June 14, 2026
I speak to you today in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
It’s funny how quickly and easily we make assumptions about the people we meet. All of us have done it at one time or another. And all of us, if we’re old enough, will have a story about how our assumptions about someone started to change once we entered into a friendship.
Our assumptions don’t change just because we get to know the person. Our assumptions change because we develop a sense of compassion that allows us to enter into their lives.
So today I want us to be thinking about compassion. How vital compassion is to our discipleship as a follower of Jesus, and how we might cultivate compassion in our own lives of faith.
This morning marks a turning point in Jesus’ ministry. So far, Jesus has been the ethical, merciful Messiah who teaches and preaches. The healer who cures people of things like blindness, and demons, and skin diseases. But up to now, Jesus has pretty much been a one-man show, with the disciples serving as his adoring fan base.
And then, all of a sudden, Jesus commissions the disciples to do the same work he’s been doing. That makes me wonder – why here? Why now? What could possibly have entered Jesus’ mind that would make him discern that this was the right time to commission his motley group of disciples? The answer, I think, lies in what’s been happening to Jesus over the course of his ministry.
We don’t know too much about Jesus’ life before he began his ministry. He lived in Nazareth and was a skilled worker – not a laborer or a farmer – who was also a literate and well-educated rabbi. Jesus probably lived a pretty comfortable life – at least as far as those things went in first century Galilee.
But now, Jesus has been living among the people he’s ministering to. He’s left the security of home and steady work behind as he depends on others for the basic needs of life: food, shelter, companionship. As he teaches and preaches and heals among the crowd, he learns first-hand about their wants and their needs and their problems and their joys. And on this particular day, the Gospel says, as Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them.
“Compassion”, though, doesn’t get this feeling exactly right. Some translations use “pity”, but that leaves something out, too. The Greek word in the original text is “splangchnizomai” (splangkh-NEE-zom-ahee). The idea behind the word is that what we’re experiencing affects us in our guts – where this culture thought we felt kindness and love and pity. Splangchnizomai isn’t about intellectually understanding the other person. It’s not even about empathy. In modern times, we might say splangchnizomai transforms our hearts.
In his ministry, Jesus has come face-to-face with human suffering and rejection and isolation. He’s living the life of the people to whom he ministers. He knows them – and us – intimately. He knows our hopes and dreams, our fears and concerns. As our Eucharistic prayer today will say: “living among us, Jesus loved us”. Jesus’ experiences with people have resulted in splangchnizomai. In the sort of compassion that has transformed the human Jesus.
And because this profound, gut-level emotional response compels immediate, loving action, Jesus radically changes his ministry by bringing others into it.
The fact of the matter is that our discipleship will not be effective without compassion. Because this deep compassion doesn’t just change Jesus. It changes us. Compassion changes us as people, because it leads us into the kind of discipleship Christ calls us into. Deep compassion transforms our discipleship from charity – something we do for those who are less-well off than us because we think it’s the right thing to do, or because it makes us feel good about ourselves – into solidarity. Where we minister to our neighbors simply because we understand who they are in our own guts. Because deep compassion brings us – like Jesus – face-to-face with human suffering and rejection and isolation.
Being a disciple of Jesus requires us to cultivate practices that help us to enter into meaningful relationships with those outside our circles. Because entering into those relationships can be scary. It’s easy to write a check to a worthy cause, or sign a petition, or maybe even hand a sandwich or a bottle of water to someone along the side of the road. Those are easy things, because they require almost nothing of us except a charitable impulse. But to have compassion – to come alongside someone – to share their hopes and dreams and sorrows and pain – that asks us to give something of ourselves that is meaningful and precious. And that’s a difficult thing to do without practice.
Like the original disciples, we, too have also been commissioned by Jesus. And so the question for us today is: does our discipleship make any contribution to making God’s reign a more tangible reality, or are we just Jesus’ adoring fan base?
Our discipleship becomes transformative when we develop the practices that open us to God’s gift of compassion. Practices rooted in a stool with the three legs of prayer, hospitality, and justice. Deepening our prayer lives and reading Scripture helps us more fully align ourselves with God’s will – letting God work more freely through us. When we go beyond offering hospitality, but – like Jesus – leave our security behind and accept others’ hospitality, we’ll come to more fully know the neighbors he commands us to love. And we develop compassion through our acts that promote justice – not because they are the sort of things that moral people do, but because they reflect the deeper reality of God’s reconciling the world in Christ.
When we experience splangchnizomai for ourselves – when God’s gift of compassion transforms us – we’ll come to know that God’s reign is not some aspirational vision in the next life. It’s a reality that’s already present here, in this place, in our midst. The harvest is plentiful, my friends. So be grateful that, as our acts of prayer and hospitality and justice equip us to enter into the Spirit’s work of reconciliation and healing, God has given us everything we need to bring that harvest in. Amen.