‘Jesus wept’ is best known for being the shortest and perhaps most misused verse in the Bible.
But these two words are more famous for their brevity than for the meaning they convey.
The Lord Jesus in his perfect humanity and immaculate obedience actually cried real tears of deep sorrow about sad things. Yet I wonder how much this verse, and Jesus’s displays of emotion elsewhere in the gospels, informs our ideas about what a biblical, godly emotional life looks like.
Emotions and the Christian
For a long time, I thought we Christians should aspire to an immoveable plateau of control in our feelings and in the expression of them. Not only was this a frustrating and elusive goal for someone who cries when watching most films, it was also a misinformed and unbiblical goal. Disney Pixar’s latest release, Inside Out, is the animated tale of 11-year-old Riley, whose family moves to a city nearly 2000 miles away. Her emotions are the narrators and are personified as Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. Allegorical in the fashion of John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress, this is a story about Joy finding wholeness and Sadness finding its place.
Joy and Sadness
The embodiment of Joy looks like a blue-haired Tinkerbell and is very clearly the ringleader of Riley’s emotions, stationed at ‘Headquarters’, which is somewhere in the head just behind the eyes. Headquarters is where orb-shaped memories are processed and stored before they travel down to long-term storage, and Joy eagerly protects the memories that are golden in colour, denoting that they are joyful ones. She fights for posi-tivity and to find something good in every situation, trying to rally the other emotions into line with her pursuit of happiness for Riley.
This positive optimism is tolerable at first, but soon becomes obviously out of touch with reality. Sadness, on the other hand, is a small, blue, bookish creature, who is oppressed and neglected by the other emotions. She is treated as a mistake, a necessary evil who must be contained. When she picks up the memory orbs she tinges them with the blue of Sadness, which is treated as a catastrophe by the others, particularly by Joy. They feel awkward around her and don’t acknowledge her rightful place among them.
Turning point
When everything goes pear-shaped and Joy and Sadness are together accidentally exiled from Headquarters, they have to navigate the wonderfully imagined tunnels of Riley’s mind, occasionally catch a ride on the Train of Thought and escape the dark clutches of the Subconscious. The turning point in the film is when Sadness empathises with Riley’s beloved but forgotten imaginary friend, Bing Bong the elephant. Sadness sits with him and recognises that it’s okay to be sad about things that hurt, and about lost things. When Joy witnesses this moment, she begins to understand that Sadness has value when she’s allowed to play her part.
Somewhere in the pit of discarded memories, full of dark grey orbs that are about to be turned to ash, Joy begins to weep. There’s no spin of positivity to be had here. She is learning that the only right response to some things is Sadness – Joy becomes more real as she allows herself to know it. When Sadness and Joy get separated, Joy tries to catch up and Sadness declares ‘just leave me, Riley’s better off without me’. But Joy now knows that this isn’t true and that things have gone wrong precisely because Sadness is missing. When Sadness stops being trampled and is instead allowed her legitimate place, the film resolves, events are righted and Riley is herself again.
Back at Headquarters, with Joy and Sadness rightfully installed again amongst Fear, Anger and Disgust, we see the multicoloured memory orbs that now fill Riley’s mind, recognising that each memory evokes and contains several different emotions at once. In our living and in our remembering we’re anything but black and white – we’re all of our experiences, our histories, our loves and our losses at once. All have played their part, and will continue to do so. The difference is, Riley’s behaviour is entirely controlled by her emotions.
Not engulfed
But for us, because of Jesus, our emotions need never engulf us. In Jesus we see deepest compassion, fierce indignation, ceaseless love, profound sorrow and exultation, sometimes all at once. He was powerfully in control of the situations that evoked these emotions and continues to be so in our own situations now. And, as we see him more clearly, our emotions find their right and proper places in all their multi-hued complexity.
