The Compassion of Christ: A Reflection on Matthew 9.35-10.8

“The name of God is blasphemed among the nations because of you!” This biblical slap in the face, from the Greek version of Isaiah 52, is deployed by Paul in Romans 2 against those who attack others for being “sinners” while ignoring their own sins. And it’s sad to say that, after two thousand years, people of faith continue to bring shame to God’s name for their hypocrisy. It’s hard to watch as, around the world, legislators keep dragging God’s name into efforts to attack and persecute groups they don’t like. And as a result of these efforts, the names of God and Jesus are associated more with hatred than love. I have not met anyone who doesn’t like Jesus; I’ve met dozens who cannot hear his name because of the actions of his followers. I’ve started today in this negative place, because today’s Gospel reading, Matthew 9.35-10.8, offers a rather different approach to what a Christian presence in the world should look like, an approach based in compassion instead of judgment, using power to lift people up instead of push them down, and rejecting personal gain. That is to say, a genuinely Christian, and therefore Christlike, way of engaging the world.

The text starts with Jesus traveling around Judea teaching, preaching, and healing. It then says, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” He did not see people needing help and cast judgment about whether they deserved it. He did not blame them or shame them for their circumstances. He simply saw people who were being harassed by others without recourse to their own resources or to the authorities to stop it, and he had compassion. Full stop.

The Greek word translated here as compassion is interesting. It’s a verbal form of splanchna, which in Jesus’ day primarily referred to the guts, so we might say it means feeling something viscerally, deep in the guts. But, at the risk of reading too much into the word, as Paul Nuechterlein has pointed out, the term originally had strong sacrificial overtones, and the verb form meant something like ‘to eat the organs offered in sacrifice.’ Here the verb is in a grammatical form called the middle voice, which directs the results of an action towards the person who performed it, so it would mean something like ‘to consume oneself as a sacrifice.’ Whether or not Matthew had this particular sense in mind, what a powerful metaphor for the kind of compassion Jesus had: it’s a compassion that leads to self-offering.

In response to this compassion, Jesus sent his disciples into the world to broaden his ministry to help more people. And we today who are his followers have this same calling.

True Christians do not sacrifice the ‘harassed and helpless’ on the altars of religion and politics; Christians set aside their own self-interest and offer themselves on behalf of the harassed and helpless. Inasmuch as we follow Jesus, this will be the case. Inasmuch as it is not the case, if we find ourselves trying to think of reasons not to act compassionately, we are not following the way of Jesus.

This is a short reflection today, but an important one. May we all go and do likewise.

If you’d like to read about today’s other readings, please see the following posts on today’s Old Testament and Epistle readings:

• Entertaining Angels; on Genesis 18 (from January 2020)
• On God and Sin(ners); on Romans 5.1-11 (from March 2023)