human emotions

Jesus is said by the prophet to be "a man of suffering, and familiar with pain" (Isaiah 53:3). We don't read of an emotionless Jesus in the gospel. Sometimes he seems perturbed at the slowness or lack of heart he finds in people toward God and each other. A few times he is angry. And he weeps. I can't help but think that part of Jesus's appeal to despised tax-collectors and "sinners" was his humanness. He was a normal human being, really more normal according to God's standard than any human who had walked the face of the earth.

Human emotions in a modernist, individualistic context in which we, in the western world still live in part, gives short shrift and often none at all to emotions. While there is such a thing as one "wearing their emotions on their sleeves", I'm afraid this is too often just a declaration of independence from emotions and any person who is not afraid to show them, whether happy or sad, expressing anger or affection. Within Modernism itself was the reaction against human rationality trumping everything, found in Romanticisim. And Postmodernism for all its faults is also symptomatic of a recovering addiction to human rationality and recovery into a more holistic view of humanity, though often resulting in other equally destructive paths, in the light of the truth as it is in Jesus.

Human emotions. What do we do with them? In Jesus we bring them before God and in community. We grieve, we lament, we love and are at times angry, though hopefully slow to become angry. All emotions we need to bring before God, like the psalmist of old, and see them mediated in Christ and his work, and thus becoming a sweet offering to God (see Bonhoeffer's Life Together as he expresses something like this in a much better, fuller way).

The Holy Spirit gives us self-control, part of the fruit of the Spirit, so that our emotions are not to run roughshod over ourselves or others. There is a time to weep, laugh, mourn and dance (Ecclesiastes 3). But all these should be mediated through Jesus Christ., so that our emotions and his are more and more one. And this is lived in context of us being one Body in this world.

What thoughts might you add on emotions? Are you considered too emotional by some, like I have been? Certainly my emotions have not always been coming from a heart that is much at all like our Lord. But have you noticed a reticence by others or yourself to express one's true emotions? And why do you think this exists in our western, and in my case, American context?