Encounters with Jesus: The Man in His Place and Time

Chapter 7

7 JESUS AND EMOTION Feelings and Desires How Do We Get to Know the Inner Life of Jesus? Our intention in this chapter is not to answer the question Jesus puts to his disciples “Who do people say that I am?” nor the question “Who did Jesus himself think he was?” We want to find out something about Jesus’ feelings, about his reactions to the situation of his people and his land. In short, we want to learn something about his inner life. Getting to know the most intimate aspects of a person is always an extremely arduous task, even in the case of our own contemporaries. In the case of Jesus, the task is made more complicated by the fact that (as we have mentioned several times) the available documents relate the life story of Jesus many decades afterward, on the basis of written and oral testimony from his followers or from persons who had contact with them. We have many times recalled that it is not possible to verify historically the circumstances of time and place in which Jesus delivered his discourses or performed his most memorable actions. To reconstruct the way in which Jesus perceived his own experiences, therefore, does not seem possible. The only correct and safe approach is to reformulate the question as follows: What did the evangelists think about the emotions and feelings of Jesus? This question has often been overlooked by exegetes, but it is both legitimate and highly useful. The Cultural Meanings of Emotions In order to understand better how the Gospels interpreted the interior life of Jesus, it is essential to grasp the nature of feelings and emotions 155 156 Encounters with Jesus in a particular context of meanings and values, and how influential they are both in the construction of a person’s identity and in relationships among individuals. There have been many discussions of the meaning of the word “emotion .”1 Here, we take into consideration not only the emotions and feelings , but also the will, the aspirations, and conscious longings—the entire complex of interior states of mind and reactions. The theoretical basis of our analysis is a type of anthropological research that regards personal and intimate emotions as generated by relationships between subjects.2 The interior life of an individual is a reaction both to the stimuli that come from the external environment and to the person’s relationship to this environment. Desires and feelings are generated by these relationships , or are dependent on them. In order to explore such feelings, therefore, we must begin by studying models of interaction between individuals in all the variety of their concrete contexts.3 And since emotions and feelings are always expressed visibly, reflection on them must take account of their bodily manifestations in looks, sounds, gestures, and movements. The emotions transpose the individual into a dimension involving the body that is altered and sometimes disturbing. The emotions construct intimate and deep perceptions that manifest themselves in corporality.4 Various cultures identify different points within the body as the seat and origin of emotional attitudes. It is only secondarily and in a complementary manner that the emotions belong to the realm of thinking. In every culture, relationships between individuals generate actions and reactions with emotional outcomes that can be perceived and interpreted . But the perception and interpretation of these emotional states (for example, suffering or comfort) necessarily presuppose shared patterns of behavior. The emotions are not simply congenital biological facts. They are cultural products and constructions that give expression to a strong desire for recognition and belonging. Franz Boas argues that they are the outcome of the form taken by our social life and by the history of the group to which we belong.5 The emotional state can be induced by moral or religious conventions, whether freely chosen or imposed by others. It can be elaborated in sophisticated ways so as to become uncontrollable, or, on the contrary, it can be controlled or denied by ideas about personal decorum, good manners, aesthetic requirements, or taboos. The emotions in the depths of the person can be covered over and reined in by rigid or repressive customs that alter individual needs. In every culture, the positive or negative connotation Jesus and Emotion 157 of the various emotions and the consequent models of expression alert us to the presence of symbolic worlds full of light and shade, and imply a...