Christ's Emotions and Ours
Christ
is, in a sense, the most emotional of men; His emotions are fine or exact,
intense and fully developed—He did not take this part of human nature in vain,
any more than He took hands or feet in vain; and His emotions were to be
crucified as His hands and feet were. In Him there were none of the obstacles
which ordinarily interfere with our emotions; He was not held back from
feeling keenly, as we are so often, by mere fear of the consequences. So often
we do not let our feelings "go", we do not allow things or people to
have the full emotional effect they might have—not so much on account of the
moral law that bids us restrain ourselves, but because we realize instinctively
that emotion might carry us into lines of action of which we are afraid. If we
hated iniquity as we should—with the intensity and fullness which iniquity
demands—we should commit ourselves to conduct which might carry us further than
we care to go. In Christ, the emotions met no such obstacle, because His
feelings were always perfectly under His control, and He was willing to accept
their full consequences; He loved us unto the end, unto death, unto death on a
cross; He committed Himself to one cause with a thoroughness, a
whole-heartedness from which the mass of us will always shrink. We naturally
dislike to give ourselves wholly to any one thing, even to the love of God; we
hedge, we hesitate, we wish to reconsider our bargains. And all this faintness
of heart is opposed to the spirit of Christ: "If any man come to me, and
hate not his father, and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and
sisters, yea and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke
XIV.26.) What is demanded of us is a love strong enough to sweep away, if need
be, all other loves, a love that will sacrifice everything rather than be
separated from its God; for "thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole
heart, thy whole soul, and with all thy mind." We must then
learn from Christ to school our emotions—not by merely restraining them, much
less by trying to suppress them, but by giving them the full scope, the full
fiery energy which they can find only in the fire of divine love.
We
need not think of each of the emotions separately; we can give full scope to
all our emotions by uniting them to the two basic emotions of Christ—joy and
sorrow; for Christ was the most joyful and the most sorrowful man who ever
walked this earth. By knowing and sharing His sorrow and His joy, we can come
to a full intensity as well as a full control of our own emotions.
Christ's Joy
He
was the most joyful of men. He always possessed the Beatific Vision, the
greatest possible source of joy. Besides, the things of this world caused Him a
joy of which we can, from the very great artists, form only a poor idea. His
senses and emotions were finer, more sensitive, more acute than those of any
other human being. Wherever He found beauty, goodness, nobility, He responded
to them with great joy—because He Himself had made whatever beauty there is in
the world, and He understood it so perfectly. Even as man He was the cause of
whatever moral beauty or nobility there is, and He knew these things as only
the maker can know the thing he makes. The artist finds a joy in the work of
his hands which he can communicate to no one because the work is his in
a sense in which it can never be anyone else's. And Christ was not only an
artist, but a perfect artist; whatever left His hands was, in so far as it came
from Him, perfect, and capable of giving Him a perfect joy. "God saw what
He had made and it was good." Even we can recapture some of Christ's joy
in reading what the saints have told of themselves; a love story such as the biography
of the Little Flower can not only edify us but move us to approval, to profound
admiration and true joy. The knowledge of what took place in the heart and soul
of the Little Flower gathered from her autobiography is a weak and poor thing
compared with the knowledge that Christ has, for He is the architect and
primary workman of all that excellence. Christ had besides one abiding power
which is found at best only in a transitory manner in other human beings—the
power of retaining fresh interest in the wonderful things with which divine
wisdom and love have filled the world. Wordsworth speaks in the
"Immortality" Ode of what has bothered so many sensitive minds—the
fact that, as we grow up, we lose the capacity for endless wonder and curiosity
which is found in the child. To Christ, on the other hand, the glory of the
sunset, the richness of the harvest fields, the endless variety of expression
in the human face, the endless variety of human character—all the things from
which has sprung the art of the world—these things never ceased to be the
source of endless joy to Him. And we may say that Christ has put the musicians,
painters, and poets into the world that we too, through these men, may retain
some sense of the strange wonders God has created for us, around us, and in us.
"All ye works of the Lord, bless the Lord." (Daniel III.57.)
What
is true of Christ's joy in general is particularly true of the joy He receives
from anything that is done for Him. His keen and vibrant Heart responds so
readily to any act of kindness or thoughtfulness to Himself; in the Bible story
and in tradition He goes out of His way to show His appreciation for little
things which are in themselves of no value to Him. Mary the Magdalen spills
ointment over His feet in a sudden, surprising gesture of loving abandon; He
rewards her with the promise that, wherever He is known, her act also will be
known. Veronica wipes His face as He passes to cruel death; tradition affirms
that He left the image of His face on the cloth. The more we enter into the
sentiments of His Heart, the more clearly we see how deeply He appreciates what
we do for Him, even though our gesture, like Veronica's, is almost a gesture of
helplessness.
Here
again we find one of those paradoxes which run the whole way through the work
of Christ; He is eternal and temporal, immortal yet subject to death; powerful
yet weak. In the same way, He needs us and He does not need us. As God, He
needs nothing, He needs no man; but as man, He needs other men, for it is part
of human nature that it is not complete in any one individual (as the angelic
nature is complete in each individual angel). Man is a social being
because he needs other men; and God deigned to assume this need as He assumed
the need for food; He assumed everything in human nature which is compatible
with His divine Person. He has then freely chosen to save mankind in a way
which requires other men than Himself. So the Omnipotent chooses to place
Himself in a position in which He needs and can appreciate what other men can
do for Him. And, mysteriously, He chooses to continue this need to the end of
time.
The
Sacred Heart is the great symbol of this need for other men, for a heart needs
love, needs sympathy, needs help, needs consolation. The greater our devotion
to the Heart, the more clearly and the more constantly we see this need of His
for what we can do, and especially His need for our heart, for our love. One
impelling motive that runs the whole way through the lives of the saints is the
desire to do all they can for Christ; they are not content with fulfilling
their duties, they multiply their acts of love. From all things, but especially
from these acts of love, there comes a great joy to the Sacred Heart.
Christ
is then the most joyful man who ever lived—He has greater capacity for joy and
He has more to give Him joy than anyone else.
