THE COMPASSION OF JESUS

(FOR THE SINFUL)

"Man, indeed, is the most noble by creation of all creatures in the visible world; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble. The beasts, birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a sinful nature. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in mine own eyes than a toad, and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too.... I thought now that every one had a better heart than I had; I could have changed heart with anybody." — John Bunyan.

St. Luke xv., xxiii. 34, xiii. 34, xix. 41.

The next subject of our study is the emotions awakened in Jesus by sin, and towards men as sinners. And at the outset it is to be said that the Gospels directly reveal little of what these must have been. There are flashes of emotion, keen and passionate; but these, we feel, are only outbreaks from a hidden fire. The more we think of what sin is and does, and of His unique experience of what it is and does, the more marvellous does the self-restraint of Jesus in the face of the sin of the world become. He seldom betrays astonishment at sin; He is never exclamatory, horrified, hysterical. His emotion in the presence of sin is that of strength, not of weakness. His attitude is never that of mere disgust, because it is always that of practical effort. He spends no emotion or eloquence upon sin in the abstract.1 It is sinning men and women that draw His very heart, and deed, much more than word, that proclaims the passion of His soul.

In the Gospels we see two emotions in chief, awakened in Jesus toward sinful men. Their conduct excited in various degrees His indignation; their condition as sinners His compassion. We are dealing now with the compassion; and what at once impresses the reader of the Gospels is the extraordinarily compassionate view Jesus takes of human sin and sinners. But we are so familiar with the fact that we do not readily realize how extraordinary it is.

1. The Marvel of It.

To feel the wonder of it, you must think of our Lord’s unparalleled experience of sin; He lived in the actual world, and knew at first hand its ugliest facts. The pages of the Gospels are written all over with the sins of men. Jesus touches sin on every hand. In the children of passion He sees it trample upon reason, defy conscience, and laugh at laws. In His own chosen disciples He sees it prevailing against loyalty and breaking down resolve. He sees its baneful influence upon religion in the tortuous casuistry by which men seek to serve at the same time God and Mammon, the blind self-righteous pride they feel in the sanctimonious formalism they take for godliness. Above all, He Himself is the exciting cause of sin’s worst manifestations, the magnet that draws out all that is worst, as well as all that is best, in men. Ever since Cain slew Abel because his own works were evil and his brother’s righteous, it has been the fate of those who choose the higher plane to arouse the enmity of those who choose the lower. Stung by the inexpugnable sense of the superiority of goodness, wounded self-love turns instinctively to hate, and

"Envy sets the strongest seal upon desert."

In the life of Jesus this saddening experience rose to a climax. This was His lifelong crown of thorns. Think only of the story of His Passion. There is sin’s awful masterpiece; there it displays its deepest character. If we ask what sin, human sin, is, human history gives its answer there. Sin is that which repudiated Jesus Christ, hated Him without a cause, spat contempt and mockery upon Him, and, only because it could do nothing more, crucified Him. Those who have felt only sin’s velvet glove, and never its iron hand, may judge leniently of it; but is it not extraordinary that He who drank the bottom-dregs of sin’s malignity has in His heart the one fount of unfailing compassion for the chief of sinners?

Again, think of the purity of Jesus. Men often take a lenient view of sin in others, because their moral sensibilities are blunted by their own. In youth we are apt to be censorious because we do not know ourselves, in age to be cynically tolerant because we do. Sin "hardens a’ within, and petrifies the feeling." It is only as men have kept the purity of their own souls that the greed, the impurity, the inhumanity of men, their estrangement from God and goodness, are felt as a heart-breaking burden. But how can we conceive the emotions stirred by sin in One whose whole nature was the stainless dwelling-place of the Spirit of all purity? We may conceive what it were for a person of fastidious tastes to be associated with a horde of filthy savages, or for a pure-minded youth or maiden to be suddenly immersed in the life of a slum, reeking with all moral disgusts. We may understand the feeling of a pure soul like Henry Drummond, when after hours spent in that Protestant confessional, the inquiry-room, he writes: "Oh! I am sick, sick of the sins of men. When I went home, I had to change my very clothes." But to be acquainted with the sins of men as only the Sinless One could be, to live in daily contact with it and feel all its loathsomeness as only He could — we vainly try to imagine what this must have been to Jesus Christ. Is it not extraordinary that His soul of glowing purity, aflame with abhorrence of evil, should melt with the compassion that drew the harlot to kiss His feet and made Him known as the Friend of sinners?

