“Passions of the Christ” by F. Scott Spencer

I am currently in a doctoral program, studying semiotics—cultural symbols—which requires a great deal of reading. Probably the greatest benefit of an education is the wise guide (teacher) who can give a curated tour of the best there is in any given subject, and such is the case with this program. Dr. Leonard Sweet has opened the door to an entire world of scholars and theologians who look beneath the surface of things and reveal mysteries. Now I would like to open that world to you.

I was already intrigued by and warmly disposed to reading a book about Jesus’s emotional life. Clearly he had one, being, as it were, fully human, and though ancient texts do not spend nearly the time modern ones do on descriptive detail in this vein, still, the Gospels all portray Jesus as having a range of feelings.

Divine Passion

Early on, Spencer asks,

“Is it not possible that God fully plunges into the creational process, with “hands on” -involvement in the earth … is it not possible that God moves with creation and is moved by it, that God evolves and emotes in some fashion, feeling God’s way through, so to speak, the unfolding experiences of a “groaning” creation and “children of God” (Romans 8:18-28)?”

F. Scott Spencer, Passions of the Christ: The Emotional Life of Jesus in the Gospels, (italics added; p. 2)

In the margin, I jotted down “open and relational theology,” and thought about the Thomas Oord book I have waiting for me for Thanksgiving break. For the life of me, I could not understand why this would be a question rather than an “of course.” On the very next page, Spencer notes, “Jesus the Son reveals the passions of his divine Father” (p. 3). To see Jesus is to see the Father. And also, the Hebrew Bible’s depiction of God is nothing short of impassioned.

But then, I had an education waiting for me in the pages to come.

Doctrine of Impassibility

I about popped a gasket reading about the doctrine of impassibility. I guess I never paid that close attention to it, it never seemed germane to biblical theology, but rather the specious musings of overly intellectual ancients (did that sound snarky? Maybe it was the word “specious,” which I wrote into the margin on p. 23). What a relief to turn to Moltmann for some sanity, “God is capable of suffering because he is capable of love” (p. 25). Whew!

How do you square the doctrine of an impassible God and the God Spencer suggests, who is deeply moved by creation and by people?

Passions of the Divine

By weaving together what neuro-biology and psychology now know about human emotions, and the stories of the Gospels, Spencer is able to create a fairly comprehensive emotional profile for Jesus.

Disgruntlement of Christ

My first real pause happened on page 52, thinking about the possibility that Jesus was incensed by the seemingly humble implication that if Jesus willed it, he had the capacity to heal this man. Although Spencer did not spend enough time developing why people say “if it be Thy will” in their prayers, I could still see his point. Of course it is Jesus’s will—God’s will—that all life be restored to thriving. Far more than being a time of rest, the Sabbath is meant to be restorative (p. 56).

I’ve continued to wonder about the uncomfortableness of Jesus’s angry outbursts, when he name-calls (and Matthew unironically has both Jesus’s discourse on anger and Jesus’s invective name-calling of the scribes and Pharisees in his “woe” speech: Matthew 5:21–26; 23:13–36). Maybe immaturity (which sure seems like imperfection) is just part of being human? Maybe sinlessness is a different kind of imperfection? Is it possible that being human includes immaturity, and maturing includes the process of learning emotional wisdom and regulation?

Distress of Christ

I found the descriptions of grief and the various charts comparing emotions helpful for further study, should I continue to pursue this line of enquiry (pp. 72–73, 119). Particularly with grief, all four varieties Spencer described (both the healthy and unhealthy varieties) can be found in the scriptures, as well as in real life today. Jesus’s anger and grief at the obtuseness of the Pharisees as well as his own disciples was well-explained (p. 80). I agree, the Pharisees’ longing to be right with God, individually and at the national level, was acute (as was the Essenes’). So their resistance to Jesus is deeply ironic in an awful way, and Jesus felt it. Jesus’s emotions recalled to mind God’s response to the corruption of humanity in Genesis 6, which Spencer alludes to earlier in the book.

Disgust of Christ

Lazarus’s Rotting Corpse?

I was not convinced that Jesus wept at the stink of Lazarus’s putrefying body as our eyes do when we cut into an onion (p. 124). His tears may have been prompted by what he was being invited to “come and see,” his beloved friend engulfed in corruption and death, I thought that was a canny insight (p. 85).

However, I am not convinced that Jesus cried tears of disgust at his friend’s tomb.

