Sympathy and Condescension.
I. The first part of the text is a call to sympathy. But notice what St. Paul meant by sympathy, how he describes it. (1) It is an old remark that it is more difficult to rejoice with them that rejoice than to weep with them that weep. Let us endeavour, in little matters, within our own doors first of all to be glad when another is glad, to feel another's as our joy, to be not willing only but thankful that another should have, even though that other's gain may be outwardly our own loss. (2) "Weep with them that weep."The first requisite of all human consolation is sympathy, fellow-feeling, the appreciation of the calamity whatever it be, in its breadth and in its depth. Of all the designations which a human being under Christ's teaching can acquire, none is so valuable, in the estimate of a truly Christian ambition, as this, A son of consolation.
II. "Condescend to those things which are lowly." Is it not just the neglect of this rule which makes the chief evil of what is called society? It is a constant pursuit of high things; a struggle to rise one step higher, and then one yet higher, on the ladder of ambition, whatever its particular ambition be; it may be of rank, it may be of fame, it may be of fashion, it may be of excitement generally; most often it is, in some shape or other, the ambition of distinction; but whatever the particular aim, it is briefly to be described as a minding of high things, and the proper remedy for it is that here described by St. Paul, Condescend to things that are lowly.There is a narrowing effect as well as a widening in the pursuit even of Divine knowledge, if that knowledge be chiefly intellectual. How many a man has ended his course a doubter or a disbeliever, mainly, we may well believe, for this reason, that he never forced himself to condescend to the humble, never discovered that the true way to knowledge is through love! If he had learned to condescend to things lowly, he would have entered at length, with a true insight, into the things which transcend knowledge.
C. J. Vaughan, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter,p. 21.