Sunday, July 21, 2024, Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
“Compassion”
Ps. 103:1-13; Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34
Divine Service IV with Holy Communion
Hymns: #528 “Oh, for a Thousand Tongues to Sing”; #551 “When to Our World the Savior Came”; #711 “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.
Our Gospel reading this morning from Mark 6 says, “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, He had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” I’d like to take a dive into that word “compassion” this morning, to help us understand exactly what it means. Jesus had “compassion” on the crowds and on the people He met, and He has great compassion for us; and He also calls on us to show the same compassion for others that He shows to us. To do that, I think we need to get to the heart of the word, if we’re going to understand what our Lord is calling us to do.
Our English word “compassion” comes from the Latin word compassio, which combines “com,” meaning “together” and “passio,” which means “to suffer.” So compassion means “suffering together” or “suffering with one another.” One good definition of compassion I found is: “Having a deep awareness of the suffering of someone else, along with the desire to do something about it.” So God didn’t just look down from heaven and see our suffering and say, “Oh, isn’t that just too bad?” His compassion moved Him to do something about it; that’s why He sent us His only Son. Likewise, Jesus calls us not to just sit here and feel bad about the suffering going on all around us, but to go out into the world and do what we can to do something about it.
In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for compassion is racham. The word means tender love, tender mercy, or pity. Interestingly enough, it’s closely related to the Hebrew word rechem, which means “womb.” When God says He has compassion on us, He’s offering us the same kind of divine protection that a baby has in its mother’s womb. In other words, He’s calling us to come and find protection and shelter in the deepest, most intimate, most tender part of Himself. The Bible calls that being “sheltered in His bosom.” His compassion for us means He loves us, protects us, and guards us like a mother loves and shelters her unborn child.
So David prays in Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your unfailing love; according to Your great compassion blot out my transgressions.” And He says in Psalm 103: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.” And in Psalm 145: “The Lord is good to all; He has compassion on all He has made.” Prophet Isaiah says in Isaiah 51: “The Lord will surely comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins.” And prophet Jeremiah says in Jeremiah 3: “Because of the Lord 's great love for us we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail.” From deep, deep down inside, God cares for us.
In the New Testament, and today in our Gospel reading, the Greek word for compassion is splagchnizomai. The word means literally “to be moved or have pity in the inward parts.” Your splagch is literally your entrails, your guts, your bowels. To the Greeks, to have compassion or esplachnos meant “to have the bowels yearn.” The ancient peoples assumed that the seat of human affection – what we would call the heart or the soul – lies in the deepest, most untouchable part of us. Where we would say, “from the heart,” they would say, “from the bowels”; but both mean compassion that comes from way down deep inside. That’s also the connection to that Hebrew rechem word for compassion that means “a mother’s womb.” Can’t get any deeper than that.
So in Matthew 14: “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, He was ‘moved in His inward parts toward them’ and healed their sick.” And Jesus tells His disciples in Matthew 15: "I have compassion (deep feelings) for these people; they have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat.” In the story of the Prodigal Son in St. Luke, the young man got up to go to his father; "But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion – he felt pity - for him; and he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” – pig slop and all!
St. Paul tells us in Ephesians 4 that since our Lord has had such compassion on us, our place and our calling is to “be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ has forgiven us.” And Paul says to us in Colossians 3: “Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, and kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” Be compassionate, tenderhearted, and merciful; wrap yourself in mercy. Let what God has done for you touch your heart, or your bowels, or wherever that deep down place inside you is, and let it move your hands and feet and the rest of you to get up and go do something about it.
Maybe one way to describe what compassion is – since we’re already talking about guts and wombs and bowels and such – is that compassion is like having a case of “holy heartburn.” Ever get a case of heartburn? Gets your attention, doesn’t it? That acid in your stomach rolls and churns and burns, until you have to reach for the antacid tablets or the Pepto Bismol to calm things down. That kind of heartburn is no fun; but spiritual heartburn is a gift from God. It happens in hearts that are full of faith and holy fire, but not in hearts that are cold. It happens when you see someone hurting, or some pressing need, or someone suffering in the world around you, and your soul just burns and churns until you do something to help.
“Jesus healed them all” is one of my favorite verses of Scripture. His heart burned for the hurting and helpless people all around Him, even as His heart still burns for us; and He had the kind of deep down, gut-wrenching, holy compassion that couldn’t leave a need unmet or pass anybody by. And that’s what He’s asking us to feel whenever we see hurts and suffering and needs, and He won’t let us be until our hearts begin to move our feet. “His Word is in my heart like a fire shut up in my bones,” prophet Jeremiah said. “Were not our hearts burning within us?” said the two apostles on the Emmaus road.
In our Gospel reading, Jesus had sent His apostles out two by two into that broken, ugly, hurting, suffering world, to bring the people healing and hope and help and Good News about a Savior. He gave them power – His power - to heal the sick and drive out evil spirits. And when they did that in His name? Oh, my goodness, it worked! It really worked! (I wonder if that surprised them?) They came back so excited to tell Him about the miracles of healing and faith that had happened when they spoke or touched people in His Name.
