“When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them.”
Everything that follows springs from compassion, a term of infinite power and intensity: the Master feels pain for the world’s pain, for humanity’s great suffering. Jesus is compassion, the weeping of God made flesh. To weep is to love with one’s eyes.
“The harvest is plentiful…” What Jesus beholds is not the endless human encampment where he has pitched his tent; instead, he sees many harvests of pain, many reaps of fear, and flocks of sheep exhausted because they have no shepherd.
His response is a pain that grips him to his very core. And he calls the Twelve and entrusts it to them: they must preserve, guard, and save compassion—the sharing of suffering, the least sugar-coated of all feelings. Save it and sow it throughout the world through six actions: preach, heal, raise from the dead, restore, set free, and give.
The mission is twofold: to preach and to heal, or at least to care for life. The core message is that “God is like this: He cares for us and heals us. God loves you and is close.”
Rather than using His omnipotence, the Lord addresses human suffering through the frailty of others. Jesus’ response to the world’s pain is realized in us. “God saves through people… and I understand: ‘Send me, Lord, as a worker of compassion.'” It is the hands of compassion and the lips of prayer that make Christian love what it should be.