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You saw the clip. Somebody on a road somewhere, in real trouble, filmed by a stranger who did not stop. Before your brain had worked out what it was looking at, your stomach dropped — that small physical lurch, low down, that you did not choose and could not have argued yourself out of.
Then, half a second later, a second thought: should I be careful about that?
It is a fair question, and it is why so many people are quietly typing what does the Bible say about empathy into a search box this year. An idea has been going around that this feeling is a soft spot. That people who feel too much for other people can be steered, and that anyone who wants to steer you will aim straight at it.
Before you decide what your gut is for, though, it is worth doing something simpler than joining the argument. Go and look at the word the Gospel writers actually used for it. They had a whole shelf of calmer, safer, more respectable Greek words available. They did not reach for a single one of them.
What Does the Bible Say About Empathy? Start With the Verb, Not the Argument
Let us be fair to the concern first, because knocking down a caricature helps nobody.
The careful version of the worry is not “never feel anything for anybody.” It is narrower. It says that a feeling which joins you completely to another person, with nothing holding it in place, can be pointed anywhere. If your only compass is how strongly you feel someone’s pain, then whoever can put the most pain in front of you owns your decisions. Feeling untethered from truth stops being love and turns into a handle somebody can grab.
That is a real risk. Anyone who has been slowly emptied out by a person who needed everything from them knows it is not theoretical.
But look at what that argument is actually about. It is about what the feeling is attached to. On its own terms it is not a claim that the feeling should not exist. Somewhere in the retelling, those two questions got welded together, and now a lot of tender-hearted people are walking around suspicious of their own insides.
So here is the more useful move. The English word “empathy” is only about a century old and carries a century of modern baggage. Set it down for ten minutes and go read what the Gospel writers wrote when they were describing what happened inside Jesus.
Splagchnizomai: A Word About Your Actual Insides
Here is the anchor. Matthew is describing Jesus moving through towns and villages, and then this:
“But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36, KJV)
“Moved with compassion” is doing a lot of quiet work there. The Greek verb underneath it is splagchnizomai. It comes from splanchna, a plain and completely unspiritual noun meaning the inward organs. Heart, liver, lungs, intestines. The parts of a body a first-century person saw when an animal was butchered for a meal.
You can feel how blunt that word family is by looking at where else it turns up. In Acts, describing how Judas died, the text says that “all his bowels gushed out” (Acts 1:18). Same root. That is not poetry. That is a word for guts.
So when Matthew wanted to record what happened in Jesus at the sight of a worn-out crowd, he did not choose a word about the mind reaching a decision. He chose a word about the body. The closest honest English is not “he felt sorry for them.” It is nearer to his insides turned over.
And that was a choice, not a shortage. Greek had gentler options sitting right there. Eleos, mercy, the kindness you show someone. Oiktirmos, pity. Sympatheo, to suffer alongside, the word behind our “sympathy.” All in circulation. All passed over.
Who Is Allowed to Feel It
Now the part that stopped me, and that does not get made much of.
Splagchnizomai appears twelve times in the New Testament, and all twelve are in Matthew, Mark or Luke. Not once in John. Not once in Paul’s letters. Not once in Revelation. It is a Gospel-narrative word, used almost exclusively to describe one person.
Look at who does the feeling:
- Eight times it is Jesus. Seeing a scattered crowd with nobody leading them (Matthew 9:36; Mark 6:34). Seeing a great multitude and healing their sick (Matthew 14:14). Seeing people who had been with him three days with nothing to eat (Matthew 15:32; Mark 8:2). Seeing two blind men beside a road (Matthew 20:34). Seeing a man with leprosy (Mark 1:41). Seeing a widow walking behind her only son’s body (Luke 7:13).
- Three times it belongs to a figure inside one of Jesus’s own stories. The master who cancels an impossible debt (Matthew 18:27). The Samaritan who stops on the road (Luke 10:33). The father who spots his son a long way off and runs (Luke 15:20).