And again, the compassion of Jesus is extraordinary because united with a full condemnation of sin. Among men we often find condemnation without compassion — the hard legal view which simply identifies the man with his wrongdoing, sees him and sums him up in the light of his sin. To most people (save a mother, a wife, a friend) the thief on the cross was just the thief. Jesus saw that, but infinitely more. He saw the criminal, who had lived a selfish and cruel life, the human beast of prey; but He saw too the man, in whom still lay untold capacities of higher life.

At the opposite extreme, we often find compassion without condemnation. Many to-day would see in the thief nothing really criminal, but merely a product of circumstances. Men, no doubt, do wrong and abominable things; but "to understand all is to forgive all." They are the creatures, not the authors, of evil — victims of a bad heredity, bad education and example, bad social conditions. After all due deductions are made, nothing is left that is really sin, nothing that a man must lay at his own door, and say "the guilt is mine." And once more, Christ’s attitude is not that. To Him sin is sin, and sinners are sinners. The truly extraordinary thing about the compassion of Jesus is that it is not founded on excuses, apologies, or extenuations, but upon the fact of sin itself. He pities and He condemns; yes, He pities because He condemns. His supreme compassion is given to men because they are sinners.

This is contrary to our usual way of thinking. When one is involved in wrongdoing by circumstances for which he is not greatly to blame, we pity him; if he is entirely to blame, we say that he deserves no pity. But how superficial is such a judgment! The man who is put in the position of a culprit while comparatively free from blame is certainly to be pitied — he suffers a grave misfortune; but how little to be pitied, how small a misfortune is his, compared with the man who is inexcusably guilty, who has done the evil thing, and has done it because he is what he is! It comes to this, that the supreme misery of our human state is that we are sinners. All other misfortunes and miseries are the small dust of the balance compared with this. We may not so judge; but unless we so judge, we cannot even get Christ’s point of view. We cannot understand Him at all; His teaching, His life, His death, all are a sealed book to us, till we feel something of the unequalled calamity and misery of sin.

2. The Gospel Picture.

Let us now turn for a little to the brightest page in the Gospels, the fifteenth chapter of St. Luke, and look at His compassion as it is there portrayed by Jesus Himself in that series of exquisite parables, and specially in the phrase which runs through them all, "That which is lost."2 Thus Jesus describes the actual condition into which men are brought by sin; they have broken bounds and are gone astray. Like the sheep that has wandered from the fold, they have lost their bearings. They know neither where they are nor whither they are going, and are ignorant of the deadly peril in which they stand.

In the story of the Lost Son, Jesus depicts this tragedy from human life itself. He sets before us in the raw ignorance, the egotism, and blind self-sufficiency of a vain and selfish lad, the world’s great picture of the psychology of sin. The story is an ugly one. The conduct of the wayward youth is wholly unfilial, heartless, presumptuous. He knew that he was behaving badly in leaving his home; nor did it need the teaching of hunger and misery to inform him that in throwing away his money, his character, his very life, among wine-bibbers and harlots he was sinning against his own soul. And yet he is so pitiably ignorant, so blind to the full reality of what he is committing himself to. Worse still, he is so ignorant of his ignorance. Tell this self-confident youth as he stands on the threshold of the far country, at last free to make his own terms with life, untrammelled by his father’s antiquated prejudices, with money in his pocket and the blood of youth coursing in his veins, with all the world before him, a virgin territory tempting the ardent foot of the explorer — tell him that he knows neither the nature of the thing he would have nor how to obtain it; and, if he listen, it will be with the smile of superiority, with pity for your ignorance, not his own. In quest of reality, he knows not that he is chasing phantoms. "A deceived heart hath turned him aside." He is "lost," he has drifted out upon uncharted seas. How wonderfully compassionate is the view our Lord here takes of human sin, and how profoundly true! What leads men away from God is no diabolical love of evil for evil’s sake, but the desire for happiness, for self-expansion, the desire to realize the fullest life. Happiness! — it is the thing we are born to seek, and from the cradle to the grave do seek. And the sins of men are just their efforts, their misguided, infatuated efforts after happiness. This is the innermost meaning of all human sin; this is how

                       "the devil spends

A fire God gave for other ends."

