The Compassion of God
by Fr. Pedro de Oliveira, OFM Conv.

The Old Testament

The Doctrine of God's Pathos

A divine attentiveness and concern for humanity, an involvement in history...God is wholly alive in every way and deeply involved in the life of His creatures...God's intimate relatedness to humanity.

This doctrine refers to the truth that God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, cares deeply for every individual.  God is all-personal, all-subject.  God is deeply involved in human affairs.  He is deeply in love with humanity.  Our justice is His joy, just as our injustice is His anguish.  God is moved and affected by what happens in our world, and reacts accordingly.  Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath.  Justice and Love arouse in Him joy and pleasure; injustice, hatred and sin arouse in Him sorrow and anger.  God is not indifferent to evil.  He is always concerned...He is personally affected by what man does to man.  God's heart is not of stone!  He witnesses our afflictions; He hears our cries; He knows our suffering; and He is intimately affected by them.  "A person is a being whose anguish may reach the heart of God."  Our anguish touches God's heart; it affects Him; it moves Him to compassion. (See Ex 3:6-9;  Ex 34:6-7)

 "Every cry of pain exists forever in the mind of God."

The actions of man are of the most intimate and profound concern to God.  God does not stand outside the range of human suffering and sorrow.  He is personally involved in, even stirred by, the conduct and fate of man.  God is concerned about the world and shares in its fate.  The predicament of man is a predicament of God who has a stake in the human situation.  Sin, guilt and suffering cannot be separated from the divine situation.  The life of sin is more than a failure of man; it is a frustration to God.

The essential meaning of pathos is that God is involved in history.  He is engaged to humanity - and has a stake in its destiny.  In the Jewish marriage ceremony, the groom and bride drink of the same cup of wine.  This action symbolizes their engagement.  God is engaged to humanity in pathos.  Using the symbol of the marriage ceremony, God and man drink of the same cup together, whether it is the cup of joy or grief, pleasure or pain, depending on man's free response to God and God's free response to man's actions.  Humanity is not only an image of God; humanity is a perpetual concern of God.  Humanity is a consort, a partner, a factor in the life of God.

The New Testament

Jesus Christ: The Incarnation of God's Compassion

In Jesus, God's compassion became visible to us.  Jesus is the concrete embodiment of this divine compassion in our world.  In Jesus Christ, God reveals Himself to us as a God of compassion.  This divine compassion is God's being with us as a suffering servant.  God is with us; He feels with us deeply and tenderly.  He allows our human pain to reverberate in His innermost self.

Jesus' healing ministry

Jesus' response to the ignorant, the hungry, the blind, the lepers, the widows, and all those who came to Him with their suffering, flowed from the divine compassion which led God to become one of us.  In Jesus' healing ministry, what is important is not the cure of the sick, but the deep compassion that moved Jesus to these cures.

There is a beautiful expression in the Gospels that appears only twelve times and is used exclusively in reference to Jesus or His Father.  That expression is: "to be moved with compassion."  The Greek verb splangchnizomal reveals to us the deep and powerful meaning of this expression.  The splangchna are the entrails of the body, or as we might say today, the guts.  They are the place where our most intimate and intense emotions are located.  They are the center from which both passionate love and passionate hate grow.  When the Gospels speak about Jesus' compassion as His being moved in the entrails, they are expressing something very deep and mysterious.  The compassion that Jesus felt was obviously quite different from superficial or passing feelings of sorrow or sympathy.  Rather, it extended to the most vulnerable part of his being.  When Jesus was moved to compassion, the source of all life trembled, the ground of all love burst open, and the abyss of God's immense, inexhaustible, and unfathomable tenderness revealed itself.

This is the mystery of God's compassion as it becomes visible in the healing stories of the New Testament.  All in need of Jesus moved Him and made Him feel with all His intimate sensibilities, the depth of their sorrow.  He became lost with the lost, hungry with the hungry, and sick with the sick.  In Him, all suffering was sensed with a perfect sensitivity.  He embraced everything human with the infinite tenderness of His compassion.

It was out of compassion that Jesus' healing emerged.  He did not cure to prove, to impress, or to convince.  His cures were the natural expression of His being our God.  The mystery of God's love is not that He takes our pains away, but that He first wants to share them with us.  Out of this divine solidarity with us comes new life.  (See Jesus' solidarity with the human race: Phil 2: 6-8)

Compassion is not a reaching out from on high to those who are less fortunate below; it is not a gesture of sympathy or pity for those who fail to make it in the upward pull.  On the contrary, compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is most acute and building a home there.  This is what Jesus did for us.

Christ's self-emptying and humiliation are not a step away from His true nature.  His becoming as we are and dying on the cross is not a temporary interruption of His own divine existence.  Rather, in the emptied and humbled Christ, we encounter God; we see who God really is; we come to know His true divinity.

The Church

Jesus gave us the command: "Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate."

In saying, "Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate," Jesus invites us to be as close to each other as God is to us.  He even asks us to love one another with God's own compassion.  Jesus' command, "Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate," is a command to participate in the compassion of God Himself.  Compassion is not merely a virtue that we must exercise in special circumstances or an attitude that we must call upon when other ways of responding have been exhausted, but it is the natural way of being in the world.  How can we creatively respond to Jesus' call to be compassionate?  The answer to that question is: "in Discipleship and Community!"  (See Phil 2:1-4;  Acts 2:44-47)

The compassionate life is a life together.  Compassion is not an individual character trait, a personal attitude, or a special talent, but a way of living together.  In Philippians 2:1-4, Paul stresses that the compassionate life is a life in community.  We witness to God's compassionate presence in the world by the way we live and work together.  A compassionate life is a life in which fellowship with Christ reveals itself in a new fellowship among those who follow Him. 

We tend so often to think of compassion as an individual accomplishment, that we easily lose sight of its essential communal nature.  A compassionate community is one which has the same mind and heart: the mind and heart of Christ!  To follow Christ means to relate to each other with the mind of Christ; that is, to relate to each other as Christ did to us.  Discipleship is walking together in the same path.

Compassion, then, can never be separated from community.  Compassion always reveals itself in community, in a new way of being together.  Fellowship with Christ is fellowship with our brothers and sisters.  In the Christian community, we gather in the name of Christ and thus experience Him in the midst of a suffering world.  Wherever true Christian community is formed, compassion happens in the world.  The energy that radiated from the early Christian communities was indeed divine energy that had a transforming influence on all who were touched by it.  That same energy continues to show itself wherever people come together in Christ's name and take on His yoke in humbleness and gentleness of heart.

The Church is a community of believers, disciples called together by Christ.  The togetherness of the Christian community is not the result of shared anger or anxiety; it grows from a deep sense of being called together to make God's compassion visible in the concreteness of everyday living. (see Acts 2:44-47)

In Christian community, we can come together on the basis of our common human brokenness and our common need for healing...and we find this common healing, as well as being instruments of this same healing for one another, in Christ, and in Christian community, which is the living compassion of Christ made visible in our world.