The Call to Be Compassionate
By Pastor David Kuntz

As I was growing up my mother displayed the Christ-like quality of compassion that never left my siblings and me.  None of us will forget the times she picked up strange people, like the bunny lady.  This oddly dressed lady would walk along a busy highway for miles every day out into the country to take care of her rabbits.  Everyone in town knew about her strange infatuation with rabbits and thus made it a point to avoid her, myself included.  My sisters and I would just about die every time my mother stopped to pick her up and give her a ride.  When we drove through the city, I vividly remember squashing my big legs down and burying my head in the back seat of that little red Chrysler Omni so no one would see me.  This went on for a few months until we moved to another city.  I’m not sure whatever happened to the bunny lady, but I do know that she was the recipient of compassion.  If she had been living during the time of Jesus, I know my Savior would have stopped to help her because He was compassionate.

Compassion was the first word used to describe the character of God when He revealed himself to Moses in Exodus 34:6:  “The LORD God, compassionate, and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loving-kindness and truth.”   Moses could not look at the Lord in His full glory and live.  But what the Lord hid from Moses, He has since revealed by the way of the incarnate Savior.  The physician Luke describes our Lord as one who mingled with people, including the outcast of society like lepers, tax collectors, harlots and sinners.  When He saw a need, He was moved by intense emotion on the inside that didn’t rest until He did something.  The Biblical word for this emotion is compassion.  The Gospels attributes compassion to Jesus Christ more than any other emotion. 

            The Gospels display an art gallery of snapshots of our Savior’s compassion.  One of the earliest pictures of His compassion took place at that wedding of Cana.  Jesus came and rescued a newly wed couple and their parents from public embarrassment (John 2:1-10).   In Mark 1:41 the Gospel writer tells us that Jesus was moved with compassion and He healed a leper.  In Luke 7:13, Jesus was moved with compassion as He saw the sorrow of a widow who lost her only hope - a young son.  He ordered her to stop weeping and then met her need as He raised the boy from the dead.  In Matthew 9:36, Jesus was moved with compassion a third time as He saw the people as sheep without shepherd.  Because His people did not have any spiritual guidance it greatly troubled His heart.  The way He acted to meet this need was to bounce the ball into our courts as He said, “pray therefore that the Lord of the Harvest will send forth laborers into the harvest” (Matthew 9:38).  Four other times in the Gospels, Jesus was moved with compassion and thus acted to meet the physical need of hunger for the multitudes (Matthew 14:14; 15:32; Mark 6:34; 8:2).  And the final occurrence of the word compassion was in Matthew 20:34, where Jesus healed a blind man.  In each one of these cases Jesus saw a need, experienced a stirring within and then moved to meet that need.  And in every case His compassion cost Him something.  On one occasion it cost our Savior His rest and forced Him to set aside His own plans (Mark 6:31-34).

            Beloved, we must never forget the compassion that our Savior has for sinners like us.  He left His heavenly home and came down to save us from our sins by dying a substitutionary death in our place.  Having observed this Christlike model of compassion, we must go and do likewise.