And the deepest compassion of Jesus goes forth to men thus self-deceived and self-betrayed.

Look at another picture from the Gospels. Men are doing the wickedest thing in the long history of human wickedness; and Jesus, the victim of their wicked hate and cruelty, only pities them for doing it, and cries, "Father, forgive them; they know not what they do."3 Passing by all they did know and all they were guiltily ignorant of, He pleads for them that they have no real, no adequate conception of what it is they are doing. And that compassion avails for all. Men know, and yet they do not know. They know so well what they do that they are responsible, yet so little do they know that they are not beyond repentance and forgiveness. We may be led by temper, or appetite, or vanity, by fear or faithlessness, to do what we know full well to be wrong; yet we know not what we do. We do not know what sin is. We have very little idea what sin is. "Father, forgive them," He pleads; "they know not what they do." It is because men know not what they dothat men are lost, but, being lost, may be found again.

Yet recovery is not the necessary sequel. This word "lost" denotes a condition of deadly peril, a condition which therefore excites the deepest compassion of Jesus. The prodigal goes merrily on his way to the far country — will he ever come back? It is only a voyage of discovery he is making; he wants only to see the sights and taste the wine of the far country — but, will he ever come back? God only knows. Meanwhile, he is lost, his feet are on the deadly slope that ends on the brink of the precipice; and he is the gayest of the gay. How it must have wrung the heart of Jesus Christ to see men with the shadow of spiritual death hovering over them, given up wholly to the enjoyments or cares of the trivial moment! It is the shepherd, not the sheep, that is tortured with anxiety about its fate. The unheeding animal contentedly nibbles the grass on the mountain-side, without a thought of the night that is coming down, the storm that is brewing, the rocks and precipices among which it will be driven, the beasts of prey that will seek its life. But of all this the shepherd thinks — pictures its helplessness, its loneliness, its sure destruction in the midst of these perils, until a great tide of pity carries him away and sends him forth on his painful and hazardous quest. It was thus Jesus saw men in their sins. He must fly to the rescue. The lost would not come to Him; He must both seek and save. On Him must the burden fall; His it must be to pay the whole price, the chastisement of our peace. It was this heart-breaking compassion for lost men that inspired the ministry of Jesus Christ, and still inspires it.

And, lastly, this word "lost" tells us that Christ’s compassion for sinners is in a sense compassion for Himself — nay, we may go further and say, for that Father-God whose representative He is. The sinner’s loss is, first of all and most of all, Christ’s loss, God’s loss. That, indeed, is directly the theme of these parables. The shepherd’s compassion is not merely pity for a sheep, any man’s sheep; it is for his own sheep which he has cared for since it was a little lamb, which has become like a part of himself. The father clasps the penitent scapegrace in his arms as he would not another man’s son. "This my son," he says, "my son," dearer to me than my own life, "was dead, and is alive again; was lost, and is found." It is the climax of all Divine joy, the joy of recovery, of love redeeming and victorious.

And not far from that picture of the Rejoicing Shepherd and Father, we find another — the picture of the Weeping Saviour, of love baffled and defeated. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,. . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not." The soul of all compassion — compassion defeated but only more poignant from defeat — all grief, the grief of love unprized and trampled upon but only the more tenacious for every rebuff, breathes in that lament of Jesus over Jerusalem. This heart-breaking compassion over the lost that are not found because they will not, is the climax of all Divine sadness. It contains depths into which I shrink from looking. Must Jesus always bear this cross? This Divine grief — is it irremediable, unending, eternal as the joy of love triumphant? This, only this, let us be sure of, this let us fix in our hearts, that something we must be to Christ — to God — we cannot be nothing — something, joy or grief, gain or loss, for which we have no measure except God’s own, the uttermost sacrifice of the Cross. This is the innermost meaning of the Gospel of Christ: the love of God is love that wants us, not a mere benevolence that pours down its gifts upon us from an infinite altitude, but love that seeks us with patient, unforgetting desire, love that lives in our lives, the love of God that can never be satisfied until it find us in our finding Him.

