I. Our Lord here teaches us how to think of, or to look at, men. (1) Notice how here, as always to Jesus Christ, the outward was nothing, except as a symbol and manifestation of the inward, how the thing that He saw in a man was not the external accidents of circumstances or position; but His true, clear gaze, and His loving, wise heart, went straight to the essence of the thing, and dealt with the man, not according to what he might happen to be in the categories of earth, but to what he was in the categories of heaven. Christian men and women, do you try to do the same thing? (2) Think of the condition of humanity apart from Christ shepherdless. Unless Jesus Christ be both Guide and Teacher, we have neither guide nor teacher shepherdless without Him. Do you ever think of the depth of pathetic, tragic meaning that there is in that verse in one of the Psalms, "Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death"? There they sit, because there is no hope in rising and moving. They would have to grope if they arose, and so with folded hands they sit, like the Buddha, which one great section of heathenism has taken as being the true emblem and ideal of the noblest life. Absolute passivity lays hold upon them all torpor, stagnation, no dream of advance or progress; the sheep are dejected, despairing, anarchic, shepherdless, away from the Christ. God give us grace to see the condition of humanity and our own apart from Him.
II. Christ teaches us not only how to think of men, but how that sight should touch us. "He was moved with compassion on them when He saw the multitudes" with the eye of a God, and the heart of a man. Pity, not aversion; pity, not anger; pity, not curiosity; pity, not indifference. Compassion, and not curiosity, is an especial lesson for the day to the more thoughtful and cultured among our congregations.
III. The text teaches how Christ would have us act after such emotion be built and based on such a vision. I will name three things (1) personal work; (2) prayer; (3) help.
A. Maclaren, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 305.
I. Christ's habitual look at men had regard to them as suffering. No other aspect of life seems to have struck Him with equal force, or to have so claimed His thought, that He did not feel its sorrow. The foundation of His work is ethical, but the tone is drawn from His sensibilities rather than from His judicial sentiments; to get rid of the sorrow is the end.
II. The question arises, Is this a true or a false, a healthy or a morbid, view of human life? The question cannot be answered by determining whether there is more happiness or suffering. Suffering is real, and a sympathizing mind will pause upon it rather than look through to the underlying joy, and especially a great pitying nature like Christ's will pause upon it and see little else. It is not a matter of more or less, but of appealing anguish. Christ was a Man of sorrows, but not His own sorrow; a Man of griefs, but griefs that were His own only as He took them from others into His own heart.
III. It is not a long step from the Christ's pity to that it evokes in those who believe in Him. There is something beyond a sense of justice and fair dealing, something beyond even goodwill and love. The highest relation of man to man is that of compassion. Hardly separable from love in words, it may be in conception; it is love at its best, love quick, love in its highest gradation; it is the brooding, the yearning feeling, the love that protects while it enfolds. Our sorrows are not our own, to be secretly wept over or soon dispelled. It should be the first question with any one who suffers, as it is nearly always the first impulse, To what service of ministering pity am I called? For the ultimate purpose of God in humanity is to bring it together. The main human instrument is that we are considering; it is the finest and most dominant force lodged in our common nature; it brings men up to the point from which they launch into the universe and live.
T. T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith,p. 131.