GOD’S COMPASSION IS REVEALED IN WORD AND SACRAMENT
Prayer: Lord, how great is Your compassion, and how great it is for us to be objects of Your compassion. As we live in this world, help us from Your Word and especially from Your Supper, to see ourselves as people who are continuously viewed with compassion by You. Amen.
The Text, St. Mark 8:1-9 (v. 1). In those days, the multitude being very great and having nothing to eat, Jesus called His disciples to Him and said to them, “I have compassion on the multitude.”
Lord, this is Your Word and these are Your words. Sanctify us by the truth. Your Word is truth. Lord, we will follow You on the way of truth to life everlasting. Amen!
Dear people loved by God in Christ, who has compassion on the multitude: Grace and peace to you from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
As we look at the life of our Lord, we look at it as going from one event to another. We look at the context: what came before this Feeding of the 4,000 – that Jesus healed a man who was deaf and mute – and what comes after it, that He heals a blind man. We look at when this takes place: some months after the Feeding of the 5,000. Also where it takes place: unlike the Feeding of the 5,000 – by the Sea of Galilee, a Jewish area – this takes place when Jesus is in the Decapolis, which is a mainly Gentile region.
But speaking of place and location, today we should see that He came from quite a different region. In John’s gospel it says: “No one has seen God. The only-begotten, who is in the Father’s bosom, He has declared Him” (1:18). This verse shows us the Son of God existing from eternity within the same divine essence as the Father, in perfect communion and harmony with Him, in eternal bliss, “in His bosom” – which is the same picture of ideal peace and rest that’s promised to us in heaven (Lk 16).
But I want to concentrate on the phrase that says the only-begotten Son “has declared” God to us, since this is what shows up in the feeding of the 4,000, where the first words out of Jesus’ mouth are: “I have compassion.”
In the original language of this New Testament verse, this is one word, a beautiful word that means “having/feeling compassion.” St. Mark writes three times that Jesus had or felt this compassion: first in chapter 1 of his gospel, when He was about to do his first healing of a leper; the second time in chapter 6, in the feeding of the 5,000, where he says Jesus “was moved with compassion for them, because they were like sheep not having a shepherd.” This word “having compassion” literally says Jesus “felt it in His insides.”
This word says Jesus literally ached, He felt it in His viscera, in His internal organs. God doesn’t have a stomach that gets twisted in knots. But here we’re shown that Jesus did. If He had a human body He must have, but we don’t often dwell on this. Jesus literally ached in His physical human anatomy as Mary’s Son. This shows what He did in His human nature being shared fully by His nature as God. He’s suffering. It’s being done to Him, that as God and Man He has this going on on the inside.
This is how God chooses to express His love. Although His love begins in heaven, He doesn’t keep His love distant and above us. He doesn’t keep it above our human emotions. He sends His Son to bring His compassion into this world, so that He literally aches and hurts as He dwells among us.
It’s important to hear that He has this compassion for us. But what’s different in this feeding of the 4,000 is that it isn’t said about Jesus. He Himself says it: “I have compassion on the multitude.” This is what He came, from the bosom of the Father, to proclaim: what God is like. This is a significant difference in the feeding of the 4,000, from that of the 5,000. Both times we hear about this compassion. But this time we hear Jesus say it.
This underscores that the compassionate nature of God is something that must be revealed. It isn’t something we can know naturally or just assume to be true. We must be told this.
But often people think it’s natural. Even we who know the Gospel think God’s compassion is the most natural thing. We know He’s longsuffering and patient, gentle and kind, forgiving and merciful, that His thoughts toward us are thoughts of peace and not of evil, that He has no pleasure in the death of a sinner but His will is for everyone to repent and be saved. But we know this only from His Word. If those outside the church have thoughts that God should be like that, it’s because they have some knowledge of the God of the Bible, God’s own claims of who He is.
But you could never know that God has compassion for you, if all you have is the natural knowledge of God – what you know about God apart from His written Word, apart from the Holy Spirit. This is what you know from nature, and from the Law of God written in your heart, that you have an inborn knowledge of right and wrong. From nature you can see God’s power, you can see His wisdom, you can see those attributes of God. But you can’t see that He is loving and compassionate. You see decay and death. The laws of nature are harsh, where the strong devour the weak.
