THE SYMPATHY OF JESUS
IT is not easy to arrive at a definition of sympathy. The etymology of the word gives us the meaning I suffering with a person '; but this does not get us very far, because, as we shall see later, there are ways of suffering with a person which do not really help him and which are bad for the sympathizer. I therefore suggest the following definition of sympathy: sympathy is an unselfish entering both with the heart and head into another person's problem, with the object of showing him, at what­ever cost, the true way out.
Let us try to understand fully what this means. Some people can think their way into the problem of another with a head as clear as a frosty night, but with a heart as cold. Some, on the other hand, let their heart enter into the problem, and they offer a sympathy that is without knowledge; and there­fore, instead of being creative, constructive, and truly helpful, it only reinforces the depression of the sufferer whom it sets out to help, and the only good it achieves is the possible good of breaking the solitude of the sufferer.Let us look first at three kinds of false sympathy which Mr. Fearon Halliday has described in his book Psychology and Religious Experience. The first is

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an identification with the sufferer which is neither constructive nor creative, and which perhaps can best be described as ' a fellowship in misery.' It is not true sympathy to go into the presence of a person who is suffering, in the spirit that shares the de­pression of the sufferer, but points him to no positive way out. Very often such a false sympathy includes a subtle form of self‑pity, driving both the sufferer and the sympathizer to a morbidity which is dis­integrating, pulling the personality down and not building it up. Self‑pity is the most debilitating of all mental conditions. Supposing, for instance, that I go into a man's room in the hour of his suffering and say to him, ' I am awfully sorry for you. It is rotten that you should have to suffer like this.' I ought to pull myself up and ask whether there is anything valuable in that attitude. I often find myself using the phrase, 'It is rotten,' without realiz­ing that it is an unconscious form of unbelief. If it is 'rotten' the words imply some one who allows it to be rotten, and that 'some one' in the back of our mind is God. By the kind of sympathy which is a false identification of ourselves, I mean the kind of sympathy offered by a person who, if he were in the sufferer's position, would be morally beaten by his circumstances. It will be said by many that any kind of sympathy is better than nothing; but if this kind of sympathy makes both the giver and the receiver morbid it is a debatable point whether it is better than nothing.
A second kind of false sympathy is that which is afraid to face the moral issue in the life of the person

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suffering. All of us know how easy it is, if people complain that they are suffering in any way in mind or body, to assent to the situation because of our love of the easiest way out, even though we can often see that people are lying down to their troubles in­stead of standing up and facing them. Two illus­trations of this may be taken from Mr. Halliday's book. ‑ He tells us of a minister who had to write a letter to a man who was, in his opinion, worthy of condemnation. He said to himself: 'I feel indignant and I cannot understand how any one could feel otherwise, but how shall I write to this man? ' He decided that he would write with extreme kindness, arguing that perhaps his kindness might awaken the other to some perception of gratitude and unselfishness. That night the minister dreamt that he came across a man who was unconscious and had evidently been in a brutal prize‑fight. As he came nearer, the man began to show signs of life, and slowly and heavily lifted himself up, and the minister said to himself, ' I don't suppose he is fit for much, anyway, and he will soon be fighting again.' The next night he dreamt that two hens were fighting one another fiercely. They fought until they became a confused mass of flesh. The flesh came off the bones, but the bones still fought one another. The minister recounted these dreams to a psychologist, who explained that they meant that the minister had been repressing indignation, though the minister said his motive was purely unselfish.

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The psychologist said, 'What would your business friend have said if you had written him quite calmly but quite definitely your real opinion of his conduct? ' The minister said at once, 'He would have shown the letter to his friends and said that it was a dis­graceful letter for a minister of Christ to write.' , Yes,' said the psychologist, 'and you have been thinking not of truth but of convention.'Here is another illustration of the same kind of false sympathy, the sympathy that is afraid to face moral issues. An invalid asked a minister to visit her. The patient's doctor told the minister that the case was a mysterious one, in which there were distressing symptoms which he was inclined to attribute to heart trouble, but he was not sure. When the minister visited the lady he found her in beautiful surroundings. Her bed was drawn up to the window and she had flowers all round her. Her conversation was very pious, and she had the air of being gentle and kind to everybody. One day in the course of conversation she said to the minister, 'I wish I were with Jesus. It would be so beautiful to be at rest with Him.' He felt at once that this was a morbid thing to say, and he replied, 'That is wrong. If you had the spirit of Jesus you would wish to remain with your husband and children. You would not wish to leave them while they need you. It looks to me as if there is something unhappy in the relation between your husband and yourself." The lady was much offended at his suggestion, but he turned out to be right. The doctors afterwards

