compassion for lost and hurting people. And because his heart goes out to a broken world, Jesus wants us—those who know him, who have been found by the Good Shepherd—to do something about it.