Since I've been asked this over the last few days and it's being discussed on social media, here's how I understand sympathy, empathy and compassion, all important virtues in the Christian life (and all falling under, as I see it, the larger category of love). A spiritual director once described these three qualities as follows: sympathy is imagining how *you* would feel in another person's situation (say, living in poverty, facing an illness, losing a loved one); empathy is imagining how *the other person* feels (not how you would feel, but how they in fact feel); and compassion is the willingness to suffer with, or alongside, the other person. Compassion literally means to suffer (or experience) with. "Pascho" (πάσχω) is also where we get the word "Passion." It reminds me of James Keenan, SJ's helpful definition of mercy: "the willingness to enter into the chaos of another person's life." More basically, we see how God desired to be with us so intimately, and to experience and suffer what we experience and suffer, that God becomes one of us, as Jesus Christ. Significantly, the Gospels often remind us that when Jesus saw people who were sick, hungry, lost or struggling, he felt it intensely. The usual English translation is "his heart was moved with pity." The Greek is stronger: he felt it in his σπλάγχνον ("splanchnon"), his guts, the seat of emotions for the Hellenistic world. My sense is that this is what Jesus invites us to experience when we see any kind of suffering: deep sympathy, or a radical empathy, which awakens in us both compassion and the desire to act.