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found the case to be one of hysteria, one of the factors in the cure of which must always be a realization of the real truth at the bottom of the situation. But how tempting it must have been when the lady said, ' I wish I were with Jesus,' to say, ' Yes, it would be very nice,' or even humorously to say, ' Yes, so do I,' rather than fearlessly helping her to face the moral issue; for one can see that just to take that easy way would be the worst possible thing for the sufferer.
There is a third kind of false sympathy which is the projection of ourselves and our need, our hunger for pity, on to other people, so that, though we appea to be giving them sympathy, we are really sym pathizing with ourselves. You see it sometimes in the case where a woman loses her baby, say in one of the poorer streets of a town, and another woman who has previously lost her own baby visits the first with the idea of offering sympathy. But the volubility of the sympathizer, the passionate recounting of her own sorrow, her analysis of her own feelings when she lost her baby, though her motive is good and she is unconscious of what she is really doing and is therefore not to be blamed, revel the fact that out of this other person's sorrow she is really getting sympathy for herself. She has pro­jected her feelings on to the other person, and, pretending to sympathize with her, she is really sympathizing with herself.Perhaps it is not irrelevant to say that that same mechanism of our minds works in the way we tend to condemn most violently in others the sins we are

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tempted to do ourselves. If a person, as we say, 'goes off the deep end,' and vehemently and unreasonably condemns a fault in another, a psycho‑analyst be­comes pretty certain that this is a temptation, if not a fault, of the person who indulges in the denunciation. The violence !of the denunciation is caused by the conflict in the mind of the denouncer, the conflict between his better self and his lower self, and his better self condemns violently the sin because his lower self is whispering in his ear that he himself would have greatly liked to have committed this sin, but either dared not or was withheld by conscien­tious scruples. That is why you find the Victorian prude always violent about any one who falls into sex sins, because that sin is one which the prude would dearly like to have committed but dared not. And you always feel a little bit violent‑and the violence is mixed with jealousy‑with the person who does something that you dare not do; the measure of the violence being the measure of the conflict in the mind of the denouncer.We therefore come to see that a good deal of what passes as sympathy is really self‑pity, a love of the easy way in which the moral issue is shirked, or a pretence of sympathy in order to win sympathy of another.
Many will feel that this is far too analyti­cal. 'Surely,' they will say, 'we are not to go to another in trouble, saying to ourselves, " Now, I must be careful not just to enter a fellowship of misery. I must not be afraid to tell him the truth, and I must not project my hunger for sympathy on

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to him." ' They will argue, 'Let us just go and be natural'; and there is something to be said for that. There is a great deal to be said for the hand‑grip and friendly eyes and very few words. But I know in my own case that, in default of any such realization of the nature of sympathy as I have outlined, I have bungled so badly that I pass this analysis on to others. For, of course, if people do ask our help and we fail them when they rely on us, that failure, in the realm of spiritual things, is as serious as the failure of the surgeon, who, knowing that an operation is required, is content to advise his patient to go to the South of France for a rest. At the same time, it would be foolish to make such a problem of the giving out of sympathy as to preclude or depreciate it; because it can do a tremendous amount to lighten the burdens of others and bring brightness into their sky. If you can take your tram‑ticket without forcing the conductor to come upstairs merely to give you yours, that also is sympathy. If you call at a house as the maid is washing the front steps and have a cheery word with her, and especially if you tread over the patch she has just washed, that also is sympathy.If you are in the hall when the postman is at the door struggling to get a large envelope through a small letter‑box, and you open the door and greet him and take the letter from him, that also is sympathy.
If, when a cup is broken at the table, you send for a cloth and a dustpan and explain to the maid, 'This cup got broken,' instead of ' John broke this cup,' that also is sympathy. If you have been served by

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a shop girl who has had to get nearly everything out for you to see, and you say, 'You must need a lot of patience in this job to deal with people like me,' that also is sympathy. If you look the other way when your opponent is taking his stroke in a bunker, instead of looking very hard to see whether he grounds his club, that also is sympathy (though it may be failing to meet the moral issue!). But, joking on one side, life would be easier for hundreds of modest and humble people if other people broke down the barriers they suppose exist, and entered more fully into the life and thought, as well as into the sufferings, of others.
Now, with all this in our minds, let us look at the sympathy of Jesus, and then note the conditions of sympathy and the cost of sympathy.
Jesus' sympathy was not a false identification which only amounted to a fellowship in ihisery. If one reads the story of His life carefully, one sees clearly that He never came into touch with another life without leaving that sufferer with his face turned towards some patch of blue in a sky that had seemed all grey. This is wonderfully illustrated in the story of Jesus cleansing the leper (Matthew viii. 3). We may say concerning leprosy, as concerning every disease, that there are two parts to it. There is the physical side, that of the physical symptoms, but there is also the psychological side, or what the psychologist calls the psychological syndrome, or what we call, in more popular language, ' What it feels like to be a ieper.' As one reads the story in St. Matthew's Gospel, one feels that, apart

