Some streams of thought say that the emotionally mature person is someone whose emotions are subdued; or are in check. They say that emotions are part of the problem in life and when they get unhinged, they become a reason why life gets difficult and specifically—why worship goes awry.
But is that the picture that the Bible gives us? Or do we need to think a little bit more technically and specifically about emotions?
I think emotions have gotten a bad rap and one of the places that we can turn to unlocking the biblical picture of the emotional life of the follower of Jesus is actually—Jesus himself.
We forget sometimes that when God took on flesh, he took on everything about us, including our emotional life. And when we look in the Gospels, we see a spectrum of the way Jesus related and expressed his emotions.
And I think we have to conclude then, that Jesus himself was a man with a broad expression of emotions.
Jesus wasn't someone that held back. In fact, his maturity was displayed in the way his emotions were appropriately expressed at the right times. But often we think of appropriateness as being subdued.
Yet when we look at Jesus, we don't see him subdued. We just see him applying right emotions in the right moments.
Let’s take a look at Jesus in the scriptures to poke at what this problem is with emotions and maybe offer a different way of looking at it.
When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. 34 “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied. Jesus wept.
—John 11:32-35
One of the things we see of Jesus here is that there was deep grief at the loss of a loved one. Here is the famous verse where “Jesus wept”. You know that verse that we memorized in Sunday school? It's the shortest verse in the Bible. But that word for wept isn’t just a sob. It's deep grief. It's a moaning. It's a groaning. It's the ugly cry. And Jesus cried that at the death of his brother, Lazarus.
Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”
—Matthew 21:12-13
Jesus expresses a just anger at the injustice here in Matthew 21. When he overturns the tables in the temple, there was a rage there. And it was an appropriate rage. Sometimes we look at that anger and say “Oh, you shouldn't do that”. But this is Jesus, fully God and full man, expressing this in a powerful way.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
—Matthew 23:27-28
Jesus expressed an indignant, woe against self-righteousness. He looked at the Pharisees and said, woe to you. And I don't think he said that, like some stoic, I think he said that through kind of a shaking fist and his, his eyes in tears as he's thinking about the fact that they're the ones that have the word of God and yet they're so far from God because they're like whitewashed tombs. They look clean on the outside, but on the inside they're messed up.
And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”
—Luke 19:41-42
He expressed a heavy sadness over sin in Luke 19. Jesus was asking the question of Jerusalem as he wept over it. Why don't you recognize me? You're supposed to be God's people, but you've ignored God altogether because you don't see me. You haven't seen me as the revelation.
And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.” And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”
—Mark 14:34-36
Jesus expressed anxious fear when facing difficulty. Mark 14, the Garden of Gethsemane. When Jesus was alone, I mean you saw a very human moment where, his anxiety came out and he said, God, would you let this cup pass from me?
“All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”
—John 14:25-27
He expressed a peaceful resolve in the hope to come in his teaching on the Holy Spirit when he was headed to the cross. So it should have been a time where he was more anxious. But in this moment he said, my peace I leave with you and my peace I give you. There was a sense in which even in the midst of hard circumstances, Jesus emotional life was secure and peaceful and expressive of that peace.
For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ ”
—Luke 7:33-34
In another instance Jesus expresses being someone who's got joyful merriment when partying with friends. One of the accusations of the Pharisees was that he was a glutton and a drunkard, like in Luke 7. And so you get the impression that when Jesus was hanging out with these people, he was having fun.
So when we look at the emotional life of Jesus, when we see the way he was expressing himself, we don't get a picture of a subdued human being. We get a picture of what philosophers might call someone whose emotions are rightly ordered. They're kind of rightly tethered to the right moments so that the right kind of emotions being full bodied and fully expressed are coming out in a given moment.
So, if Jesus life was as broad and as vibrant as the scriptures say they are, what does this mean for you and me? What does this mean for the worshipers that we arediscipling in our local congregations? What does this mean for our discipleship and our following of God?
As we look at Jesus, we ask the question, how does our life mirror that kind of breadth and depth in an appropriate way?
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