- Once it is a request. A father at the end of his options says to Jesus, “if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us” (Mark 9:22).
Read that middle group again. In the parables, the one whose guts turn over is never the cautious character. Never the sensible one keeping a safe distance. It is either the figure standing in for God, or the outsider Jesus holds up as the one who got it right.
Two respectable men see that beaten traveller on the Jericho road and keep walking. The person whose insides turn is a Samaritan — not a foreigner, but a member of the estranged half of Israel’s own family, the last man in that audience anyone expected to be the hero.
Whatever this vocabulary is doing, it is not treating the gut-lurch as a liability. It is treating it as the family resemblance.
The Part Almost Nobody Quotes: Read the Next Sentence
Here is where the whole question actually gets settled, and it is not settled by a doctrine. It is settled by sentence structure.
Go back through all twelve. In every single one, something happens immediately after the verb, usually inside the same sentence.
Moved with compassion — and he healed their sick. Moved with compassion — put forth his hand, and touched him. Had compassion on them — and touched their eyes. Moved with compassion toward them — and he began to teach them many things. Moved with compassion — and loosed him, and forgave him the debt. Had compassion — and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
The verb never sits alone. It is never a mood anybody stays in. In the Gospels it works as a hinge: on one side a person sees something, on the other side that person does something, and the gut is what turns the first into the second.
The clearest case is attached to our anchor verse, and you only see it if you keep reading past the chapter break. Jesus’s insides turn over at the sight of the scattered crowd in Matthew 9:36. Two verses later: “The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:37-38). And the very next thing Matthew records is Jesus calling twelve people together and sending them out.
The feeling became a prayer. The prayer became a workforce. Three sentences, start to finish.
A Word So Strong That Early Copyists Read It as Anger
One more detail, and it is the strangest thing in this whole study.
Mark 1:41 — Jesus and the man with leprosy — is one of the twelve. The King James reads: “And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean.”
That follows the reading in the overwhelming majority of surviving Greek manuscripts, and it is what nearly every English Bible on your shelf says. But a small handful of ancient witnesses — one well-known fifth-century Greek manuscript and a few early Latin copies — have a different word in that slot. Not “moved with compassion” but something closer to “angered.” Scholars have argued over which reading came first for a long time and have not resolved it, and I am not going to pretend to resolve it here.
But notice what the disagreement tells you either way. Nobody reading that scene in the ancient world thought Jesus felt something mild. The two candidate readings are his guts turned over and he was furious. Polite concern is nowhere in the running. Whatever moved in him when he looked at that man was strong enough that early readers reached for the strongest words they had.
And then he touched him. A man nobody had been permitted to touch for years. Then he told him to go and say nothing to anybody — an instruction with a purpose of its own, and one the man immediately ignored.
The Turn: The Feeling Was Never the Destination
Put the two halves together and the answer stops being complicated.
The concern about empathy is really a concern about feeling with nothing on the other end of it. Feeling that circles. Feeling that goes nowhere, so it gets steered by whoever is loudest, or simply drains you until there is nothing left for anyone. That failure is real, and the Gospels never pretend otherwise.
But watch how the Gospels answer it. Not once do they answer it by turning the feeling down. They answer it by attaching the feeling to a hand, a word, a loaf of bread, a cancelled debt, a run down a road. The gut-lurch gets treated as an engine — and an engine that is not connected to wheels is not a safer engine. It is just a noise.
The feeling was never the point. It was the ignition.
Which changes the question you ask when your stomach drops. Not “am I feeling too much?” but “what is this feeling attached to?” One of those questions shuts you down. The other one puts you to work.
If you have spent years half-believing that feeling everything so deeply is a defect in you, this is worth sitting with. You were not handed a weakness. You were handed the exact thing the story keeps giving to the person who ends up doing the good.
Try This Today
- Name the last one. Think back to the most recent time your stomach dropped for somebody this week — a person, not a headline. Say their name out loud, once. Most of us never do this, and the feeling stays a blur we can dismiss. A name is harder to dismiss. Two minutes.
