The Compassion of Christ

I’m sure many of you have seen the popular movie known as Passion of the Christ. It made box office history a few years ago by telling the story of our Lord’s journey to the cross. Jesus betrayal and public execution began the turning of the tide in Jerusalem, His love and sacrifice were put on gruesome display as this film portrayed the last days of Christ as a flesh-bound man on Earth. However, I want to cover a different viewpoint of His life’s work in this message, one that meant the world and eternity to those that it touched. The compassion of Christ.

Years ago, when my son was small, while I would do yard work, he would bring his little plastic lawnmower and follow me in the yard. He was probably only four or five years old and as I would use the real thing, he would follow in my footsteps making the noises like a little kid’s version of a walk behind mower. A few years later when he was older, he took over for me while we were again outside doing yard work. This time he took the reins of the real mower and I quietly watched from the side. He went straight down the line of cut grass turned around and kept going back and forth. As he mowed, small pieces of grass were left uncut here and there where he wandered back and forth. Like little cowlick hair follicles, they stuck up here and there across the yard. When he was done, he approached me and said, “how’d I do”? My answer was, “you did a great job”. We talked several times that day about how good he had done and how proud I was of him. For the next few days, I told anyone that would listen how good he had done and how he had stepped in to mow my yard. I was a proud bragging dad.

I think God looks at us with those same eyes, ears, and heart. He sees his children toiling about here on Earth with our trials and our hurts, and then we turn to him and we ask for help; we plead, we read books, we pray to connect to him, and sometimes we feel that what we do isn’t good enough, that our efforts somehow have to look polished or refined. That not spending enough time in the church might make God not want to listen to us, or by failing to have enough faith that he sometimes won’t answer our prayers.

I’m reminded of all the times that Jesus showed compassion and not judgment, which would have been his right, but was not His mission. Something that stood out the other day in my reading was his mother at the wedding party where he performed his first miracle. His mom knew that the party had run out of wine, which in those days would be a major insult to the wedding party and host. She directed the people serving to fill the jugs with water and present them to Jesus so he could bless them and presumptively do something “out of the box”. Jesus politely reminds his mother that it’s not his time and almost recuses himself of her request. But then, it seems, he does the compassionate thing and proves his mother’s faith and belief in her son to be well-placed. He not only turns the water into wine, but he turns it into the very best wine. In fact, Jesus publicly shows his compassion many times over the course of his ministry. Matthew the tax collector, a highly educated man in a hated position among the Jews. Come and follow me he told him, most assuredly against the “good judgment” of His current followers and the onlooking eye of the temple leadership. He dealt with Peter a notorious hotheaded fisherman and the rest of the disciples who at times could hardly understand his direction and teachings. He even stopped to discuss dangerous accusations with a woman on the street one day, noting that her accusers had all left once he asked them which one of them was without sin. He showed compassion on this woman all the while knowing that she had failed, not condoning her failure or telling her it was okay to keep on failing, but telling her to go and do it no more.

On his last day in the flesh here on Earth, Jesus used his final few breaths to show compassion to a man who had also been beaten and publicly humiliated that day. The thief on the cross who begged Jesus to forgive him and remember him when he came into his kingdom was there during the last minutes of Jesus life here on Earth. As his strength failed and his breathing became more and more difficult, he spoke to the thief and in compassion reassured him that “today” he would be with Him in Paradise. I want to impress on each one of us, Jesus was always first to dispense compassion, grace, and love on those who many times seemed unlovable. He taught us that the ambition of all Christians should be to learn to love one another, to show love as he had loved them, as He loves us.

 This is the way that we will stand out from the rest of the world, by our propensity to love, when loving isn’t easy. They will know that you follow Me, by your love.

Jesus could have come into this world to judge and condemn wayward people, to create a kingdom of servants and followers, but he didn’t. We often think with horror of the torture and pain that Jesus endured during his last few days before he was hung on that cross, and rightly so, it was our actions that nailed him there. He could have called any number of angels or changed a single heart or circumstance to overcome His ruling of execution. But he didn’t. Jesus did not come to rule over a kingdom of servants, he came to save a world who were and are His children. When he looks at your life and mine, he sees that poorly mowed yard with the stitches of grass still sticking up here and there and the edges not sharply mowed. He sees the feeble attempts to paint the beauty of nature with the wrong colors, the areas where we’ve gone outside the lines. When we fail to love as we should or find the good in others and say the wrong things. When we seek possessions and power instead of loving our neighbor or giving the gift of compassion. When we step on the weak to get ahead in our own lives. When we push others out of our gatherings because they don’t look like us or act like us. When we think thoughts of lust for things that are not ours. When we finally and shamefully come to the realization that we have wronged others, ourselves or God and come before him with hearts that are broken, beaten, worn and trampled on; like a proud dad would, he gives his sons and daughters a big hug and tells us what a great joy we are. He encourages us to keep going, keep learning, keep pursuing and running the race.

It’s hard to imagine why God would continue to pursue us in His loving, patient way when we run so very hard in the other direction, but He does. No matter whether you’re the hated tax collector. No matter whether you are a hard-headed and hot-tempered person. No matter if you are involved with infidelity or sexual sin. No matter if you are a thief in your last few hours of life, Jesus has compassion and acceptance for you. Forgiveness is waiting for you if you’ll only ask for it, it’s definitely a step into the abyss of faith. You see the story of this thief and Jesus in those last hours on the cross did not go like this, ‘Jesus reached out to the thief and ask him if he wouldn’t please consider one last time believing in him’. No, the thief saw one last opportunity and took it. Paradise was his that day because he decided that the message of the Gospel was not a fantasy or just for those who were cleaned up and in the right club. His life in eternity changed direction on that day because the thief spoke up in faith, took that difficult first step and believed in the compassion of Christ.

John 13: 34-35