To have profound understanding and appreciation regarding servant leadership one has take a look first at one thing that is very central to Jesus. That thing is about Compassion. Compassion tells us what was very important to Jesus; Jesus’ advocacy of compassion is both an invitation and a challenge to church and government leaders in our days.
Compassion is a very important word in the gospels. The stories told about Jesus speak of Him on having compassion and of His being moved with compassion. The word also represents the summation of his teaching about both God and ethics. For Jesus, compassion is the central quality of God and the central moral quality of a life centered in God. These two aspects of compassion are combined most clearly and compactly in a single verse: “be compassionate” (Lk 6:36). Here what God is like and how we are to live are brought together. For Jesus Compassion is not only an individual virtue, but also a sociopolitical model expressing his vision of human life in a community.
Now let’s take a look at the meaning of compassion. In terms of feeling, compassion means, “to feel with”. Thus it mans feels the feeling of somebody else. Most commonly compassion is associated with feeling the suffering to somebody. That is, the feeling of compassion leads to being compassionate.