- Attach one small thing to it. Send that person the smallest true message you can manage. Not advice. Not a plan. “I thought about you today” is enough, and costs nothing. The point is not the size of the action, it is that the feeling now ends somewhere outside your own body.
- Go back for one you dropped. Pick a gut-lurch from the last month that you did nothing about. Write down one action and one day this week beside it. This is the hard one, and it is the one that changes how you carry the next thirty.
Journal On This
- When your insides turn over for someone, what do you usually do in the ten minutes that follow? Write down the honest pattern, not the one you would like to have.
- Whose pain do you find easiest to feel, and whose do you find yourself explaining away? What does the difference between those two lists tell you about yourself?
- Where did you first learn that feeling deeply was something to manage rather than something to use? Who taught you that, and were they right?
A Prayer for When You Feel Too Much
God, my insides turn over at things I cannot fix, and lately I have started treating that like a fault in me. Show me what it is for. Not in general, and not tomorrow — the next time it happens, with a real person in front of me, give me one thing small enough that I will actually do it. Where I have been feeling and feeling and never moving, forgive me, and get me moving. Amen.
One Question
Do you think a person can care too much about someone else’s suffering — or is the problem always what they do with the caring? Tell us how you see it in the comments.
Share This
- The Gospels use a Greek word for what Jesus felt that literally means your guts. Not “he felt sorry.” His insides turned over. And every single time, he did something in the very next sentence.
- Turns out the question is not “am I feeling too much?” It is “what is this feeling attached to?” One of those shuts you down. The other one puts you to work.
- I always thought feeling things this deeply was a flaw I had to manage. Then I read what happened in the sentence right after Jesus felt it, twelve times in a row, and I stopped thinking that.
Questions People Ask About Empathy in the Bible
Does the Bible say empathy is a sin?
No. The English word “empathy” is roughly a century old and does not appear in any Bible translation, so no verse addresses it by name. What the Gospels do contain is a Greek verb, splagchnizomai, describing a physical gut-level reaction to another person’s suffering. It is used of Jesus eight times, and of the God-figure or the hero in three of his parables. Nowhere in the Gospels is that reaction treated as a weakness or a fault.
What does splagchnizomai literally mean?
Splagchnizomai is a Greek verb built from splanchna, the noun for the inward organs — heart, liver, lungs and intestines. Literally it means something like “to be moved in the guts.” The King James Version renders it “moved with compassion” or “had compassion,” which is accurate but far more polite than the original. The same root appears in Acts 1:18, where it is translated plainly as “bowels.”
How many times does splagchnizomai appear in the New Testament?
Twelve times, and all twelve are in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The verb does not appear in John, in Paul’s letters, or anywhere else in the New Testament. Eight of the twelve describe Jesus. Three describe a figure inside one of his parables: the master who forgives a debt in Matthew 18:27, the Samaritan in Luke 10:33, and the father in Luke 15:20. The twelfth, in Mark 9:22, is a father asking Jesus for it.
Did Jesus ever tell anyone to feel less for other people?
There is no recorded instance in the Gospels of Jesus telling someone their compassion was too strong. The nearest thing looks like the opposite on close reading: in Luke 7:13 he tells a grieving widow “Weep not” — and then immediately raises her son and gives him back to her. The instruction was not a rebuke of her grief. It was the announcement of what he was about to do about it.
What is the difference between empathy and compassion in the Bible?
Biblical Greek does not draw the modern line between the two. It has several overlapping words: eleos (mercy shown to someone), oiktirmos (pity), sympatheo (to suffer alongside, the root of “sympathy”), and splagchnizomai (the gut reaction). The Gospel writers had all of these available and repeatedly chose the most physical one. In practice the distinction that matters in the text is not feeling versus action, but whether the feeling produced an action — and in the Gospels it always does.
Want to keep pulling on this thread? Our free What Jesus Teaches assistant will walk through any of these passages with you, verse by verse. It opens in ChatGPT.
