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Six year old Timmy was supposed to come home from the nearby playground by dinner time. When he didn’t appear, his mother was annoyed at first, then as time passed she began to worry. When he finally arrived her worry yielded to a stern demand of where he had been and why he hadn’t obeyed the curfew. “Sally’s cat died,” he replied.“What does that have to do with your disobeying,” she retorted.“Well, Sally was sitting on the steps crying.”His mother’s tone shifted from annoyance to curiosity. “What did you do?“I just sat and cried with her.” *There is no more critical element in human relationships than compassion, the ability literally to suffer with an other.Jesus’ ministry flows from and focuses on just that virtue. In the midst of his ministry we can always find him identifying with the lived experience of the people around him, whether it’s the grieving widow, a paralytic, a leper or even a woman caught in adultery. He showed us that being able to enter into another person’s lived experience, is what makes for healthy human relationships.In fact his compassion is at the heart of his image as the Good Shepherd. By becoming one like us, our God in Jesus the Christ entered totally into the human experience and so understands all our needs in a unique, personal way. As Jesus disembarkes from the boat in today's Gospel, he is moved by the crowd because he understood their needs; he had entered into their lived experience. His suffering and death--the ultimate human experience--would become the supreme sacrament of divine compassion. Out of unconditional love our God “pitched his tent among us,” as our ancestors in faith imaged this relationship. Israel’s leaders often failed to shepherd Yahweh’s people so the prophet Jeremiah addresses their lack of compassion:You have not cared for them,but I will take care to punish your evil deeds. I myself will gather the remnant of my flockfrom all the lands to which I have driven themand bring them back to their meadow;there they shall increase and multiply.For us this “covenant of compassion” is symbolized in our baptism when God’s promise of unconditional love raised us up above the ordinary into a relationship with the divine and with one another in faith that invites us to a new way of life and has the power to reconcile all our relationships. This is Paul's point in the letter to the Ephesians:In Christ Jesus you who once were far offhave become near by the blood of Christ.Though we more than likely believe that God loves us, we often have a problem with the deeper meaning of that baptismal covenant: we find it hard to accept the “unconditional” part of God’s compassionate love. We have come to believe that God loves us as long as we keep to the straight and narrow, but as soon as we deviate from that, God’s love is withdrawn. Not so. God’s love has no conditions.One of the reasons we come together each week to share the Story of God’s love in the Sacred Scriptures is that we need constantly to remind ourselves of that love. We are challenged by the prophet’s criticism of Israel’s leaders, shepherds who failed to care for Yahweh’s people. That story informs not just present-day political and religious leaders but each one of us as well; it calls us to the responsibility to shepherd one another – and especially those who need our care. As the Good Shepherd left the ninety-nine to search and to find one lost sheep, so too our religious leaders and we the faithful need to demonstrate that same “covenant compassion.”We also come gather each week to experience again the Sacrament of that Divine Compassion is the Eucharist. We pray over bread and wine the story of the Christ offering his Body and his Blood for our sakes and asking us to “Do this in memory of me.” This seminal story transforms the bread and wine into the Real Presence of the Christ, and our communion transforms each of us into that presence so that we can become good shepherds in his name, shepherds willing to take the time witness in even simple everyday ways the covenant of compassion.