3. The Christian Obligation.

Such was the character of Christ’s compassion on lost men, that inspired His ministry; and His ministry is ours, and for its fulfilment, how we need His compassion! Now, I believe there never was so much compassion in the world as at present. Christ has taught us compassion for the physical ills of life, the weariness, the drudgery, the maladies and sufferings of men. That noble compassion touches us with something like enthusiasm. It inspires legislation, draws munificent gifts from the rich, spreads over the land a network of beneficent agency, has its focus in the Christian Church and its deep source and sustainment in the Spirit of Christ. But, I fear there is not in the Church to-day an equal growth of the deeper compassion of Christ, for the spiritual disabilities of men, for men as lost to themselves and lost to God. We do need a great quickening there, in the conviction that the root of all our human problem is just Sin, in our compassion for those who are wandering in the ignorance of their darkened minds, led astray by temptation, far from the possibility of all really happy and fruitful life, who need help at the centre, the help and salvation of God in Christ. Does the heart of the Church, your heart and mine, throb like His with a vast pity for those who are scattered abroad as sheep not having a shepherd, who have lost faith in God and righteousness, whose soul’s light is quenched or has never been kindled, and who are drifting into even deeper darkness, and, worst of all, who are quite content or, if not, think it is only more money, more success, or more pleasure they need? Do we need to be goaded and whipped up to something like zeal for the Church’s missionary enterprises at home and abroad, and for its work of social service? If we had Christ’s compassion for men, we would be unable to restrain ourselves in effort and sacrifice. We have the ideas, but ideas are pale ghosts until they are suffused with feeling and are embodied in action; and it is easier to preach the Cross of Christ, or to demand to have it preached, than to bear the burden of Christ’s compassion. We are called to take up the ministry of Christ, and there was one only way by which He could fulfil that ministry. In the fulness of His love He entered into humanity, took the sins and woes of men upon His own soul, became one with them, entered so completely into their lives as to make them His. At a great distance, but in the same path, we are called to follow. We cannot do it without His compassion; and we cannot know that deep compassion of Christ except by first realizing it toward ourselves. God commendeth His love toward us in that, while we were yet sinners, and because we were sinners, Christ died for us. May He give us to know and feel something of that Divine wonder, and we shall know and feel this too, that God makes known His love toward us in imparting it to us, and calling us to make it known by word and deed, character and influence, and with all our heart and power enter into His redeeming purpose of bringing back to the fold of His love the sheep for whom the Shepherd died!

1 The abstract conception of sin does not occur in the Synoptic Gospels. ἁμαρτία a in the singular is found only in Matt. xii. 31, and there in the concrete sense.

2 In English the word "lost" is used in a double sense: an article of property which has disappeared is "lost" to its owner, and a person who has gone astray and is ignorant of his whereabouts is also "lost." The same two meanings belong to the various parts of the Greek verb ἀπόλλυναι. In St. Luke xv. the idea directly conveyed is deprivation or interruption of actual ownership; but in St. Matthew’s version of the Parable of the Lost Sheep πλανᾰσθαι is used, bringing out the fact that it is because the sheep has strayed and lost itself that it is lost to the shepherd; and the same Gospel has τὰ πρόβατα τὰ ἀπολωλότα οἴκου ΄Ισραήλ, where ἀπολωλότα seems to refer immediately to the "lost" condition of the sheep. In this connection, indeed, the two ideas are inseparable.

3 Regarding the genuineness of this verse, vide Expositor, Jan. 1914, p. 92; also Expositor, April 1914, pp. 324 ff.