Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them
Sympathy
Reverence is the spirit of the Christian towards that which is above him, and sympathy is his spirit towards that which is about him.
That which is above is summed up in God; that which is about us is summed up in man. We speak of sympathy as a feeling for others, where it is in the fullest sense of the phrase a feeling with others. Sympathy is not from without, not from above, as of one who looks afar off upon some object which moves his pity, but it is from within, and reaches to our whole being. He who really sympathises has in the true language of the heart entered into the feelings of another and made them his own. That which moves him belongs not to a stranger but to himself; he has mastered so far the secret of a true communion of life. And then, for the most part, and very naturally, we understand by sympathy a fellowship in suffering. We are most conscious of our need in moments of sorrow, and in such moments we can most recognise how much we owe to those who help us. But sympathy does not find scope in suffering only or even chiefly. It is co-extensive with human emotion and human experience. No doubt the service of sympathy costs us something. We must bear and feel the burden which we remove. The wonders of Christ’s infinite compassion were indeed triumphs of human love rather than of Divine authority, and as we study them we dimly discern with something of trembling awe what is meant by “the power of His resurrection” and “the fellowship of His sufferings”; how it is through pain and seeming loss and death that we gain, in Him, for others and for ourselves, the blessings of life. The service of sympathy does cost us something, but it brings abundant compensation. St. Paul has told us the secret of his unmatched influence: “I became all things to all men.” His influence flowed, that is, from his sympathy, and the transformation wrought in him by sympathy was a reality and not a superficial imitation. It is always so. Just as the great poet lives in the characters which he creates, so the great teacher makes himself the true fellow of his scholars; he regards things with their eyes, he reflects on them with their thoughts; he offers his lessons to them in the form which answers to their condition; he wins to them a larger knowledge because he enables them to see how the new grows from the old, guards their peculiar treasures, and makes these also tributary to the interpretation of his messages. As it is with the great teacher, so it is with the great leader. He who sways men must be one with them, however far removed by his personal gifts. For sympathy is not the communion of like with like, but the power of uniting things different in the embrace of a greater life. Sympathy, therefore, preserves these small differences answering to our individuality, on which the beauty of the whole order of things depends. It does not only give; it receives. He who enters into the feelings of others becomes partaker of their energy. It does not only offer; it claims. He who is seen to sacrifice himself freely for the service of another, can justly demand in return a service corresponding to his own. And both aspects of its working must be observed carefully. Till we have called out the response of action we have not attained the object of our efforts; till we have sunk ourselves in those we wish to help, we have not measured the full extent of our power, for all experience tends to show that self-surrender is the gauge of power. It cannot be otherwise, for self-surrender is the gauge of faith. It is the soul’s answer to the voice which calls us to become fellow-workers with God. That voice too often is unheard, and “when we consider our worst failures and disappointments, we must confess that words which are constantly on our lips express most truly how they have been brought to pass. Even in our highest purposes “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,” we have pursued our ends in our own manner, we have fashioned them according to our own fancies, we have placed our own things and not the things of others in the forefront, we have not used the way of sympathy. So we have gained no entrance to the hearts of those whom we sought, and we have been cast down by the conviction of our weakness. Perhaps during that conviction we have recognised what we needed and found encouragement. For sympathy, which is the source of influence, is also the source of strength. In isolation there can be no experience of the highest human forces. It is through contact with our fellows that we feel the majesty of truth and righteousness. As we move among men, we see that our own best thoughts are shared by others, and we are invigorated by their silent support. Thus common testimony tells us that God is on our side. He has not left us desolate. He Himself works among us by His gifts, and they who have them are said to be ministers of His loving wisdom, trusting not to their own power but to His, confident not in their own foresight but in His sovereign will. So it is that as soon as we see this social destination of our several endowments, sympathy enriches us with the manifold resources of all through whom God is working. We draw strength from the very burdens which we have to bear. (Bp. Westcott.)
Christian sympathy:
There are, as we think, two very different, but both highly important principles here asserted: the principle of fellowship, and the principle of forethought. That of fellowship, for we are to feel as though bound with them in bonds: that of forethought, for we are to remember that we ourselves are also in the body, and therefore exposed to the adversities which claim our sympathy in others. Or to expound our text by the motive rather than the principle it puts forth, there are here two reasons or inducements suggested by the apostle, why Christians should be earnest in works of Christian love; the one is derived from their intimate connection with the suffering, the other from their own liability to similar visitations.
