22 Mar Christological Consideration: On the Emotional Life of the Son of God

In having a prophetic voice to the culture in which we minister and create community, I have found (and you likely know) how important it is to get our Christology correct. That is, it is so important how we talk about, and put language around, who Jesus of Nazareth was, and is.

For the first few centuries of the church, much ink was spilled over “Christological controversies”: who was Jesus? Was He a human who “grew into being God?” Was He just a divine being whose body was ghostlike (a la a Salvador Dalí painting) but who never really suffered?

What emerged on the back end–superintended by, Christians believe, the person of God the Holy Spirit– was an understanding of who we see Jesus to be in the Gospels and affirmed by the early church: a being who was fully God and fully human. Theologians call this, you may know, the hypostatic union.

Part of every Christian church’s responsibility, then, is to faithfully minister this understanding and application of the two natures of Christ: God and human.

And without question, the culture in which we live needs to hear that Jesus Christ is Lord (Romans 10:9-10), that there is no God but Him and no other name under heaven by which we can be saved (Acts 4:12). Emphasizing the divinity of Christ and His membership in the Godhead helps us avoid making a god in our own image, and allows Him to rightly receive worship as a holy, divine being.

But if we aren’t careful, especially as those who exist broadly in the “evangelical square,” we can forget that Jesus was not just God, but God in a body.

What does that mean? How does the Incarnation shape our understanding of how life is meant to be lived, and how we relate to God—especially in our emotional lives?

After all, God has emotions. We have emotions. Our problem (among others) is not that we have emotions, but that we don’t understand how to listen to them properly, nor use them rightly.

Jesus, in the last week of His life, shows us how to do both. His human experience, like ours, ran the gamut from grief to joy, and just about everything in between. He did, after all, come to be known as the Man of Sorrows, and not the Man of unflinching, keeping-a-stiff-upper-lip Superhumans.

In light of all this, beginning this Sunday, we will be doing a brief, two-week, three-message series (Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter) called Passion, where we look at the passionate, emotional life of the Son of God, at His lowest and highest moments, and what this means for how we both live and worship.

I hope you’ll journey with us and allow yourself to come face to face with a new wonderment at who Jesus the Christ really was (and is).

And, maybe most of all, you will see in a new way how much He really, passionately loves you, and us.

Morgan