Why do we limit ourselves? Why are we so timid or afraid of this power He’s promised to give us? Was His power just for those few disciples, and not for us, too? Are we limiting our Savior by not believing Him for His promises? Remember the story about Jesus in Capernaum, where “He could not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith?”
The disciple’s two-by-two mission seems to have been a great success. The people were coming, and coming, and kept on coming to see Jesus; and Jesus was preaching and teaching and helping and healing all day, until He and His disciples didn’t even have time to sit down to eat. (That’s the big question we have to ask with any evangelism program we try, by the way: What do we do if it works?)
Jesus, because He is compassionate, not just for the crowds but also for those who serve Him, called His disciples to take a break, to come to a quiet place and get a little rest. If your heart is really moved to meet the needs in the world around you, you’ve got yourself a big job, because the needs will never end, the suffering and hurt is always everywhere, and “the poor you will always have with you,” Jesus says. Your rest is in your daily prayers, and in your time in God’s Word, and here in worship and in the Sacraments. Don’t neglect those things. You need them. We serve God by His power, and not by our own.
I don’t know how long a vacation the disciples were expecting – a day or two, maybe a week – but it turns out the only rest they got was for the length of the boat ride. “They went away by themselves to a solitary place. But many who saw them leaving recognized them and ran on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them.” The needs don’t stop. The world is a broken place. The people in that crowd had never, ever had hope before, for their own ailments, or for their loved ones and dear ones who were troubled and sick. God had sent the Lord of all hope and compassion into the world, a Lord who loved them and cared for them, a Lord whose heart just burned to help them, and they came to Him from everywhere.
When Jesus and His companions landed on the beach, the crowd was already there to meet them. “Help me, Lord! Help me, Jesus! Son of David, have mercy on me! My son is suffering! My little daughter is dying! Lord, I’m blind and I want to see!” The disciples wanted, even desperately needed, a little rest; and since He was a human being like the rest of us, no doubt Jesus did too. When the disciples saw the crowd, maybe they would have been happy just to keep on rowing and find some other place to rest – but Jesus had compassion on the people. His heart went out to them. His soul yearned and burned to help them. He couldn’t just leave them there on the shore and sail away. Because, our Gospel says, they were like shepherd-less sheep. They were lost, they were in danger, they were in trouble, they were suffering, they were going to die, if something wasn’t done for them.
So Jesus stepped ashore, says our Gospel, “and began to teach them many things.” He taught them about God’s mercy. He taught them about prayer. He taught them about trusting God. He taught them about hope, and where to find it. He taught them what they needed to know to have better lives in this world, and how to have hope for the next one.
And the compassion of Jesus brought Him, at the end of all things, to the cross. What we needed was a Savior. It was, and it still is, our sin that was the cause of all the suffering Jesus saw as He looked around Him; and sin is still the cause of all the hurt and suffering we see in the world today. To take away our sin, Jesus and He gave and He gave and He gave of Himself, until finally He emptied Himself and gave His blood and His breath and His life on a cross, to pay for all the foolishness our own sin had caused us. He in His mercy gave Himself to us, to give us a chance to be forgiven and live. And He was raised up so we could be raised up, too.
Compassion. “Suffering together.” “Suffering with one another.” “Having a deep awareness of the suffering of someone else, along with the desire to do something about it.” That’s Jesus. That’s the depth of His love and His feelings for us. And that’s the kind of caring and compassionate people God has created us and called us to be.
In Mark’s Gospel, the story that follows this one is the feeding of the 5000. Jesus and His disciples land on the shore, and Jesus preaches and teaches and helps and heals all day long. Then evening comes, and the disciples, who are tired and hungry and still haven’t had the break they were looking for, ask Jesus to dismiss the crowd and send them away to find themselves something to eat. And Jesus says to them, “We can’t send them away hungry, or they might faint on the way; you feed them!” The disciples complain, of course, because the assignment is humanly impossible, and they don’t have the money or resources to even begin to do the job. Then Jesus opens His loving, compassionate, generous hands, and multiplies the loaves and the fish; and the disciples do the serving, until everyone is fed.
That’s a picture, folks, of a compassionate Church. St. Paul says in our Epistle reading that in Jesus, “You too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” The picture is of the Church as a “dwelling place” - a womb, if you will. A place to bring people back to safety, a genuine “safe space” in the world, a place where you’ll always find genuine mercy and compassion – a place to call home!
Precious Lord, we ask You to put the same compassion in our hearts that You have in Your holy heart for us. Show us the hurts and sufferings, Lord, that we can be Your hands to heal them. Show us the needs, O Lord, that we by Your powerful hand may do our best to meet them. By the compassion we show, dear Lord, may the world around us come to know Yours. In Jesus’ name; Amen.