Jesus’ Compassion: The Heart of Missional Livingનમૂનો

Day #1: Matthew 9:35–38

Matthew 9 relates a series of healings by Jesus: a paralytic (9:2–8), a sick girl and a bleeding woman (9:18–26), two blind men (9:27–31), and a deaf man (9:32–34). At the beginning of Matthew 10, Jesus will send the twelve apostles out into missional engagement that will be modeled on his own: liberating people from demonic oppression and healing their sicknesses and diseases (10:1). Between Jesus’ miracles and the sending of the Twelve, however, Matthew gives us a summary of the kind of Jesus-shaped ministry the disciples will be doing: “Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness” (9:35, NRSV). Everywhere he went, crowds surged around him. Matthew summarizes Jesus’ perspective on the crowds this way: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (9:36). This is the perspective and posture he invites the Twelve to take as he prepares to send them out into their own encounters.

Instead of a jostling mass of smelly humanity, worthy of repugnance and disdain, Jesus sees a “plentiful harvest” of compassion-worthy human beings (v. 37). He sees beyond any unpleasant outer conditions, perceiving their inner reality: they are “harassed and helpless”, quite literally “bothered and beaten down.” Both expressions are passive forms, meaning that they are in this condition as a result of someone or something else’s harsh treatment of them. They are hard-pressed on every side by the enemy of their souls. Jesus’ response to this is to send “laborers” into the harvest. His compassion-driven reaction is to people—the very ones who have been formed, reformed, and transformed by their intimacy with him—are now sent to offer others the gift of formation, reformation, and transformation in Jesus’ name.