From his book, Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund notes that our capacity for compassion — no matter how great — is still limited by our sinfulness.
What if, he asks, it wasn’t?
That was Jesus.
Ortlund writes:
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“What then must it mean for a sinless man with fully functioning emotions to lay eyes on that leper?
Sin restrained my emotions of compassion: what would unrestrained emotions of compassion be like?
That is what Jesus felt. Perfect, unfiltered compassion.
What must that have been like, rising up within him?
What would perfect pity look like, mediated not through a prophetic oracle as in the Old Testament but through an actual, real human?
And what if that human were still a human, though now in heaven, and looked at each of us spiritual lepers with unfiltered compassion.”
