JESUS: His Emotions                                                                  

12-18-05     Audio

John 11:33-39 (33)

Two Sunday mornings ago we looked at the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in John chapter 11.  I would like for us to turn to that chapter again this morning.  This is where Jesus made the claim: I am the resurrection and the life; he that believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.

But in this story we also see something else.  We see Jesus emotions, and that’s what I want us to think about this morning.  So let’s turn in our Bibles again to John 11.

God made man an emotional being.  We are physical; we are spiritual; we are intellectual; but we are also emotional.  You have emotions.  I have emotions.  Even Jesus had emotions.  That’s the way God made us. 

Are emotions sinful?  Is it sinful to be angry?  To be depressed? To be filled with grief? To be disappointed?  If Jesus experienced these emotions, since He was sinless then these emotions in and of themselves are not sin.  So let’s look at these verses in John 11 and see what we can learn about Jesus’ emotions.

For those of you who were not here two weeks ago, let me set the scene.  Jesus’ friend Lazarus had died.  Jesus had known of his sickness but had not come at once, and now Lazarus was dead and his sisters were disappointed that Jesus had not been there to heal him. 

What they don’t know is that Jesus is about to raise their brother from the dead.  All they know is that a deep sadness fills their hearts, and that they are grieving their brother’s death.

Read John 11:32-39.

In verse 33 there are two expressions I would like for us to look at.  It says that Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”  The King James translation says He groaned in the spirit, and was troubled.

What does that mean? 

NLT: He was moved with indignation and was deeply troubled.

Message: a deep anger welled up within him.

Williams: He sighed in sympathy and shook with emotion.

Jerusalem Bible: in great distress, with a sigh that came straight from the heart.

Amplified Bible: He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. [He chafed in spirit and sighed and was disturbed.]

Whatever these phrases mean exactly, one thing is clear: Jesus was experiencing emotion here.  He was feeling something.

Most of you know that the Bible was not originally written in English.  The New Testament was written in Greek, and what we have is a translation – actually many translations – from the Greek language into the English.

The Greek word that is used and translated “deeply moved in spirit” is an interesting word.  It is used only 3 other places in the N.T. and in those places it is translated to “warn sternly” or “rebuke harshly”.  So in those cases the word carries the idea of sternness, almost anger.

That’s why some translations carry that idea of indignation or anger.

Why would Jesus be angry here?

Perhaps He saw hypocrisy in the tears and the wailing of the Jewish visitors, some of whom had come out of a sense of duty.  They didn’t actually feel the grief but had turned on the faucet because that’s what was expected of them.  But that would not be true of Mary’s tears and grief.  Hers would have been genuine. 

Or perhaps Jesus anger was at sin and its results: sickness and suffering and death and grief.  Perhaps His anger was at Satan and what he had done to God’s creation, at the untold suffering that we experience as a result of the working of this enemy of God.

But there is another meaning in this Greek word.  Its usual meaning in Greek literature is of a horse snorting.  And perhaps it was not anger at all that Jesus was experiencing.  It may mean that Jesus experienced such deep emotion that there came from Him almost a snort.

So Barkley translates it: He was deeply moved in spirit so that an involuntary groan burst from Him, and He trembled with deep emotion.

Think about this for a moment: Jesus, Who was God in human flesh, so entered into human experience that His heart was deeply, deeply moved at our suffering.

John seems to have written his Gospel with a Greek audience in mind,  & any Greek reading this would have found it almost incomprehensible.  In Greek mythology, their gods were characterized by what they called “apatheia”, from which we get our English word “apathy”.  The Greek gods were a-pathetic.  They were without pathos, without passion, without emotion.

Here was their reasoning: if we can feel sorrow or joy or anger or grief, it means that someone can have power over us – they can affect us and cause these emotions.  That cannot be so with a god.  No one can have power over a god; no one can affect them.  So they must be apathetic, they must be emotionless.

But along comes Jesus, the Word of God – God’s heart and mind made available to us – along comes Jesus and experiences emotion.  Not just a fleeting smile, but the depth of grief that you experience, and I experience.

God has emotions?  God is affected by what happens to us?  To the Greeks it was unthinkable, but that is exactly what the Bible is teaching us here.  But wait, there’s more!  There’s the second word here in John 11:33.  He was deeply moved in spirit, and troubled.

That Greek word means: to agitate, to cause one inward commotion, take away one’s calmness of mind, disturb one’s equanimity. (Now there’s a word I haven’t used in a while.  But if you have seen our drama already you know that it’s a word that Priscilla Hightower probably uses all the time. It suggests an evenness of mind that is only rarely disturbed under great strain.)

