The Emotions of Jesus

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851–1921) is known as one of America’s leading theologians. He taught theology at Princeton Seminary at the turn of the 20th century, and he is remembered as one of the last great defenders of historic Christian orthodoxy at an institution that later caved.

While some of his best work is in defense of biblical inerrancy, in 1912 Warfield published an essay titled “The Emotional Life of Our Lord.” (I mention it here because I’ll refer to it often during Sunday’s sermon.)

The premise of the essay was simple but profound: the Gospel writers show us not only what Jesus did and said, but what he felt. Jesus lived truly human — perfectly human — and therefore he experienced genuine human emotions.

Warfield wrote the essay in a time when many ‘theologians’ were skeptical about Jesus’s deity and overemphasizing his humanity. Warfield boldly affirmed the former and wanted to accurately portray the latter. He said that “it belongs to the truth of our Lord’s humanity that he was subject to all sinless human emotions.” Jesus’s feelings, far from being arbitrary, reveal the moral perfection of his heart.

Warfield notes that the emotion most often attributed to Jesus in the Gospels is compassion:

The emotion that we should naturally expect to find most frequently attributed to Jesus whose whole life was a mission of mercy, and whose ministry was so marked by deeds of beneficence … is no doubt “compassion.” (33)

Jesus’s compassion always moved him to act — he healed, fed, taught, and restored. But then Warfield highlights another emotion that might surprise us: anger. 

We see this in other places, such as Mark 3:4–6, but the primary scene of Warfield’s focus is Jesus in John 11.

At the tomb of Lazarus, John tells us that Jesus was “deeply moved” and “troubled.” The Greek words mean to be angry, and to shake, respectively.  Warfield writes:

The spectacle of the distress of Mary and her companions enraged Jesus because it brought poignantly home to his consciousness the evil of death, its unnaturalness, its “violent tyranny” as Calvin phrases it. In Mary’s grief, he “contemplates” — still to adopt Calvin’s words — “the general misery of the whole human race” and burns with rage against the oppressor of men. (66)

Then, with a line that almost glows on the page, Warfield summarizes what’s happening at the tomb:

Not in cold unconcern but in flaming wrath against the foe, Jesus smites in our behalf. He has not only saved us from the evils that oppress us; He has felt for and with us in our oppression, and under the impulse of these feelings has wrought out our redemption. (67)

That is the heart of our Savior — righteous anger at sin and death, tender compassion for the broken, and holy resolve to redeem us.

Jesus burned with anger against the wrongs he met with in his journey through human life as truly as he melted with pity at the sight of the world’s misery: and it was out of these two emotions that his actual mercy proceeded. (76)

This Sunday, we’ll look closer at this in John 11 and see what Warfield saw: the emotional life of our Lord. And in seeing his heart, we’ll discover the kind of hearts he calls us to have in this world. Pray, please, and join me.