7.18

Emotions of Jesus

The Gospel of Mark often attributes emotions to Jesus in ways that are sometimes omitted or muted in the other Gospels.

Mark 1:41	“moved with pity”	No emotion mentioned in Matthew 8:2–4 or Luke 5:12–16.
Mark 3:5	“he looked around at them with anger”	No emotion mentioned in Matthew 12:9–14 or Luke 6:6–11.
Mark 3:5	“he was grieved at their hardness of heart”	No emotion mentioned in Matthew 12:9–14 or Luke 6:6–11.
Mark 6:6	“he was amazed at their unbelief”	No emotion mentioned in Matthew 13:35–58 or Luke 4:16–30.
Mark 6:34	“he had compassion for them”	Same phrase in Matthew 14:14, but no emotion mentioned in Luke 9:12–14
Mark 10:14	“he was indignant”	No emotion mentioned in Matthew 19:13–15 or Luke 18:15–17.
Mark 10:21	“Jesus, looking at him, loved him”	No emotion mentioned in Matthew 19:16–30 or Luke 18:18–30.
Mark 14:34	“I am deeply grieved, even to death”	Same phrase in Matthew 26:28, but no emotion mentioned in Luke 22:39–45

 

The usual explanation is that Matthew and Luke may have feared that attributing emotions to Jesus would lessen his divinity, while the author of Mark’s Gospel either did not consider this a problem or wanted to present a more human portrait of Jesus.

Augustine (296–373) offers these comments on Jesus’s emotions—focusing especially on anger:

If angry emotions which spring from a love of what is good and from holy charity are to be labeled vices, then all I can say is that some vices should be called virtues. When such affections as anger are directed to their proper objects, they are following good reasoning, and no one should dare to describe them as maladies or vicious passions. This explains why the Lord himself, who humbled himself to the form of a servant, was guilty of no sin whatever as he displayed these emotions openly when appropriate. Surely the One who assumed a true human body and soul would not counterfeit his human affections. Certainly, the Gospel does not falsely attribute emotions to Christ when it speaks of him being saddened and angered by the lawyers because of their blindness of heart. (City of God, Book 14)

R. J. Deferrari, ed., Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, 86 vols. (Washington DC: Catholic University of America, 1947–present), 14:368–69.