The emotions of Jesus.

Now Jesus was deeply troubled, and He exclaimed, “I tell you the truth, one of you will betray Me!”

The disciples looked at each other, wondering whom He could mean. The disciple Jesus loved was sitting next to Jesus at the table. Simon Peter motioned to him to ask, “Who’s He talking about?” So that disciple leaned over to Jesus and asked, “Lord, who is it?”

Jesus responded, “It is the one to whom I give the bread I dip in the bowl.” And when He had dipped it, He gave it to Judas, son of Simon Iscariot. When Judas had eaten the bread, Satan entered into him. Then Jesus told him, “Hurry and do what you’re going to do.” None of the others at the table knew what Jesus meant. Since Judas was their treasurer, some thought Jesus was telling him to go and pay for the food or to give some money to the poor. So Judas left at once, going out into the night.

—John 13.21-30 NLT

 

These Red Letters posts are about getting to know Jesus by looking at what He said. But one other way that we can get to know Jesus is to look at what He did; and to look at what He thought. Sometimes the gospels actually tell us what was going on in His head. We should definitely look at that.

In this story, we tend not to. Your average sermon focuses on one of the many other elements of this story. There’s the bit about Jesus being omniscient; knowing all, including what Judas Iscariot was up to and what would become of him. There’s Jesus giving Judas the bread, yet telling him to leave. There’s the author of John sitting next to Jesus (actually, the way first-century folks ate, lying at a bench next to Jesus), and the many many sermons about how close they were, ’cause he identifies himself not by name (the only John in John is the baptizing prophet) but by the fact Jesus loved him. (Jn 13.23) There’s the fact that Judas was entrusted with the money, and how ironic that was. There’s how nobody but Jesus, Judas, and John knew what was going on.

All these things are important, but if we want to understand Jesus, we need to look at what was going on in His head at that time. And John actually tells us. He was “deeply troubled.” The original word is tarásso, meaning “to take away one’s peacefulness of mind.” Or, as we put it nowadays, to lose one’s cool.

Because Jesus knew all about, and was in command of, every situation, we tend to think of Him as always being cool. After all, one of the fruits of the Spirit is self-control, and it’s really difficult to think of Jesus acting in any manner inconsistent than Spirit-led. …Well, it should be really difficult, anyway. Some Christians are more of the mindset that Jesus would get pissed off at everything that pisses them off—that He is more like them than they like Him—and use the story of His whipping people out of the Temple (Jn 2.14-17) as an excuse for them losing their cool. But I’ll save that discussion for when I actually get to that story.

But agitation is a normal human emotion. There’s nothing sinful about being agitated per se. There’s everything wrong with dwelling on it, or intentionally conjuring it up, or using it as an excuse for your behavior. Self-control doesn’t mean you have no emotions, like a Vulcan from Star Trek; it means you are in control of them, rather than vice-versa. Jesus was agitated, but Jesus didn’t act out His agitation. He didn’t shout (though the NLT has “exclaimed,” the original word légho is the usual word for “said”). He didn’t throw things. Other than His comment on how not all of them were clean, (Jn 13.11) and his bible quote about a traitor in the group, (Jn 13.18) He didn’t single out Judas, expose him, or tear into him with some passive-aggressive lecture. He maintained.

Really, there’d be something horribly wrong with Jesus if this didn’t bug Him. It would mean that he never really cared about Judas; that the kid was just a patsy in His whole plan to get arrested, tried, crucified, killed, and take out our sin in the process. It would mean Judas was only brought into His inner circle for the one and only reason of manipulating him into betrayal, and dooming him to hell.

Sad to say, some Christians are so focused on the sovereignty of God—on the fact that God is in control of everything in the universe—that they believe this twisted version of events: They do think Jesus set Judas Iscariot up. And they disregard all the scriptures that tell us, time and again, how Jesus felt about His passion; that He didn’t want to die this way, that He was irritated by His students’ behavior, that He was sad about the entire situation. They dismiss His emotions, and focus only on their favorite beliefs.

But to be fair, most of us do. We acknowledge that Jesus wasn’t happy about His suffering and death. (Naturally.) But that’s all we do; acknowledge. We don’t empathize—we don’t conjure up His emotions in ourselves, and make ourselves feel what He did. Some Christians teach that this is unhealthy, a needless form of self-torture that only the most radical of mystics try. Others just don’t see the point. Because this idea isn’t taught in most churches, a lot of Christians get totally blindsided by movies like The Passion of the Christ, where the filmmaker tries to make viewers feel something about Jesus’s death—and succeeds, and reduces Christians into blubbering weepy heaps. Understandably, most of us would rather dodge those emotions. But if you really want to follow Jesus, you have to follow Him emotionally too—all the way to the cross.

So that’s the bit I want to focus on here. And I want to use Jesus’s emotions as the context for the rest of this passage.

Jesus was agitated. Despite this, He kept it together. He told His students that He was gonna be betrayed, so that they wouldn’t lose faith in Him and think events caught Him by surprise. (Jn 13.19) He maintained control over the group, voluntary sending Judas out instead of allowing Judas to sneak out, and keeping the rest of them in the dark rather than letting any of them try to seize Judas and perform a little vigilante justice upon him. He didn’t let circumstances or emotions control the situation. He controlled it.

We need to do likewise when we lose our cool. We need to practice some of that self-control the Spirit wants us to; we need to tap into His infinite patience when our own supply runs out. Acknowledge the emotion; don’t lie and pretend it’s not there because you are a perfect Christian and don’t feel such things. Jesus felt such things. But remember that you are in charge. You can either choose to act as Jesus does, in love and peace and kindness and wisdom; or you could be a bitter jerk, a destructive fiery rage, an puddle of agony, a vengeful plotting time bomb, or frozen in confusion. And you need to practice doing as Jesus does with our smaller bouts of emotion, so that when the huge flare-ups happen, your knee-jerk reaction is not the sinful one.