God's compassion

Matthew 9:36 says, "Seeing the people, He (Jesus) felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd."

Isaac Watts worked on the translation of the word "compassion." Knowing the word was insufficient, Watts took another word and wrote the following:

"Touched with a sympathy within,
He knows our feeble frame;
He knows what sore temptations
mean,
For He hath felt the same."

On a human level, this picture of God is that of a man who went into different cities, and into the villages, and looked at the people. What he saw made his whole inner physical life, as the sacramental symbol of the spiritual, move and burn. All of us know something about this; how in certain circumstances, in some great overwhelming fear we might have, or in some sudden sorrow, our very physical life, acting in harmony with our mental life, is filled with pain. "He was moved with compassion." He was moved to the agony of the physical by the pain of the spiritual.

What was behind it all? Going back to the translation we read. "He was moved with compassion." What is compassion? Feeling with, pain with, comradeship in sorrow, fellowship in agony, an "at-one-ment" so to speak between this King and those upon whom he looked, culminating at the cross for its outward expression. It existed in the heart of God long before the material cross was lifted up. And, it expressed itself in the suffering of the Son of God through all the years of his sympathy with man before he walked to that actual cross. He identified himself with the very issue of their pain, the very issue of their sin. Now, he identifies himself with your pain, and mine. That is compassion.