Sympathy without Compassion

“Let your feelings be your guide!”  “If it feels right, do it!”  Dangerous counsel or words of wisdom?  For many of us who have been raised in a church environment the answer is obvious.  From our youth up, we have been repeatedly admonished:  Do the right thing and the good feelings will follow.  This may be sound guidance in most situations, but is it necessarily always good advice?

In my personal studies in the Gospel of Mark, I have been impressed recently by the frequency of Jesus’ actions that sprang from His emotions.  Moved with compassion He touched and healed a leper.  Looking around in anger at those who were ready to attack Him, He defied them by healing a man on the Sabbath.  He felt compassion for the crowds that were following Him because they were like sheep without a shepherd and began teaching them.  He felt compassion for the four thousand who had been with Him for three days and had nothing to eat then miraculously fed them all.

“Well, of course,” you might say, “if you’re Jesus, following your emotions would a good thing!”  But if we are Jesus’ followers, are we not supposed to do as He did, to become like Him?  Clearly if our emotions are leading us to do something for our own pleasure that is obviously sinful, that is not the time to act.  That is what we call temptation!  But what about when our emotions seem to be in sync with what we think is right?  We need godly discernment in knowing when to act on our emotions and when to refrain.  After all, God gave us our emotions.  Jesus taught something about this in a very well known parable.

The parable of the Good Samaritan (found in Luke 10:30-37) tells about a man who is robbed and beaten and left by the roadside half dead.  Both a priest and a Levite passed by and did nothing.  In fact, they took care to pass by on the other side of the road.  Then the Samaritan came by, “felt compassion” and took care of him. 

The main point of the story was to illustrate who was truly a good neighbor.  The ones who passed by may have had sympathy for the man but those feelings were quickly overwhelmed by their religious system that looked down on the needy and required them to avoid contact with “unclean” things, like this man would have been to them.  There may have been sympathy but no compassion.  The Samaritan, on the other hand was moved to do the right thing by his emotions.

According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, sympathy is defined as:  “the act or capacity of entering into or sharing the feelings or interests of another.”  It could be characterized by the words, “I feel for you!”  On the other hand, compassion is defined as:  “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.”  In other words, sympathy implies feelings but no action.  Compassion, however, implies taking action to relieve the other person’s distress.

As a culture we are continually bombarded with visual images and sit by the hour watching drama of all kinds.  Sometimes I wonder if we are absorbed in so much vicarious stimulation of our feelings and sympathies for no other purpose than our own entertainment that we become dull to real needs when we actually see them.  Do you ever leave a movie feeling emotionally fatigued for an experience that was not real?
  
One thing is clear from the Scriptures, our God is a God of compassion, and He wants us to follow His example.  Jesus, even though He knew that He had to keep moving to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom throughout Israel, continually stopped to respond to the immediate physical needs of people.  At the same time, He did not compromise His greater mission to become the sacrificial Lamb of God, knowing that its purpose was to alleviate the hideous problem of sin and death, the ultimate need of all mankind.  Let us pray for that kind of discernment in responding to the needs of those around us, that we may have compassion and not just sympathy.

Convinced of God’s great mercies, the prophet Jeremiah wrote the following, even in the midst of seemingly hopeless desperation, chaos and destruction that surrounded him when Jerusalem was under siege by the Babylonians:  “The Lord’s loving kindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail.  They are new every morning: Great is Thy faithfulness.” -- Lam 3:22-23