Tibet has held a fascination for Westerners for many years. Like the fabled kingdom of the priest-king Prester John, located sometimes in Ethiopia and sometimes in Central Asia, the theocracy of Tibet in a remote, unknown land beyond the mountain wall of the Himalayas excited the imagination of many in search of a spiritually ordered society. Shangri-la has passed into the language as a distant place of natural beauty, a mountain fastness where the spirit can be renewed and the pressures of contemporary life can be relieved.

As I suspect was true of a number of my generation, reading books about Tibet as a teenager kindled the imagination and I looked forward to a time when I might be able to travel there. Last month this wish became reality, and I found myself in Lhasa joining a great crowd of pilgrims in the darkness before dawn – many walking and some painfully prostrating – on the way to Drepung, one of the great Buddhist monasteries badly damaged in the cultural revolution but where on this day, to mark a significant festival, a huge thangka, or religious painting, the size of a football field was to be unveiled on the mountainside. As we climbed to the monastery, amid the excited crowd the air was filled with clouds of juniper smoke, the incense of prayer, and then at sunrise the great thangka was unveiled, a painting of the Buddha of Compassion. Sadly, because of the ethnic squeezing that is characteristic of Tibet today, there were none of the traditional religious dances, nor the music of celebration.

As a Christian bishop I reflected both on the need for religious freedom and on the fact that at the centre of this ceremony filled with popular devotion was an image of compassion, and compassion is central to many religious traditions. One of the invocations of God in Islam is “Blessed be God, the merciful, the compassionate”. In Judaism some of the midrashic texts identify the mysterious name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush with his compassion. The Psalmist compares the compassion of a father for his children with God’s compassion for those who fear Him; and the prophet Isaiah makes a similar comparison between God’s enduring and faithful loving kindness and a mother’s compassion for her child. In the Gospels Jesus is spoken of as having compassion for the hungry crowds whom He then feeds, and for a widowed mother grieving at her only son’s funeral, whom He then raises to life. The Greek word that is used is a powerful one indicating a wrenching fellowfeeling. The compassion shown by Jesus is the deepest kind of empathy, and reaches out to human need in healing, forgiveness and in the sustaining of life.

The Christian faith does not speak of a serene and detached compassion, if such a thing there be, but of a compassion and love that go to the uttermost. The Christlike God is the one who empties Himself, pours Himself out, and comes down, as Lady Julian of Norwich so powerfully says, “to the lowest part of our need”. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes in the 17th century, linking the passion of Christ to the compassion of God, tells us in a powerful phrase that “compassion is but passion at rebound”. The command of Jesus to His followers, that they are to love as He has loved them, is a call to embrace the world – the poor, the needy, the damaged – with a like compassion. The compassion of God shown in Jesus is a searching, not a generally endorsing, love, a love that T. S. Eliot spoke of as “the sharp compassion of the healer’s art”.

The Divine Compassion is not sentimental feeling, but the edged scalpel that cuts away the carapace that men and women so often grow to protect themselves from exposure and engagement with one another, and with the God who made them for Himself. The compassion of God can show itself in the thin blade of truth which dissects and prunes away what is false and distorting. The costliness of compassion, whose root meaning, like that of empathy, is “suffering alongside and together with”, is revealed in the arms flung wide on the Cross and nailed ferociously to its wood. There, says the Christian, the costly compassion of God is shown most fully.

Much as I appreciated the serenity of the Buddha of Compassion on the Tibetan hillside, there is surely something deeper in the compassion shown in the Cross of Christ, the love of God by which we are both judged and healed.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe