Pity

"I have compassion on the multitude." - Matthew 15:32

Jesus feeds the Multitudes

Christ, the incarnate Son of God, was all compassion. Compassion for fallen man it was that brought Him down from heaven and led Him up to Calvary. His Incarnation and His death, as seen in the light of faith, are deeds of supreme, boundless pity, such as man could never have looked for or imagined. To accomplish them the Eternal Son had to divest Himself, or as Saint Paul says, "to empty Himself" of attributes and privileges seemingly inseparable from His divine nature.

And as compassion inspired His coming, so it pervaded and colored His whole mortal life, revealing itself at every step under the most touching forms, and extending to every shape of human misery. Thus in reading the Gospel one cannot fail to notice in the first place how strongly physical suffering appealed to Him wherever He met it. "He went about" says Saint Matthew (4:23), "healing all manner of sickness and every infirmity among the people." The blind, the paralyzed, the deaf and dumb, were lead to him, " and they were all healed." The most loathsome forms of disease were powerless to repel Him. He gently laid His hand upon the stricken ones and they were cured. Those poor outcasts, the lepers, approached Him freely and were restored to health. In short, His whole public life is filled with such mercies.

Nobody ever appealed to Him in vain. Even when not appealed to, the very sight of human suffering was enough to move Him. He was not asked, he was not expected, to raise to life the poor widow's only son; but he saw her utter bereavement and that was enough. "He gave him to his mother." (Luke 7:15) And so with the sufferer at the pool of Bethsaida. He finds him ex hausted and disheartened by his thirty-eight years of helpless misery, and by his long unavailing expecta tion beside the pool; at once He bids him to arise and walk. And so again with the blind man whose story is so graphically told in the ninth chapter of Saint John.

He is not less alive to the more common needs of those around Him. When the crowds followed Him into the desert and, in their eagerness to hear Him, forgot their necessary sustenance, He is mind ful of it. It is on one of these occasions that He spoke the touching words recorded by Saint Matthew (15:32) "I have compassion on the multitude because they continue with me now three days and have not what to eat, and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way;" and that thereupon he wrought in their favor the wonderful multiplication of the loaves and the fishes. The very sight of the grief of Martha and Mary was enough to move Him to tears; while, at the wedding feast of Cana, He ac tually wrought a miracle in order to prolong the enjoyment of the assembled guests and spare a humiliation to those who had invited them.

That tender regard for the feelings of others reveals itself most strikingly in His treatment of those who were specially despised or hated by the Jews. He visits the Samaritans and stays several days with them, speaking more openly of Himself to them than He had done to his own, and subsequently we always find him referring to them in terms of kindness. Nor is His action different with regard to the publicans. He visits them, He eats with them, he chooses one among them, Saint Matthew, for an apostle. If His enemies upbraid Him with the favor He shows them, He answers by the declaration, that it was, after all, for sinners He had come.

Indeed, His tender pity for sinners is perhaps the most striking aspect of His divine compassion. There was in His soul a horror of sin beyond any thing that the human mind can imagine. The Saints tell us in their writings how loathsome sin was in their sight; and they had but a faint image of the reality, for God alone can see sin in its true light. And yet how lovingly He pictures sinners in the parables of the lost sheep and of the Prodigal Son. With what merciful condescension He welcomes them when they approach Him. How effectively he repels the accusers of the woman taken in adultery. How warmly he pleads the cause of Mary Magdalen repentant at His feet.
How generously he promises to the penitent thief an immediate share in His Kingdom. At the bidding of the Pharisees and the priests, Jerusalem had repeatedly declined to listen to Him. He had been constantly opposed by those in power. Yet at the very moment they were plan ning to take away His life, He forgets their obstinacy, their perverse blindness. Looking down from Mount Olivet on the devoted city, He weeps over her impending fate: "He saw the city and wept over it;" and one of His last words on Calvary is a touching appeal for those who had nailed Him to the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Thus the life of Our Lord from beginning to end was an unceasing exercise of the purest, the holiest, the most generous and most indulgent compassion.

Who would not love one so merciful and good?
Who would not strive to be like Him?

- from Daily Thoughts for Priests, by Father John Baptist Hogan, S.S., D,D., 1899; it has the Imprimatur of Archbishop John Joseph Williams, Archdiocese of Boston, Massachusetts