And then in v.35 we read the shortest verse in the Bible: Jesus’ wept.  Isn’t that amazing?  God weeping.  I guess He had never been taught what we have been taught: “Big boys don’t cry.”  And most of us men growing up wanted to be big boys, so we learned not to cry, not to show our emotions.  We stuffed them down inside somewhere so that no one could see them.  Cry?  Not a chance!  Cry in public?  Never in a million years.  But Jesus cried; He shed tears, and He did it openly.

Jesus did not see His emotions as His enemy.  He saw them as a healthy part of Himself and lived not only as an intellectual being, and a spiritual being, but also as an emotional being.

Jesus was not ruled by His emotions, however.  He had them, but was not ruled by them.  His sharing of Mary and Martha’s grief did not prevent Him from doing what He came to do – to raise Lazarus from the dead for the glory of God.

Emotions are amoral.  They are neither moral nor immoral.  But how we react to our emotions can be immoral.  What we let them do to us can be immoral – when we let our grief keep us from doing God’s will, when in our grief we turn away from God, when grief leads to suicide, we have reacted immorally to our emotions. 

Grief in itself is our natural reaction to loss.  It is a healthy part of the healing process.  Even Jesus experienced it here, and also when His cousin, John the Baptist died. But don’t get stuck in your grief and never move on.  Don’t get bitter in your grief and in your bitterness destroy your relationships with people who love you and want to help you. 

Isa 53:3 said that Jesus would be “A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”  Grieve, knowing that Jesus understands your grief, but let Him help you to live a spiritually and emotionally healthy life in the midst of your grief.

I want us to look at another passage in the Bible and another emotion that Jesus experienced.  Turn with me to Mark 3.

The Jewish religious leaders were constantly trying to find something in Jesus’ words or behavior for which they could arrest Him.  They asked Him questions; they watched Him like vultures, waiting to dive in and tear Him apart.  And Jesus almost seems to bait them.  He seemed to purposely do things that upset them, especially when it came to their Sabbath rules.

God had said that we are to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy.  But these religious leaders had added their man-made rules to God’s simplicity – hundreds and hundreds of rules.  It put people in bondage rather than in the freedom that God had for them.  So in the verses we are about to read, it’s again the Sabbath, and Jesus is going to upset these religious leaders.  (read v.1-6).

I read these verses in 10 different versions of the Bible, and 9 of them used the word “anger”, and one used the word “wrath”.  What Jesus experienced here is very clear.  He was angry.

So the emotion of anger must not be a sin either.  Please do not stop listening.  Don’t go away from here saying the pastor said it was ok for you to be angry next time you verbally or even physically blast someone when you are angry: “The pastor said it’s ok for me to be angry, so just shut up!”  There is a difference between being angry and how you express that anger.

Numbers 22:22 the Lord spoke to Moses about the Israelites and said: They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them. On that day I will become angry with them and forsake them; I will hide my face from them, and they will be destroyed.  God gets angry.

1 Kings 11:9 The LORD became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the LORD, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice.  God gets angry.

Psalm 7:11 God is angry with the wicked every day. God experiences anger, and you, who are made in the image of God, experience anger as well.  We all do.

I hear Christians sometimes say: “I never get angry.  I sometimes get upset.  I sometimes get ticked off.  I sometimes get frustrated.  But I never get angry.”  All you have done is to rename the emotion of anger.  What you are feeling in all those things is anger – maybe mild anger, but that’s the emotion you are experiencing – anger.

In Mark 3, Jesus saw the hardness, the callousness, the stubbornness, or as Priscilla Hightower would say, “the obduracy” of His accusers’ hearts, and He felt angry.

I once read someone who said: “The problem is not that Christians get angry, it’s just that they don’t get angry at the right things.”  These religious leaders, in their stubbornness and hardness of heart, did not want Jesus to help this man.  It would break one of their little rules if He healed him on the Sabbath.

Hypocrisy, insensitivity to the needs of others, more concerned about themselves than they were for this man who needed help, and Jesus got angry.

When He saw the desecration of the Temple and went through it, overturning the moneychangers’ tables and driving out the animals, He wasn’t smiling and whistling “Dixie”.  He was angry.

What is it that makes you angry?  Does injustice done to someone else make you angry, or is it because you aren’t getting what you want that you get angry?  We need to get angry about child abuse.  We need to get angry about pornography. We need to get angry about abortion.  We need to get angry about sexual exploitation of women and girls. We need to get angry about our lack of concern for people who are lost and heading for an eternity without God.

