Emotions of Jesus
“Jesus wept.”
Definition
The emotions of Jesus are the genuine human feelings — compassion, anger, grief, joy — that Christ displayed throughout his earthly life, belonging to his true human nature rather than being play-acted or merely apparent. Sammons ties this directly to the incarnation itself: “the Son, in assuming human nature, took on a nature with unique qualities He otherwise did not have,” including the “full range of human emotions,” so that his experience of affliction “corresponds in many ways to the afflictions we experience.”1
Biblical Basis
Scripture records Jesus expressing the full range of human emotion: he wept at Lazarus’s tomb (John 11:35), had compassion on crowds “because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36), grew angry at the hardness of hearts in the synagogue (Mark 3:5), and in Gethsemane was “greatly distressed and troubled,” saying “my soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:33-34). Hebrews grounds the church’s confidence in prayer directly in the reality of these emotions: “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). Sammons draws out the pastoral weight of this: because Christ’s high priestly sympathy is grounded in real, felt human experience and not merely in divine knowledge of human experience from the outside, “he is equipped to sympathize with us in a way He otherwise could not.”1
Objections and Responses
If Christ genuinely wept over Jerusalem’s coming judgment but did nothing to avert it, doesn’t that show his emotions were somehow disconnected from his will — a kind of performance rather than a real response? Hodge answers that grief and a righteous refusal to alter a deserved outcome are not in tension: “Christ wept over Jerusalem. Why did He not avert its doom? Simply because it would not have been right. So He may weep over the doom of the impenitent wicked; and yet leave them to their fate.”2 Real sorrow over a judgment that is nonetheless just and necessary is not a contradiction — the same pattern that appears whenever compassion and righteous judgment meet.
Related Doctrines
References
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Peter Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why It Matters (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 2023), chap. 8, “Impassibility,” 168-169. ↩ ↩2
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Charles Hodge, “The Concomitants of the Second Advent,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 872-873. ↩