SyroPhoenician Woman?

And I had a hard time seeing disgust in the SyroPhoenician woman’s story either. Jesus often spoke in similes and metaphors, that was cultural, it was normal for a teacher to speak in this way. Jesus gave the woman—and his disciples, very importantly—a way for a gentile to navigate in God’s spiritual waters. Spencer mentioned the CAVE CANEM, but he did not mention that actually, little fluffy lap dogs were also pretty popular in the first-century Greco-Roman world. In Greek, the word attributed to Jesus is kynarion, the diminutive form of the word “dog,” meaning either “puppy” or “little dog.” 

Jesus, as with his conversation with his mother at the wedding in Cana, was modelling for his disciples what it looks like when a man respectfully listens to and allows himself to be persuaded by a woman. I think it would be safe to say Jesus’s disciples were disgusted (Matthew makes that more clear). But I do not think Jesus was in the least.

Jesus did not call the Syrophoenician woman a disgusting slur.

Now, to be clear, I think Jesus probably did get disgusted.

White-washed Tombs!

I would pick Jesus’s “woe” speech to the Pharisees as my example of Jesus’s disgust—

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean” Matthew 23:27 NRSVUE, emphasis added

People would white-wash the tombs to make sure nobody touched them, to protect against being rendered unclean, it was that big of a deal.

If there was a matter for disgust for Jesus, white-washed tombs, and the Pharisees’ behavior would be a strong contender.

Dovetails with They Flew

I was enrapt with the section on amazement, the separation of awe from wonder and surprise, the sense of enjoyment but also fear in that array (pp. 154–157). Then I saw two dovetails between this book and the one we read earlier in the semester: They Flew: A History of the Impossible, by Carlos M. N. Eire.

1. Spencer writes: “… we are elevated vertically by extraordinary models of loving action” (p. 158). This sense of elevation—which perhaps can also be inspired by awe, wonder, rapture and ravishment—is meant metaphorically, and as an internal experience by Spencer. But it was witnessed by thousands in centuries passed, as Eire documents in his book, as a physical phenomenon.
2. Spencer writes: “… somehow pain … will contribute to the alchemy of joy” (p. 258). One of the strange things that can happen in the human brain is to translate pain into pleasure. The more acute the pain, the more climactic the pleasure. This helps to explain (perhaps) the consistent inclusion of self-torture in the people who were observed to levitate in Eire’s book and display other miraculous signs of extreme spirituality.

Dazed

The issue of Jesus’s surprise touches on how difficult it is to imagine a being who is fully God and fully human all at the same time (p. 160). We cannot imagine God ever being surprised, or we would have to discard the doctrine of God’s omniscience. But humans are surprised all the time. So I thought this was an especially insightful treatment of Jesus’s feelings when he was contemptuously dismissed by his townspeople.

By that same token, the discussion of Jesus’s diminished power to perform wonders there is also unsettling. How could we say that human lack of faith would have any bearing on God’s ability to exercise God’s wonder-working power? This cannot be the same as Santa’s dwindling powers due to people’s fading belief in Santa (ala Elf, and the Santa Clause franchise). So what was happening? I especially appreciate Spencer’s thought that perhaps this was Jesus confronting the “limits on his knowledge and power,” which took the metaphorical wind out of his sail (p. 164). We have to believe Jesus was not born as a tiny little full-grown man (as Medieval depictions of him would have us believe). He learned. He grew. He came to understand things along the way. Here, early in his ministry, he was met with his own human internal limits.

Digs on Empathy

I especially appreciated Spencer’s insistence that to love and have compassion includes the heartfelt emotion of love (pp. 175, 178). It has continued to both mystify and irk me that “love is an action word, not a feeling” keeps getting preached right and left. I guess that must be thanks to the (faulty) doctrine of divine impassibility.

It is right there in the Bible.

“Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart”

1 Peter 1:22 NRSVUE, emphasis

Peter leans into it again in his second letter. In his ladder of virtues, he ends with this:

“… to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love”

2 Peter 1:7 NRSVUE, emphasis added

I simply do not know how else a person can read “affection” without understanding it as a felt experience, an emotion that springs from the heart.

So it was strange to me that Spencer had a rough time trying to figure out what to do with empathy. The experts he turned to didn’t give him much help, but at the end of the book he explains that he tries to swim in his own lane of pastoring and not stray into counseling (pp. 181, 263).

