ALSO our Savior has known moments time and again, in which strong emotions threatened to overmaster Him.
We constantly read, that at the sight of our human misery He was inwardly moved and stirred. Sometimes even the Evangelists add, that He was very greatly moved and strongly stirred; moved with compassion; moved with mercy; deeply moved in spirit, as at Lazarus’ grave, or deeply affected in spirit, as at the announcement of the treason; until at length with Him also emotion became too overpowering to inwardly smother it, and also gave Jesus an outlet in the tear, that trickled down His cheek.
Also Jesus has wept. Wept at Lazarus’ grave; wept over Jerusalem’s unwillingness to convert herself to her God. And not least in that weeping did it become evident, how violently He could inwardly be shocked and moved.
Yea, deepest of all Jesus was inwardly assaulted, altogether amazed and appalled, when in Gethsemane He underwent satanic temptation and He bent Himself down under the burden of our guilt and our sin, until anxious sweat broke out from Him and God’s angel had to support Him.
Also that was a violent, inward emotion affecting His whole being, of which in the anxiety of terror He Himself complained to His disciples: “My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death” (S. Mark 14, 34).
Jesus’ example therefore shows, how such emotions of our heart have their right of human existence; that impassiveness is no virtue; that blunting of our feeling is no fruit of faith; and that to remain stolid in most striking moments of our life, betrays a condition of mind and heart, which has its place with stoical philosophers, but is not at home with children of God.
The familiar story, that after the fall an angel of God brought man a tear from heaven as a means of divine comforting, is of course nothing but a poetical invention; but an invention, founded upon truth.
To be able to have emotions of sorrow and sadness, is a divine grace for him who became a sinner; and when necessary to be able to weep, is an outflow of divine compassion.
YET, and this should never be forgotten, with Jesus such emotion never became passionate. He did not give in to it. He sought no pleasure, in rousing it and giving ever stronger utterance to it. He did not willingly surrender Himself to it. Even then, when Jesus weeps, His sorrow is a weeping, marked by seriousness, and therefore by self-control. Not the crying of a child, but the silent, and therefore so significant, weeping of the Son of man.
Even in Gethsemane that dreadful perspiration shows, that Jesus did not surrender Himself, but kept up the struggle against the violent emotion, and His complaint to His disciples is a seeking of human help, not to sink away in the overwhelming power of the emotions.
Thus no cold impassiveness, however highly as calmness it may be advocated; but also no turning of emotion into wild passionateness.
Not the nerves, the heart must be touched in our emotions, and the pressure and impact of our nerves must be resisted, so soon as they would do anything else and anything more, than relieve the violently moved heart.
JESUS was inwardly moved, and that “inwardly” excludes the false play of nerves.
The nerves lie on the outside; the inward hides in the soul.
He who wants to affect the nerves, can make any one cry or laugh, without there being in the heart the least cause, that would move him to sadness or joy.
That play upon the nerves the children played in the streets of Jerusalem, and when it did not succeed, they complained: “We have played on the flute and ye have not danced, we have sung songs of mourning unto you and ye have not wept.”
Even as in preaching also there was a time, when men sought to operate upon the nerves instead of upon the soul.
But with this the emotion, whereby Jesus was moved and stirred, has nothing in common.
Him wounded the sorrow in the heart. So He was inwardly moved. And it was that emotion of soul, that communicated itself to His flesh and finally took expression in the weeping of His eye.
Sensitiveness of heart therefore was the startingpoint with Jesus. He felt so deeply and so tenderly.
Therefore has your Savior suffered all the days of His life, for all seeing of human sin and human misery gave Him inward pain.
And when, as in the betrayal, that sin was particularly strong in evidence, or when, as at Lazarus’ grave, this misery showed itself in specially shrill colors, then it shocked Jesus, and then He became inwardly altogether moved, so that the emotion communicated itself to His entire being.
AND this is the way with the believer. Not so purely; not with that equipoise. With one more, with the other less. But yet the soul, that may believe, sometimes feels pain. Pain because of sin and pain at the sight of misery, sorrow and death.
Then something cuts within; not with an affected, but with a spontaneous bitterness. You feel, that there is a wound, and that with every emotion that wound smarts.
This is at one time by reason of one’s own sins; then again because of the ruin worked by sin in your home, or in your environment of life, or brought about in God’s Zion; or it is a human misery, which either overtakes you, or strikes you because others suffer.
Want and death are still so dreadfully abroad. There is so namelessly much suffered, that the shouts of merriment on the part of the world shall never hush the complaint of our misery.
On the deepest bottom of so many a soul there lies such nameless woe of heart.
The pessimist may feast himself on this woe, and the lover of pleasure may dismiss it with a laugh; he who is a child of God, and therefore understands something of the divine compassion, knows what it is, to be inwardly moved with compassion, and honors something sacred, something that may not be repressed, in his own sorrow and in that of others.
AND on this element of sanctity it depends.
In the work of nerves there is nothing sacred, and therefore you must not spare your nerves, but resist them medically and by way of chastisement.
But such is not the effect with him who is inwardly moved.
Then an anxious homesickness smarts within, springing up from a sacred remembrance, or sacred tie, that was broken, and still draws.
Amidst much work and diversion this temporarily passes away. But the wound remains. And no sooner is rest regained and remembrance awakened, but that pain within throbs again, and the emotion comes back.
And though in our busy life presently all sorts of things may divert us, or with new sorrow fresh emotion repress the old, yet the heart of God’s child does not become unfaithful to its earlier sorrow. Only it sinks away in his heart a little more deeply, and is buried in one of those mysterious depths of his human heart; until either already here remembrance wakes it up again, or presently in our eternal existence the fruit of all this “woe of heart” appears.
“MIXED with faith” remains therefore also with respect to the world of our emotions the fixed stipulation.
For he who believes, can be so aboundingly happy in it and thank his God for it, that he has once again become aware of the tenderness of his own heart.
For it seemed sometimes many days, as though everything within was frozen. So coldly and unsympathetically you went along from day to day. Sometimes it even gave you a feeling, as though you carried about in your bosom a dead heart.
And see, now at once you discover, that this, God be praised, is not so. Now you perceive, that when it begins to storm in your life, and the wind blows off the ashes from the seemingly extinguished coals of fire, those coals are still possessed indeed of their former glow. You then live at once so much more deeply, so much more richly, so much more affectionately. Everything melts again. The wood of the trunk of your life has become sappy again. You love so much more, and it is as though indwelling sin no longer dares to show itself at the windows of your heart.
And where in this way from such emotions faith receives a beneficent impression, which leads to the glorifying of God’s name, that same faith puts the bridle upon that emotion.
Also in deepest sorrow our Father in heaven may not be denied; it may not seem to our soul, as though there is no Reconcilor and Savior, as though there were no Comforter provided for our heart.
His love held the balsam in readiness, before He inflicted the wound.
And so by that love also an emotion must be quickened in our heart.
A being moved by the tendernesses of our God.
← 42. He Bindeth Up Their Wounds (The Lord Bindeth Up Your Wounds) · Contents · 44. A Judge of the Widows (The Widow) →