I.
St. Paul may here be said to go even beyond what he has laid down in Rom_12:15. He requires something more than sympathy as commonly understood. One man is said to sympathise with another, who is pained when and because theft other is pained: and sympathy, as thus understood, is little more than pity or commiseration. But to suffer with another, which is actually to sympathise, goes much beyond the weeping with another; it is making the griefs of that other mine own, so that the wound is in my heart as well as in his. The members of one family actually sympathise and suffer themselves, when death has come in and snatched away one from their circle; the loss is a common loss, attecting all equally, and the sorrow of each is literally the sorrow of every other. According to the Scriptural idea Christians constitute but one body, the mystical body of Christ; and if this be the application of the acknowledged principle, that “if one member suffer all the members suffer with it,” it follows that every Christian, in the measure which he has attained towards perfection, would seem to bear in his own person the very sufferings, and to receive in his own person the very blessings allotted to those who have like precious faith with himself. And when we think how deficient we are even in such sympathy as is generally understood by the world, and which would result from universal brotherhood, we may well be staggered at finding, that the Christian standard is yet vastly higher, and that universal brotherhood would be but a stage towards universal membership. But what an image does it give us of the condition of the world, to suppose all men actuated by the consciousness of being members one of another. Beyond nature, we confess it, but not beyond grace; and the Christian is not to be content, until in relieving the distressed lie can feel that he acts on the great principle of membership. He must see to it, that he has part in the bearing, as well as in the relieving the calamity. His relieving is to be the result of his bearing; he is to relieve, that is, as one who is relieving himself, with all that activity and all that perseverance which our own personal interests are sure to elicit.
II.
St.
Paul descends to a lower and yet not wholly different ground: he descends from Christian membership, and takes his position on that of our own exposure to misfortunes.
“As being yourselves also in the body!” What an amount of motive is gathered into these simple words! It has been one of the natural, and, we might almost say, necessary consequences on the combination of men into societies, presenting almost every possible variety of condition and circumstances, that there has been a comparative losing sight of the equal liability of all, to the several ills to which flesh is heir.
It is very difficult not to fancy that the man of large ancestral revenues has an exemption from the contingencies and changes of want, which beset the poor peasant that tills one of its fields.
It might sound to him as a threat, whether of ignorance or insult, that it should thus be implied, that notwithstanding all his state, and all his abundance, he might come to want the morsel which we ask him to bestow. And, of course, it does need a very thorough and practical recognition of the truth, that “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof,” to be able to put aside all the appearances of security and independence, which hoarded wealth furnishes, and to view in every man, whatsoever his circumstances, a pensioner on the bounty of that omnipotent Parent, who “openeth His hand, and satisfieth the desire of every living thing.” I would rather have the security against want, which the meanest of our villagers enjoys, whose daily bread is the subject of daily prayer and daily toil, than that of the foremost of our capitalists, who in any way gives indulgence to the sentiment of the rich man in the parable; “Soul, thou hast goods laid up for many years.” The one, indeed, has a security--the security of a prayerful dependence on God; whereas the other has no security whatever, but lies exposed to the peril of being punished for presumption. And it matters not to us, what may be the worhtly circumstances of any, nor how far they may seem to remove him from liability to poverty. If he be a man, he may come to be a starving man; and that, too, without any of those explicable occurrences and reverses, which seem to mark God’s special interference to bring round an unlooked-for catastrophe. There ought, therefore, to be to him as much cogency as to the man whose property seems jeopardised, in the motive of being himself in the body, when it is for the relief of the actually destitute that we appeal to his bounty. And this is, perhaps, the only case in which there is even the appearance of exemption from liability to the misfortunes with which we see others oppressed. It cannot be said that any one form of sorrow is appropriated to this class of men, and warded off from that; all are accessible through the same channels, and all are capable of the same ills. And is there not in consequence the greatest cogency, whosoever be the party addressed and whatsoever the affliction which asks to be remembered, in the motive of being in the body? It is the enlisting of selfishness on the side of the afflicted, and calling on us to be merciful if we would have mercy ourselves. Inexpressibly bitter would it be if living to be oppressed and deserted ourselves and to ask in vain for succour and for sympathy, we should have to remember how in our own sunshine we had cared nothing for those over whom darkness had gathered, and to feel that we were but reaping the harvest of which our own want of charity had sown all the seeds. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