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altogether from the physical illness, the psychological syndrome was a threefold horror : a sense of isolation because he was outcast from his fellows, a sense of being hideous, repulsive and loathed by his fellows, and a sense of helplessness because he knew that the disease was incurable. Jesus, in the restrained words of the Gospel narrative, ' stretched forth His hand and touched him.' It was just that touch that he needed to break the isolation; to show him that there was One by whom he was not loathed; and to turn his face to the blue sky beyond the grey days of sorrow by inducing that rush of healthy blood through his wasted frame. In a more intimate way than we can imagine, Jesus truly sympathized, for when Jesus saw a leper there is a sense in which He became a leper. When He saw a blind man He became blind. I inean by this that He identified Himself entirely with that psychological syndrome. He was not trying to see leprosy through His own eyes ; He was seeing leprosy through the leper's eyes. He was feeling what it was like to be a leper, and then His purpose was to turn the sufferer in the direction of deliverance.
Following our plan above, we may notice next that His sympathy was not one which shirked moral issues. If one reads the story of the woman of Samaria, one can see how again and again she tried to turn Him from His purpose. She must have felt that, being what He was, He would deal with the moral problem of her life. She was an outcast truly, since in the East it is most unusual to draw water from the well at noon‑ Women drew water in the

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early morning and again in the evening, and there is something significant in her being there at noon at all. If she can get Him to embark on an argument as to the way men ought to worship, she may save herself. But His sympathy with this woman is not the easy kind that omits all reference to the moral question.
We see the same thing in the case of the rich young ruler. If he had been a Methodist he would have been made a Circuit Steward or a Trustees' Treasurer. The fact that his riches were standing between him and the Kingdom of God would have been evaded and passed over. If we had brought ourselves to say anything to him, and had then noticed his clouded face and his turning away in sorrow, should we not have gone after him and, with our ' arm through his, given him that sympathy which he would have welcomed and which would have soothed His con­science to sleep for ever ? Jesus let him go. Jesus was not unsympathetic, for, 'looking upon him, He loved him '; but He would not offer a sympathy which shirked the moral issue, and allowed him to have a false conception of the nature of religious reality and the august claims of God. In the same way, we notice Jesus refusing to accept sympathy from another because it shirked the moral issue. When Jesus spoke of the way of the Cross, Peter, the lovable and impulsive disciple, broke out in protest, 'Be it far from Thee, Lord,' and Jesus sounds almost violent as He calls His friend by the name Satan; but the violence of Jesus is the measure of His recognition of the subtlety of the temptation.

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Then, in the third place, Jesus' sympathy was never a projection of His own hunger for sympathy on to others. If this had been so, then in the Garden He would have appealed to His men not to sleep, would have said to them, ' I know you are tired and I sympathize with you, but how much greater than yours is My own need.' There is almost the tender­ness of a mother to her children as He says, 'The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.'
When we turn to the conditions of sympathy, I think we may divide them into two. There is something that is given and something that is learnt. It can hardly be denied that there are gifts of imagin­ation, insight, and tenderness which make some people more equipped to sympathize than others; but there is also something to be learnt, an experience of life, and practice in seeing another person's point of view, not through one's own eyes, but through his eyes.
Perhaps the biggest problem in regard to sym­pathy is that of the relation of experience to sym­pathy. In my 'Friday Fellowship' we spent three evenings discussing this most interesting question. Some held that you can sympathize better with a person who is passing through a bitter experience if you yourself have passed through that experience. OLhers saw that this would make Christ incapable of ideally sympathizing with others who suffered an experience which He had never had. They therefore deduced that experience was unnecessary. Others felt that the experience was necessary to perfect sympathy. Others, again, felt that it depended on

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how one reacted to experience whether one could sympathize with others passing through such experience.
It is surely a superficial point of view to say that experience of a certain form of suffering is essential to the truest sympathy with a person passing through such experience. Sometimes, indeed, things work the other way. Two women were lying side by side in hospital beds. One had passed through a certain painful experience; the other was just entering upon it. The latter allowed some groans to escape her, whereupon the former was heard to say, 'I wish she wouldn't groan like that. It isn't nearly as bad as that.' On the other hand, some cases would seem to indicate that true sym­pathy is impossible without experience. Some people find it almost impossible to understand the intense craving of some men for alcohol, causing them to go through anything in order to get it. Whereas one who has experienced such incontroll­able desire can understand and can truly sympathize.
In our Fellowship Group we came to two clear conclusions. The first was that our experience of a certain kind of suffering would help us truly to sympathize only if we had ourselves reacted to our experience in the right way, and that, if this reaction were not made, experience might even weaken our sympathy, this latter point being especially illus­trated by the case of sympathy for a sinner.The second conclusion to which we came was

