Compassion
David Livingstone was one of the most famous Scottish missionaries to Africa, although he did more exploring than missionary work. He has been censured for gun-running, lying about his discoveries, and placing tribes at disadvantage by neglecting promises he made them. Nonetheless he did much to awaken the world to the horror of the Arab slave trade, which he called a “monster of iniquity brooding over Africa” and “this trade in hell.” Writing to his wife Mary Livingstone from Bashinge on March 20, 1855, he recounted an incident in the slave-trade he had seen that day. Referring to a slave-agent with whom he had been, in 1855 he wrote:
This agent is about the same in appearance as Mebalwe, and speaks Portuguese as the Griquas do Dutch. He has two chainsful of women going to be sold for the ivory. Formerly the trade went from the interior into the Portuguese territory; now it goes the opposite way. This is the effect of the Portuguese love of the trade: they cannot send them abroad on account of our ships of war on the coast, yet will sell them to the best advantage. These women are decent-looking, as much so as the general run of Kuruman ladies, and were caught lately in a skirmish the Portuguese had with their tribe; and they will be sold for about three tusks each. Each has an iron ring round the wrist, and that is attached to the chain, which she carries in the hand to prevent it jerking and hurting the wrist. How would Nannie like to be thus treated? and yet it is only by the goodness of God in appointing our lot in different circumstances that we are not similarly degraded, for we have the same evil nature, which is so degraded in them as to allow of men treating them as beasts.
When David asked his wife Mary to associate herself with a slave woman, he was expressing the need for Christians to be compassionate.
In the New Testament the Greek word splanchnitzomai is translated into English as “to show compassion” or “to have compassion.” The word splanchnitzomai, as used in the New Testament, literally means “to have one’s bowels turned over.” By creating a linguistic link between the idea of compassion and the bowels or inward parts of the body, the authors of the gospels were affirming in a very vivid way that when we truly show compassion for someone who is suffering, we feel their hurt as a nagging ache in the pit of our stomach.
Judaism associated compassion with maternity. The Hebrew word for compassion is rechem which means womb or uterus. If one becomes engaged in a compassionate act the womb – the sacrosanct nurturer of life – is pained. Compassion, for the Jewish community, expresses a feminine characteristic of God.
The English word for compassion is derived from two Latin words, com “with” and pati “to suffer.” Compassion means “to suffer with.” It means total and complete solidarity with another individual in which his or her suffering becomes that of my own. The suffering of the afflicted one is transposed into the soul of the caregiver. The suffering of one can no longer be distinguished from the suffering of the other. I, and the other, in suffering have now become one and the same.
Such a confession can be sustained when one understands that, in the Greek, as recorded in the New Testament, only Jesus is ascribed to possess the personal attribute of compassion. Jesus, and Jesus alone, was compassionate. The biblical writers make a succinct declaration that only Jesus was compassionate, and the best that we can do is emulate the compassion of Jesus. Other individuals in the Bible may have been loving, concerned, and understanding, though only Jesus was compassionate. This is a confession that when Jesus acted with compassion or spoke the word in his teaching, it became the turning point in the life of another individual, bringing reconciliation and restoration, wholeness and healing.
To be a compassionate Christian, we must enter into the suffering of another individual as if it is our own.