The fellow of suffering:
We feel our own burdens distinctly enough and our own limitations and sorrows. Now if we felt those of other people a tenth part as distinctly, we could do almost anything with them and for them. To Christ other people were real: just as real as He. God was interested in men because to Him they were lovable. “God so loved the world”; that was where redemption began. And it was not a general, diffusive kind of thing, His love was not. It was not like some great sea of translucent fog which sometimes inundates our city of a warm morning, which only has a kind of general reference to everything and no particular reference to anything. His love was rather like a sunbeam, which drops down ninety million miles upon one specific grass-blade, into one particular bird’s eye. People, indeed, are interesting as soon as we get near enough to them to feel that they are people, not things, and as soon as we get far enough into the secret of their life to discover its workings, its difficulties, its disappointments, its ambitions, its defeats, its penitences, its remorses. I believe we would love everybody we came near to if we realised what a hard time they are having. No two people would ever quarrel if they could be each other for a little while. “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” Then, besides that, if we could feel the sorrow and suffering that is in a man’s life, no matter how wicked or degraded he might be, his degradation would be no barrier to kindly regard for him. If we came near enough to a bad man’s history to understand it, to see how unfortunate influences tell upon him, what susceptibilities to evil were in him, entirely independent of any choice of his own in the matter, we should find that circumstances were what made a large:part of the mischief, and that the poor fellow has had just as hard and sad a time in keeping from being worse than he is, as we have had in keeping from being worse than we are. We are sometimes surprised that Christ, who as we are told “ knew what was in man,” nevertheless was able to love man, to love all men. But that was exactly the reason why He was able. Tragedy is all about us--a good deal more tragedy than comedy; and any life becomes inter-resting as soon as, with a key wrought out of love, you unlock it and begin so to be yourself closeted on the inside of it as to feel yourself somehow involved in it, and all its difficulties to be your difficulties, and all its weaknesses and sins even to be so taken upon yourself that you commence to feel the burden of them as your burden. That is what Christ did. That is the meaning of His life; that is the distinctive quality in His redemptive work. He carried people. By becoming like them He helped them to become like Him. And as Christ can do this for each of us, because in His loving way He so perfectly understands all the ins and outs of each of us, so we, in order to make our own lives redemptive in another’s behalf, have to make a distinct and affectionate problem of his life, get on to the interior side of it, discover the impulses that play in it, the history that lies back of it, the circumstances that encompass and dominate it. These things quicken in interest as we go on. If you have commenced to read a book, and some one says to you, “Do you like it?” you will very probably answer, “I can hardly say, for I have not yet got fairly into it.” So the characters and lives of people only then begin to be interesting, when we have fairly got into them. They are then sure to be of interest, even when we treat them merely as problems to be mentally solved; how much more when we bring to them a heart fraught with personal regard and Christian sympathy. It is in this way, then, that people must be saved and lifted. I do not believe we are going to solve the problem of city and country evangelisation till we get over lumping people. When, at this season of the year, you look up into the sky of an evening, you discern a nebulous belt of light, an indiscriminate mass of stars, lying up and down the sky like a vast white cosmic rainbow. Now, telescopes, as they are directed to that great nebulae, are showing themselves competent to crumble up that mass of stellar uncertainty into myriads of little diamond-like stellar individualities, and as, year by year, the penetrating powers of telescopes are increased, this crumbling, individualising process goes steadily on, so that now we do not any longer think of the Milky Way as a mass of star stuff, but as a host of brilliant worlds, each as distinct from the rest, and as complete in itself as our own great sun, which is indeed thought to be one single flaming member of that superb host. Now, what lenses of enhanced power do for the human eye in the way of splitting up a world of filmy splendour into keen-edged points of individual light and lustre, the same thing love does for human discernment when exercised upon the mass of humanity by which, in a great city, we are environed. It crumbles the mass up into glittering individualities, each a little distinct personal world all in himself. When the sun melts the snow in the spring it tackles each little snow crystal by itself. Each sunbeam picks out its own crystal and turns it into a tear, and so is able to do a great deal in its little way and saves itself the embarrassment and weariness of thinking how many flakes there are that it can never reach; and the snow goes off. How much better that is than it would be for the sunbeams to spend all their time holding conventions in order to devise means for melting the masses of snow. The next thing, therefore, for you and me to do, is to go into the Snow-bank, if we have not already done so, and pick out our particular snow crystal, and commence melting it. (C. H.Parkhurst, D. D.)