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that experience of a certain kind of suffering is not essential to the highest sympathy, provided that the sympathizer had himself successfully passed through some sterner conflict, higher in the scale of conflicts, and had come through it successfully. We read that Jesus was ' in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.' This cannot be true literally if it is supposed to mean that Jesus suffered every temptation that comes to us. Many of us are not tempted to excessive alcoholism or to the worst forms of immorality ; and if these tempta­tions pass us by, they must have passed Him by. What is surely meant is that He engaged in stern conflicts, higher in the scale than ours, and emerged from them successfully, and that His experience made Him at all points able to enter into our lower experiences with sympathy, defined as we defined it at the beginning of this chapter. One of the members of the Fellowship hit on the happy illus­tration of potential sympathy as a reservoir high up in the mountains, and he suggested that if we had had certain experiences the water of sympathy would flow down that channel, but that, if not, it would make for itself another channel which would be equally effective, though the second channel might be harder to make. So the amazing fact emerges that Jesus the sinless could draw far nearer to a sinner than could even a fellow sinner.
When we come to consider the cost of sympathy we know how small our power of sympathizing is, compared with that of Jesus, because the toll it takes from us is so much less : but even in our own case, if

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any one cares to make the experiment, he will find that to interview six people one after another, and to bring to the fifth and sixth the same freshness of mind and the same compassion, the same determin­ation to enter into another's experience and find God's way out, will leave him pretty exhausted at the end of the time. At the same time, when we look at Jesus in regard to this matter, all talk of our own power to sympathize is silenced. Day after day He gave Him­self unceasingly in a manner which we can hardly understand. ' He was moved with compassion.' ' He saw the leper by the wayside, and never ceased to bear his disease. He heard the cry of the blinded when others passed him by. He felt the touch of the woman in the thronging crowd. . . . He saw not only the pain and sorrow which all men's eyes have marked. He saw into the depths of men's souls, away behind their callous faces and high looks and stoical pose. He saw how surely the bravest and purest come to the hour of agony, and how universal is the crown of sorrow. Never did morning wear to evening but Christ's heart did break.'
The events of the Cross bring us to the climax of His power to sympathize. As Dr. Clow beautifully writes : ' He came to Calvary after a night of sleep­lessness, following on the agony in the Garden, when the sweat stood like drops of blood on His brow. During the long anguish of the morning, He stood for hours with no one to bid Him rest, and He was scourged and crowned with thorns, and smitten by the soldiers' rough palms. His

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limbs refused the weight of the cross on the way. He came to His dying act with every nerve quiver­ing with exhaustion, and every muscle crying out with pain. He hung upon His cross, with the nails piercing His hands and feet, and He felt the agony of an unappeasable thirst, and that slow chill which told Him that the shadow of death was upon Him. And, although it may not so stir our human imagination, still more awful was the travail of His soul. The burden of human sin which He must bear alone, and the felt approach of the tide of forsakenness which swept for a moment between Him and the Father, were agonies which even David's conscience could not have fathomed. Who would have aught but words of praise had He concentrated every thought and word on the great redemption deed? Yet He lifts His eyes to look upon His mother. A flood of recollection, we can boldly say of Him who took upon Him our nature, passed over Him. The home in Nazareth, in His vision, hid the walls of Jerusalem. The crooning of His mother's voice as she sung her lullaby to Him; the tending of her care as His boyhood grew to strength ; the reverent wondering of her mind as He bore more plainly the marks of His divinity; and the piercing of her heart as He strained forward to the cross‑all came back to Him. Now also dear before Him rises the picture of her future. The widow's loneliness made more dpsolate, the whitened hair given another sorrow as it goes down to the grave, age feeling its failing strength, poverty and homelessness stinting her of the sweet comforts

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of life! He masters His agony, He refuses His groan. and in brief words, never forgotten by two of those who heard them, He said: "Woman, behold thy son." " Son, behold thy mother." ' And even a dying thief on the cross next to His own finds a sympathy coming out to him big enough to turn his face to Paradise.
There is one last essential in sympathy; it is both a condition and, in a world like this, a cost. It is personal nearness to Christ. 'So many people come to you,' a minister said to me once. ' How do you know what to say ? ' If I am ' close up ' I do know what to say. If my communion with Christ is not what it should be, if I have been prayerless or careless, slack and indifferent, if my own spiritual temperature is below normal, then I have to guess. Only if we are ' close up ' dare we try to help men and women by true sympathy in a way which will often prove surgical. Only so can we do what true sympathy should always end in doing. It should bring men to a Love which never lets them go and which never lets them off ; a Love which faces the fact that life is full of thorns, but which can show us how to do what Jtsus did ‑wear those thorns as a crown.