But those are not the things most of us get angry about.  We get angry about the stupid jerk ahead of us on the freeway that is keeping us from driving as fast as we want to.  We get angry when our kids make us look bad.  We get angry when our husband or wife doesn’t meet our expectations.

Anger isn’t sinful, but selfishness is.  And when our anger is selfishly motivated, then it is sinful.  When our anger leads us to hurt others, verbally or emotionally or mentally or physically, then in our anger we have sinned.

Ephesians 4:26 says In your anger, do not sin.  It’s possible to experience anger and not sin.  God does.  Jesus did.  And we can too.  But the question is “how?”  All of us have sinned in our anger, and some do it quite regularly.  Your anger is in control of you, rather than you being in control of your anger, as Jesus was.  How can you bring your angry reactions under control?  And let me assure you, God wants your angry reactions under control.

Don’t express your anger.  By that I mean don’t vent it – lash out, say things you will later regret, do things you will later regret. That is sinning in your anger, and God says “Don’t do that.”  When we express our anger, we so often damage not only our relationship with God, but also our relationships with other people.

God says in Proverbs 22:24 Do not make friends with a hot-tempered man, do not associate with one easily angered, or you may learn his ways and get yourself ensnared. If you are hot-tempered, easily angered, God warns people to stay away from you. 

Don’t repress your anger.  That’s the opposite of expressing it.  It’s stuffing it and pretending it doesn’t exist.  But there is danger here.

If you have a fire in your wastebasket, you don’t want to put it in your closet and pretend there is no fire in there.  Bottling up your anger inside of you leads to both emotional problems and physical problems.  Talk to any doctor; talk to any counselor. They will tell you that repressed anger is a root cause of many, many problems in our lives.

Don’t caress your anger.  Some people like their anger.  They can intimidate people.  They can keep people out of their face.  They can control people and get them to do what they want them to when they come at them in anger.  So they caress their anger, and hold on to it, even nurture it. It’s a sick sort of thing, but there are people who do that.

Confess your anger.  Take your anger to God.  I’m not talking here about the anger you feel when you see little children being abused.  I’m talking about the selfish stuff in us.  I’m talking about our sinful nature.  And most of the time when we get angry it’s not righteous anger; it’s unrighteous anger – arising out of our selfishness because we aren’t getting our way.

Confess your selfish anger to God.  Take it to Him in prayer and call it what He calls it: an expression of your sinful nature. 

Selfish anger is the result of blocked goals, and if you want to get rid of the anger, you have to change your goals.  Think about the last time you were really angry.  What was it that you wanted that you weren’t getting?  If what you wanted was not a Godly goal, then you need to change the goal. And if it was a Godly goal, then you need to see what you can do to remove whatever is keeping you from that godly goal.

Confess your anger to God.  Get down on your knees and pour out your heart to Him.

But confessing your anger to the person you are angry with is also good.  “When this happens, I feel angry.”  The Bible says we are to speak the truth in love.  That’s in Ephesians 4:15.  And sometimes we aren’t truthful with each other when we experience anger.  Confess it; speak the truth to that person.  They may have no idea that what they are doing is causing you to feel angry. 

The other side of that is found in Proverbs 15:1 A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.

And in Colossians 3:21 Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.

If we are causing someone else to be angry, we need to take a look at that.  Jesus caused some people to be angry with Him, but it was His confronting them with truth that angered them.  And He didn’t stop just because it angered them.  But most of the time that’s not why we anger other people. 

It’s our harsh words, our ungodly behavior, our rotten attitudes that bring reactions from most people.  And their anger may be God’s warning to us that we need to change.

I had hoped we could look this morning at Jesus’ depression, be we aren’t going to have time.  But the strongest of the three Greek words for depression in the N.T. is used to describe Jesus in Mark 14:32-34.  As He entered the Garden of Gethsemane and faced the cross, He experienced depression.  And during that time God sent and angel to minister to Him.

Emotions: they can be our friends; they can be our enemies.  They are responsible for some of man’s greatest achievements; they are responsible for some of man’s greatest tragedies.  But they are one of God’s greatest gifts to us.

We need to thank Him for our emotions.

We need to bring them under His control, so they can be used for His glory and for our good.

But whatever emotions you are experiencing, Jesus understands them.  He lived among us & experienced them all.  He knows your loneliness, your disappointment, your sorrow, your grief, your depression, and yes, even your anger. He loves you just like you are.  But He loves you too much to leave you like you are.  He wants to help you become more of what He created you to be.