S. R. Faruqi:

The opening-verse is by way of introduction, but its structure also has the excellence that in the first line there's a prayer for comfort to the pain-afflicted. This is a commonplace kind of idea, and it creates no kind of hope/expectation.

But when from the second line it becomes clear that it is the speaker himself who is mentioning himself before the Court of the Unseen, then an amazement mixed with joy is created. Then, in this way the speaker and the pain-afflicted people merge completely into one, such that the speaker and the pain-afflicted people become, so to speak, metaphors for each other.

FWP:

SETS
MOTIFS
NAMES == LORD
TERMS

In English the ideas of 'pain-afflicted' (that is, enduring one's own suffering) and 'compassionate, sympathetic' (that is, empathically sharing in someone else's suffering) seem quite distinct. In Urdu, by contrast, it's hard to separate them entirely (see the definition above). As SRF points out, the first line takes clever advantage of this ambiguity. Not until we hear the second line does the logic of the ghazal world (the lover is much more likely to suffer from pain than from sympathy) tell us that the verse relies chiefly on the former sense.