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Compassion costs something. Sympathy is cheap — you can feel it from across the room. Compassion moves. It gets close. The word the New Testament uses for it is the same word used for gut-level physical movement — it doesn't stay in your chest. The parable of the good Samaritan doesn't end with someone who felt moved. It ends with someone who acted.
Get These Verses Daily — Free“It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.”
The Hebrew raḥamim — compassions — shares a root with the word for womb. God's mercy is not occasional or thinly distributed. Jeremiah writes this surrounded by ruins and finds it still true.
“But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him.”
The Samaritan had the most cultural reasons not to stop. Compassion here is not a feeling that arose easily — it is a choice made against social logic.
“Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering.”
'Bowels of mercies' is not poetic decoration — it is the same gut-level compassion word used of Jesus. Paul is saying: clothe yourself in this. Wear it on purpose.
“But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.”
Jesus saw crowds as scattered people, not statistics. The compassion followed the quality of his attention — he was actually looking at them.
“But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.”
John is direct: shutting up your compassion when you have the means to help raises a question about whether God's love is actually in you at all. Love that stays theoretical isn't love.
The Greek word translated "compassion" in the New Testament is splanchnizomai — from splanchna, meaning the bowels, the gut, the innermost organs. When Jesus saw the crowds and had compassion, it was a visceral response, not an intellectual one. He was moved in his depths. This word is used to describe Jesus in Matthew and Mark more than any other emotional term. Compassion is not a peripheral quality of his character; it is close to the center.
The parable of the good Samaritan is often read as a lesson in helping neighbors. It is also a lesson in who was qualified to be compassionate. A priest passed. A Levite passed. The man who stopped was a Samaritan — ethnically despised, religiously suspect, someone who had every social reason to keep moving. Compassion in this parable crosses every line that typically keeps people apart.
Paul's language in Colossians 3:12 is telling: "Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering." Bowels of mercies — splanchna oiktirmōn — is the same gut-level word. He is describing compassion as something you put on deliberately, like clothing. It doesn't always arise naturally. Sometimes you choose to extend it before you feel it.
Commentary is from a charismatic Protestant perspective, drawing on KJV text and public-domain sources including Spurgeon, Andrew Murray, and Matthew Henry.
Lamentations 3:22 — "It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not" — uses the Hebrew word raḥamim for compassions. This is the plural of reḥem — which is also the word for womb. God's compassion has the quality of a mother's bond with the child she carried. The plural form suggests not just an attitude but a deep, inexhaustible supply of it. That is the model behind the human command to show mercy: not occasional sympathy but a characteristic generosity of spirit that mirrors something in God's own nature.
Matthew 9:36 says Jesus "saw" the multitudes and was moved with compassion — and the seeing matters. He was looking at people, not at crowds. The follow-up statement — "they were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd" — tells you what he saw when he looked: not numbers but lostness. Compassion requires the kind of attention that notices the person behind the situation.
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