Empathy is essentially mirroring emotions while also expressing a response of understanding, acceptance, and love. Empathy creates connection and fosters healing. Empathy begins with listening to the other without judgment, and moves into validating that person’s feelings, offering support, and recognizing the underlying emotions, vows, lenses (etcetera) that the other may or may not understand are within them. Empathy:

1. Radiates feelings
2. Creates a safe environment
3. Encourages vulnerability
4. Promotes connection
5. Improves outcomes
6. Helps with conflict resolution

When did Jesus show empathy?

I propose Jesus did this at least twice.

Nathanael

The first is when he told Nathanael all about himself in John 1. Nathanael stopped being skeptical and started being curious, he was disarmed, he felt seen and known and accepted.

Woman at the Well

Another time Jesus asked a Samaritan women to go get her husband. Her response tells us how she felt about that. She felt seen and respected in an environment safe enough to admit she did not have one. Jesus told her that he knew, and she was struck in that moment with a thunderbolt of realization. Jesus was the Prophet, the one like Moses, the Messiah they had been longing for, for millennia. She did not feel judged. She felt known, and Jesus’s continuing conversation proved how high a regard Jesus had for her.

Dichotomy

We often talk about having to beware the valley after a mountaintop experience, but I had never applied that to Jesus’s own dichotomy between the artesian air of heaven and the murky miasma of earth’s faithless fumes (p. 199). I realized why, a couple of pages later (p. 201). We do not like to think of Jesus losing his temper because we are convinced that losing things like tempers is immature. It feels like a Moses moment when Moses struck the rock twice with his staff and had himself a little rant. Moses paid dearly for that, at the end of his life (Deuteronomy 3:23-29, 4:21-22, 32:48-52).

But is it okay if God the Son has a rant? Wouldn’t that make him … imperfect? Or maybe, here again, Jesus is still growing in maturity.

Dish-Soap Hands

My favorite insight came with Spencer’s exploration of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, “the basic intimacy of touch and massage” (p. 214). I sat with that for a while. It had to have been viscerally uncomfortable to experience such pleasure at that level of intimacy from their “superior,” in a way they would have, without even thinking about it, certainly denied each other, and possibly even their own families.

I had always read this story—now that we have been “washed from head to foot” in baptism—as our continuing need to have the dirt of our sins washed away by Jesus by way of “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). But Spencer proposes this really is about love, as John explains a verse or two beforehand. This is about “preparing them, setting them apart.” How? Through the intimacy of touch.

This about blew me away. This is what we mean about being filled afresh by the Spirit.

Addenda:

1. In Greek, the same word translated “Jewish” is also translated “Judean.” Some scholars now simply transliterate the word across the board as “Judean” to avoid the appearance of antisemitism. The footnote about this on p. 60 is important.
2. Jesus’s question to Mary Magdalene, “What/who are you seeking” was a theologically portentous phrase well-known to John’s first-century Jewish readers, but lost on us today (p. 83). Jesus was not being “cheeky,” as Spencer states. John was alerting the reader that the conversation about to ensue between Jesus and Mary was going to hold great spiritual import
3. First-century Passover meals included at least two, and probably four cups of wine throughout the evening. Each of these cups held meaning relating to God’s promise of redemption from Egyptian bondage found in Exodus 6:6:
   • “I will bring you out” (sanctification)
   • “I will rescue you” (deliverance)
   • “I will redeem you” (redemption)
   • “I will take you for my people” (Hallel or praise)
4. The cup Jesus lifted was either the one for redemption or the one for praise, the cup he would not drink of again until reunited with his own.
5. I do not think Jesus died alone. His mother, John, aunt, and Mary Magdalene were there, and perhaps a few other women. Jesus sang out the opening line of Psalm 22, recalling the whole song to mind. In a very real way, he felt utterly alone, but he was not. The Spirit and the Father were there with him. The Father did not turn his face away.
6. I had never seen it before, but of course Anna’s tribe being mentioned in the Christian Testament—very notable because of how rarely that happens—is also about the word “Asher” itself, which in Hebrew means “happiness.” Because Anna had to have been a happy and beloved woman, a known prophet, one who blessed countless people, and who joyously proclaimed the Redeemer before that was even a thing. She was the OG prophet who preceded that last Hebrew Testament prophet (John the Baptist) by a good thirty years.