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If this were me, I don’t know that compassion would pour forth from me after hearing that my cousin, forerunner, and friend was brutally murdered. I know the depths of my own selfishness – my love of comfort and safety. Such an event would have almost certainly embittered me. Not Jesus. Though it appears that he was in mourning, his sense of mission only grew. “He had compassion on them and healed their sick.” This can only be the product of someone totally sold out to the mission. Otherwise, this interruption to Jesus’ time of solitude would’ve been aggravating. Help me, oh, God, to be consumed with the mission so much that your compassion flows from me in the worst of times. Note verse 23: Did Jesus seclude himself again so that he could carry on mourning? (It was a tradition, as I understand it, in Jewish culture, to mourn for three days.)