The heart of compassion

As the reality of the divine election of love, Jesus Christ was the mercy of God incarnate who saw the disobedience of man as the greatest need of mankind, and who hastened to meet that need by pouring himself out in compassion and self-giving to man. And yet the more he entered into man to gather human life into oneness with God, the more intensely he took this conflict into his own heart. In him who takes our place like that, God's heart beats for humanity, but in him who so joined himself to us, ‘touched with the feeling of our own infirmities’ and ‘in all things made like unto his brethren’, it is the judge who came to condemn sin in the flesh. In the ultimate self-giving of God in love to man in Jesus Christ, man is confronted with the ultimate things, the last things before which all the secrets and intentions of the heart are revealed. Here in Jesus, as the very heart of God is laid bare in compassion and mercy for man, the human heart is laid bare before God, in such a way that men and women are plucked out of their isolation and estrangement and alienation, out of their hiding place in themselves, and are placed before the light of the majesty and love of God where they must acknowledge the divine judgement upon them. ‘If any man would come after me’, Jesus said, ‘let him deny himself, and follow me!’,—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 112–13