While reading B.B. Warfield, a 19th/early 20th century Presbyterian theologian, one reads the following in an essay entitled “On the Emotional Life of Our Lord” on the true humanity and emotions expressed by Jesus in the Gospels:
Even more clearly, his own unrestrained wailing of the most poignant pity: “O that thou hadst known in the day, even thou, the things which belong unto peace” (Lk. Xix. 41)! The sight of suffering drew tears from his eyes, obstinate unbelief convulsed him with uncontrollable grief. Similarity when a man afflicted with dumbness and deafness was brought to him for healing we are only told that he “sighed” (Mk. vii. 34); but when the malignant unbelief of the Pharisees was brought home to him he “sighed from the bottom of his heart” (Mk. viii. 12). “Obstinate sin,” comments Swete appropriately, “drew from Christ a deeper sigh than the sight of suffering” (Lk. vii. 34 and cf. Jno. xiii. 20), a sigh in which anger and sorrow both had a part (iii. 4 note).” We may, at any rate, place the loud wailing over the stubborn unbelief of Jerusalem and the deep sighing over the Pharisees’ determined opposition side by side as exhibitions of the profound pain given to our Lord’s sympathetic heart, but those whose persistent rejection of him required at his hands his sternest reprobation. He “sighed from the bottom of his heart” when he declared, “There shall no sign be given this generation”; he wailed aloud when he announced, “The days shall come upon thee when thine enemies shall dash thee to the ground.” It hurt Jesus to hand over even hardened sinners to their doom.
It hurt Jesus,--because Jesus’ prime characteristic was love, and love is the foundation of compassion. How close to one another the two emotions of love and compassion lie, may be taught us by the only instance in which the emotion of love is attributed to Jesus in the Synoptics (Mk. x. 21). Here we are told that Jesus, looking upon the rich young ruler, “loved” him, and said to him, “One thing thou lackest.” It is not the “love of complacency” which is intended, but the “love of benevolence”; that is to say, it is the love, not so much that finds good, as that intends good,--though we may no doubt allow that “love of compassion is never”—let us rather say, “seldom”—“absolutely separated from love of approbation”; that is to say, there is ordinarily some good to be found already in those upon whom we fix our benevolent regard. The heart of our Saviour turned yearningly to the rich young man and longed to do him good; and this is an emotion, we say, which, especially in the circumstances depicted, is not far from simple compassion. (Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Person and Work of Christ [ed. Samuel G. Craig; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1950], 100-2)