But where it really gets difficult is when you aware of your sins. The Law of God written in your heart can only condemn you, as you see what you’ve done wrong and what you’ve done right, and you see that your sins outweigh your good actions, and there’s no way to get rid of them. This knowledge of God also tells you that God is your Judge. But it doesn’t tell you how to get rid of your sins. It doesn’t tell you that God forgives. Then if you ask whether you deserve any kindness, whether you deserve to have good things, your sins cry out and say, No. You don’t deserve it. You earn the opposite. By your sins you don’t deserve one drop of kindness.
Isn’t that a wilderness? Where there’s no expectation of anything good. But here comes Jesus – into that wilderness, yours – He came down from heaven, sent by the Father to declare what God thinks, and He says: “I have compassion on the multitude” – which includes you.
Compassion is one of God’s attributes that you can only see through Jesus. He came down for our salvation. He came to do it all. He came to make it His wilderness. He came to be rejected by men. He came to be under the Law and to do everything it requires, for you, without you lifting a finger. He came to die the death you deserve, to pay for all your sins. He came to rise from the dead to give you a new life that’s not a wilderness.
All of this is something He did, but you would never know it if not for His Word. That’s where His compassion is revealed, in the message of what Jesus has done for you – promised in the Old Testament, fulfilled in the New Testament. He sent out His apostles, He sends out pastors, to preach this message that despite your sins – no, because of your sins – He has compassion for you. Isn’t that incredible? We expect our sins to make people have less compassion and understanding for us. They’ll say, at some point: “I don’t have sympathy for you. I’m out of patience. You got yourself in this mess, you get yourself out.” Not our God. Not Jesus. Not ever.
It’s not just in the Bible, but in these ways God commands His Word to be brought to us – in the absolution, in the sermon, in the blessing – that He keeps saying: “I have compassion” for you. He gives it to you in His Word.
He also instituted a supper for this wilderness we’re in. He prepares a table in the wilderness! For you! In the presence of the enemy. (Ps 23:P5, 78:19) His Supper, the Lord’s Supper, the Supper of His body and blood. The Lord’s Supper is the Supper of His compassion where He forgives your sins. That’s the gift we think of when we come to the Lord’s Supper. “This is My body … this is My blood … for you, for the remission of sins.”
When you eat and drink His body and blood with faith in Jesus’ words, He’s giving you the complete forgiveness of all your sins. But behind His forgiveness is – what? – His compassion. That Jesus aches and hurts for you. He suffers with you. He sees you wracked in the pain of your guilt and your shame, and He suffers with you. He sees how you get wounded by the world, sinned against, how you hurt, and He aches and hurts for you. He sees how you withdraw from others, how you can’t trust, He sees that you feel alone, you feel left alone – He suffers with you. He sees how because of things that happen in life you can be tempted to doubt and question Him, or get angry and impatient with Him; He aches for you.
This is what you’re invited to in the Lord’s Supper: the fellowship of His compassion. When you come to the Lord’s Supper, you receive this. In the Lord’s Supper there’s nothing about how you deserve His goodness, or that you’ve suffered enough to deserve something from Him. He just gives His compassion to you, all His compassion, He wants you to be sure of it!
In making you a recipient of His very body and blood, He’s giving you the identity of a “recipient of Christ’s compassion.” That’s who you are. You come to the Lord’s Supper to know this, to receive it again. Really, since we need His compassion all the time, why would we have a Sunday service that doesn’t include the Lord’s Supper? Why act like there’s a Sunday when we don’t need the Supper of His compassion given to us?
In His Supper He’s looking on the heart by sorrow broken, He’s looking on the tears by sinners shed, and gives His Supper as a token that by His grace – His forgiveness – your soul is fed (ELH 312:1). He fills you with His forgiveness, and therefore with His compassion, so that you’ll go into His world bearing His compassion inside you, and bearing it to others, wherever you are. Amen!