Sympathy not scared by suffering
Sympathy for each other in suffering is not confined to mankind. “There is one trait,” says Mr. Jesse, “in the character of rooks, which is, I believe, peculiar to that sort of bird, and which does them no little credit. It is the distress which they exhibit when one of them has been killed or wounded by a gun while they have been feeding in a field or flying over it. Instead of being scared away by the report of the gun, leaving their wounded or dead companion to his fate, they show the greatest anxiety or sympathy for him, uttering cries of distress, and plainly proving that they wish to render him assistance, by hovering over him, or sometimes making a dart from the air close up to him, apparently to try and find out the reason why he did not follow them
‘While circling round and round,
They call their lifeless comrade from the ground.’
If he is wounded, and can flutter along the ground, the rooks appear to animate him to make fresh exertions by incessant cries, flying a little distance before him, and calling to him to follow them.” (Scientific Illustrations and Symbols.)
Remembering the needs of others:
In one of Dickens’s letters referring to a notice of Tom Hood’s book which he had written for the Examiner, he says: “Rather poor, but I have not said so, because Hood is poor too, and ill besides.” (H. O. Mackey.)
Value of sympathy:
Every man rejoices twice when he has a partner of his joy; a friend shares my sorrow and makes it but a moiety; but he swells my joy and makes it double. For so two channels divide the river and lessen it into rivulets, and make it fordable and apt to be drunk up by the first revels of the Syrian Star; but two torches do not divide but increase the flame; and though my tears are the sooner dried up, when they run on my friend’s cheeks in the furrows of compassion, yet when my flame hath killed his lamp, we unite the glories and make them radiant, like the golden candlesticks that burn before the throne of God, because they shine by numbers, by unions, and confederations of light and joy. (Bp. Taylor.)
Nature of sympathy:
It is by sympathy we enter into the concerns of ethers, that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost anything which men can do or suffer. For sympathy may be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected. (E. Burke.)
Practical sympathy:
We must not make too much of sympathy, as mere feeling … We praise feeling and praise its possessor. But feeling is only a sickly exotic in itself--a passive quality, having in it nothing moral, no temptation, and no victory. A man is no more a good man for having feeling, than he is for having a delicate ear for music, or a far-seeing optic nerve. The Son of Man had feeling--He could be “touched.” The tear would start from His eyes at the sight of human sorrow. But that sympathy was no exotic in His soul, beautiful to look at, too delicate for use. Feeling with Him led to this, “He went about doing good.” Sympathy with Him was this, “Grace to help in time of need.” (F. W. Robertson.)
Helpful sympathy self-remunerative:
It is said of the saintly George Herbert, the quaint old English church poet, that once in a walk to Salisbury, to join a musical party, he saw a poor man with a poorer horse that was fallen under his load. They were both in distress and needed present help, which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor man to unload, and afterwards load his horse. The poor man blessed him for it and he blessed the poor man, and was so like the Good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself and his horse. Thus he left the poor man; and at his coming to his musical friends at Salisbury, they began to wonder that Mr. Herbert, who used to be trim and clean, so soiled and discomposed. But he told them the occasion; and when one of the company told him “he had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment,” his answer was, “that the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight, and that the omission of it would have upbraided and made discord in his conscience whensoever he should pass by that place; for if I be bound to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am bound, so far as it is in my power, to practise what I pray for; and let me tell you, I would not willingly pass one day of my life without comforting a sad soul, or showing mercy, and bless God for this occasion.” Oh, how many might have anxious thoughts which often infest their midnight hours changed into sweet music, if they would only be more frequently seen with full hands and friendly words in the abodes of poverty and suffering! These are the places in which to attune one’s conscience to midnight harmonies.
