God is “I Am Who I Am”. God is Love. God is Truth. God is Goodness. God is Life. God is One.

The theologians tell us that these are properties that other things share in, but in God they reach their unlimited fullness and perfection. Depending on whether we talk about our understanding of these qualities or their reality, we talk about analogy and participation. It’s a central theme of Saint Thomas Aquinas. God is more than “just” loving; he is Love taken to the point. God is more than “just” true; he is Truth taken to the point…

We could call these the names of God (as Saint Thomas does in Sum. cont. Gent., I, chapters 30–35 or Sum. theol., Ia, q. 13).

We can give names to God, like “God is Love”.

We know that we have a compassionate God. Is Compassion also a name of God? Or is it just a metaphor we use to talk about God? Is it something else?

To have compassion means, at least in Latin, to suffer with. If I am compassionate, I suffer with you. In this sense, God is not compassionate; nothing can alter God or move him; he’s the first One and the first Mover; he’s the Creator.

But that’s not a satisfying answer. Not at all.

Yes, God cannot be compassionate in everything that that means to us. To have compassion means to have a certain limitation: my feelings can change; my dispositions can change; I can suffer with you. God does not share in these limitations.

Without the Incarnation, it would never have done to say that God suffered. When God became united to human nature in the Person of Jesus, the picture changed drastically. God, in the Humanity of Jesus, was suffering with us. Jesus was compassionate. There is something that was done in the Incarnation that made a completely new reality: a suffering God – not, to be sure, suffering in his divinity but suffering in his humanity.

In fact, Jesus was compassionate to the point of death. Again, this is an entirely new reality in the world. There was nothing like the Crucifixion.

But it still does not create a new name of God. It still is not exactly right to say that God is Compassion. But he did everything in his power to unite the highest possibility of compassion to his own divine nature, through the Humanity of Jesus.

And in a sense, isn’t that, as we say in Thai, เหมาะสม (suitable)? Isn’t it supremely suitable that, where there existed a property that we humans find of immense value but it could not really be attributed to God in his unlimited divinity, God still decided it was worth having, claimed it as his own, and offered the highest possible value of it?

Compassion and เหมาะสม are taken to the point in God, not in his divinity which does not exactly admit of that kind of thinking, but in the Humanity he took to himself in Jesus. This is the marvellous universe of the Incarnation, the Suffering God, and the Eucharist.