Whenever I hear someone say, “Jesus was X,” such as, “Jesus was emotional,” I then hear in my head my seminary professor and friend Cherith Fee Nordling saying, “No, no, no, Jesus is. Jesus is! Not Jesus was!”
While I understand the reasons for writing “Jesus WAS” for our book purposes, with regards to emotion, I want to remind you that Jesus IS.
Cherith says, passionately (anything Cherith says about Jesus is passionate), that Jesus is emotional because he retains his humanity in his ascension.
Jesus still has a human body. So Jesus still has human emotions.
Jesus, being of one substance with the Father and Spirit, is emotional in his divinity, and Jesus is emotional in his full humanity.
Jesus, as God incarnate, experiences the emotions of God, in whatever way it is that God is emotional and therefore created us with the capacity for emotion, in God’s image. For example, the lovingkindness that characterizes God in the Hebrew Scriptures is ever-present in Jesus’s life. We see this in Matthew 20 when Jesus heals the two blind men. They cry out, “Have mercy on us!” Jesus is full of lovingkindness and mercy, and he heals them.
Jesus, as a human, also experiences the emotions of people. His brain makes meaning out of sensations to construct emotions in him just as in any human. Emotions are our brains making meaning from sensory input and circumstances, influenced by our values, vocabulary, past experiences, predictions of the future, culture, language, and even our physical health.
Emotions are culturally bound, and Jesus learned the emotions of the culture he grew up in: what he was supposed to feel and when and how he was supposed to express it. Like when his mother asked him in John 2 to handle the wine problem at a wedding, and Jesus understood the cultural nuances of shame and regret that would plague the hosts if he didn’t intervene. He knew the cultural norms of celebration and joy that should mark the event. His emotional empathy for his mother and the hosts helped drive his miracle.
Jesus’s earthly life took place in a different part of the world, in a language, culture, and time far from our own. His emotional vocabulary and the cultural expectations for expressing emotion were different from ours. He constructed uniquely human and uniquely Jewish emotions such as “zeal-for-the-temple” and “hope-for-God’s-future-rescue-based-on-a-repetition-of-the-exodus-and-passover-stories” and “lament-over-forsakenness.”
When Jesus interacted with his disciples, he bridged the emotions of his and their shared human culture with the emotions of the Kingdom of God. Jesus taught his followers emotions they didn’t know, like “love-your-enemies” and “do-not-worry-because-God-will-provide.”
Jesus is our example in life, including our emotional life. Jesus felt strong emotions and made God-honoring choices. As followers of Jesus, part of our discipleship involves attending to our emotions, which means being transformed to value the things Jesus values, which will help us construct more Christlike emotions. It means learning to feel our emotions, express them rightly, and obey God.
So getting back to the importance of “Jesus IS”:
Jesus brings the human emotional experience into his mediation and intercession for us. In his ascension to the right hand of the Father, in his reign, he brings to the Father and the Spirit what we as humans experience emotionally. Jesus is still human, retaining his resurrection body in the heavenly realm, and Jesus is still emotional. He mediates our humanity with his humanity to the rest of the Godhead. So the Father and the Spirit know not only what they experience emotionally as God, but also what we as God’s children experience as humans through Jesus’s mediation.
I wonder if we teach Jesus emotions as well? Jesus, in his process of relating to and mediating for us, might learn some of the emotion concepts from our unique cultures and feel along with us.
When we feel hurt or happy, Jesus knows what that feels like. When we are afraid, when we grieve, Jesus understands. He remembers what he felt when he was here. He also still feels, both because he is still human and because he is still God.
This concept that Jesus is human is important for Christians because we believe in an incarnation. We believe that Jesus is human, and when we try to make Jesus non-human or super-spiritual, we can see ourselves as unworthy or not good enough because we can’t achieve his stoic perfection. But Jesus wasn’t a Stoic. He lived as an emotional, Jewish human.
When I have reached out to Jesus in my own excruciating emotions, asking him to help me endure and be faithful, I have sensed him responding, “I’m not asking you to do anything I haven’t done myself. I’ve been there, I’ve felt the sting, the betrayal, the rejection, and I kept loving people anyway. I am asking you to follow me and keep loving them even when they don’t want you. I’ve set the example, I’ve paved the way, and I’m here with you in it.”
Meditating on Jesus’s humanity, and specifically his human emotions, makes him more incredible to me.
To be like Christ is not only to behave like Christ but also to feel like Christ. Christ could act out of his emotions because his emotions were based on the right things. To be conformed to his image is to be able to act out of feelings because the feelings are based on the truth of the gospel. (Matthew Elliott, Faithful Feelings, p. 26)
To contact Becky Castle Miller, visit her website here.
"This is a book that brings Jesus out of the headlines and back into our hearts."
—Pastor Josh Burtram and Will Wright, hosts of the Faithful Politics podcast
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