Love on the brink of action
Compassion: Pity aroused by the distress of others, with the desire to help them.
How do we gauge the crucified Christ? How do you gauge the crucified Christ? It is a topic that traverses a breadth of subjects, including science, history, philosophy, law, and psychology, among others. By the way, Christ means the Messiah, aka the anointed one, in the Greek language. Christ is not Jesus’ last name:) In my previous post, What is Love, I talked a bit about the love motivation in trying to gauge the crucified Jesus, but it is hard to explain self-sacrificial love to a modern society who don’t really grasp non-self-sacrifice love. But take the sacrificial part out, and most people are well aware and are a champion of self-love. Thank you, Covid.
So how about looking at it through the lens of compassion? We can all relate to the above definition of compassion. Philanthropic giving, volunteerism, and other forms of altruism stem from some form of a desire to help others in distress. For example, let’s look at the issue of homelessness combined with drug addiction in the United States. There is ubiquitous support to address it but how? It seems completely improbable to solve, mainly because it is. We know we have compassion enough, or if I’m reaching at least pity, to at least donate clothes or money to shelters and rehab programs.
Compassion is what God felt for all of us, His children. If humans, in their flawed nature have the impulse to intervene, as distant and cold as it may be, imagine God who personifies love looking at the human race, who is essentially homeless and addicted to all the drugs of this world that numb us from anything supernatural, with pity from the distress we cause each other and ourselves and desiring to intervene directly.
Truly gauging the crucified Christ creates a paradigm shift in a person. One cannot feign compassion and love after comprehending that the Maker and Creator came to this speck of dust in the expanse of His universe to become like one of us. Shed divinity and donn humanity? Humanity with our frailties, bodily functions, and limitations instead of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. In addition to that, Jesus always referred to us as either his friends or brothers and sisters; he saw us as his family! Jesus saw us all as one family, not Jew or Gentile, White or Black, Brown or Yellow, educated or uneducated, rich or poor, servant or king, gay or straight, nurse or engineer, but as God’s children.
We all need help and a Saviour to save us from being a slave to our sins, a slave to the darkness in the world that just wants to destroy and kill everyone it gets its hands on.
Boundless Compassion, along with boundless love, is what compelled God to give His only begotten Son to give us eternal life. To give us a home, to deliver us from our addiction to sin, and let us walk in the way of freedom, light, truth, joy, peace, and love.
