Do Something About It

"The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few." (Matthew 9:37)

Compassion is seeing the world through the eyes of Jesus and then doing something about it. The second half is not optional, and it is not advanced. It is the definition. And notice that the first thing Jesus tells them to do about it is pray. Pray that the Lord of the harvest would send out workers into his harvest. That sounds like a soft answer until you keep reading, because in the very next chapter he calls the twelve and sends them out. They prayed for workers. They became the workers.

That is how it almost always goes. If you have ever prayed earnestly for God to do something about a situation and then felt a horrible sinking suspicion in your stomach, you already know exactly what this means. The prayer for compassion is dangerous, because the God who hears it tends to answer it through the one who prayed it.

So be careful what you ask him to fix. He may hand you a coat and point at the door. That is not God refusing your prayer; it is God honoring it by making you part of the answer. The distance between feeling something about the world's need and doing something about it is often exactly one obedient yes, offered the moment you realize the worker you were praying for is you. Pray the dangerous prayer anyway. Just do not be surprised when it comes back with your own name on it.

Stop

"When he saw the crowds." (Matthew 9:36)

The first act of compassion is not doing. It is stopping. Jesus is on his way somewhere in almost every one of these stories. He is going to Jairus's house and a woman touches his cloak and he stops. He is passing through Jericho and a blind man is shouting and everyone tells the man to be quiet and he stops. He is walking to a wedding, a funeral, a boat, a mountain, and something interrupts him, and he does not resent it. He stops.

And most of us do not. It is possible to walk past a person in obvious distress on the way to do something religious. It is possible to sit in a hospital waiting room mentally editing a calendar. It is possible to be present in a conversation and entirely absent from it, nodding, making the sounds, calculating the drive home. We treat the interruption as the obstacle to the ministry. But almost every time, in the Gospels, the interruption is the ministry. The thing that got in the way of the plan was the plan, and only Jesus seemed to know it.

You cannot see anybody at forty miles an hour. Compassion begins with a full stop, with letting your day be derailed by a person, with treating the one who interrupted you not as a delay but as the appointment you did not know God had made. So slow down enough to be interrupted. The people you are rushing past to go do good may be the good you were sent to do.

Harassed and Helpless

"Because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." (Matthew 9:36)

Two words, and they are doing enormous work. Harassed. That is not tired. It is a word for something done to you, over and over, by a force outside you. It describes a person being worn down by a pressure they did not invent and cannot stop. Helpless. That is not weak. It is the word for someone who has run out of moves.

And Jesus looks at a crowd of religious people, people with a temple and a law and a priesthood and centuries of Scripture, and he does not see rebels. He sees sheep with no one watching them. That ought to change how you look at the person who is driving you to distraction right now. The difficult one. The defensive one. The one who keeps making the same catastrophic decision.

They are not opposing you. They are unshepherded. There is a very great difference between those two things, and everything you do next depends on which one you believe. Treat a harassed and helpless person as an enemy and you will fight them. See them as a sheep with no shepherd and you will do the thing Jesus did, which is move toward them with compassion instead of away from them with a verdict. Ask, of the person who most exasperates you, not how to win against them, but who has been shepherding them, and whether the answer is no one at all.

The Compassion of Seeing

"Jesus went through all the towns and villages ... When he saw the crowds." (Matthew 9:35-36)

Before Jesus does anything for the crowd, he sees them. And we do not understand what that means, because seeing is the one thing we have almost entirely stopped doing. You have walked past a hundred people this week. Some were harassed. Some were helpless. Some were sheep with no shepherd anywhere in their lives, standing right beside you at a gas pump. And you did not see them.

Not because you are cruel. Because you were busy, and because seeing costs something, and because a person who genuinely sees another cannot easily go back to what he was doing. Jesus walks through every town and village, teaching, preaching, healing every disease, and in the middle of all of it he stops long enough to actually look at the people in front of him. And what he sees breaks him open.

That is where compassion starts. Not with feeling, with looking. The reason we feel so little is often that we have seen so little; we have trained ourselves to keep our eyes at the level of tasks and screens and never let them rest on a face. So today, look at one person. One. All the way. Long enough that they stop being scenery and become a soul, and let what you see begin to cost you something.

Compassion Is Not a Feeling

"When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." (Matthew 9:36)

Compassion is not a warm feeling that comes over you when you notice someone hurting. Most of what passes for compassion, in our churches and in our own hearts, is really a feeling that got mistaken for a virtue. Something moves in the chest. The eyes get hot. You feel it, sincerely, and you go home. That is pity, and pity costs nothing.

True compassion is seeing the world through the eyes of Jesus and then doing something about it. It has a verb attached, and it always did. Watch how fast the sentence in Matthew moves. He saw the crowds. He had compassion on them. And then, immediately, the harvest is plentiful, the workers are few, pray the Lord to send workers out. He does not stand there feeling it. He turns and starts sending people.

Which is worth remembering the next time your chest tightens over something on a screen and you scroll past it. You felt something. That is not the same as having compassion. Feeling is where compassion begins, not where it is allowed to end. So do not trust the tightening in your chest as though it were obedience. Ask what the feeling is going to make you do, and if the answer is nothing, it was not yet compassion. It was only weather passing through.