Robert Law,
a Scottish pastor and theologian wrote a volume on the emotions of Jesus that
was published in 1915. While holding to a Trinitarian Christology, without perhaps
wrestling with the Christological implications of such, he openly admitted that
the person of Jesus experienced
astonishment, showing
that Jesus learned things he was, up to that point, ignorant of:
The Astonishment of Jesus
Though little is directly reported of it in
the Gospels, this also belonged to the perfection of our Lord Jesus. No one has
ever lived in such a marvellous world as He, to whom “the glory in the grass
and splendour in the flower” continually revealed the diviner miracle of a
Heavenly Father’s munificent love and care. No one ever felt as He did the
wonder of God—the infinite majesty and the infinite tenderness, the infinite
purity and infinite forgivingness of God. No one has ever felt as He did the
wonder of man, of the human soul with its heights and depths, its heroisms of
love and loyalty, virtue and self-sacrifice, its marvels too of baseness and
ingratitude—the amazingness of sin.
Yet it was not the virtues or the vices of
men that most excited the wonder of Jesus. What He is expressly said to have
shown Himself astonished at was their faith and unbelief. When He came to His
own and His own received Him not, He was stirred out of His habitual calm. He
was not taken by surprise. He recognized that His was the common experience of
God’s messengers: “A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country and
among his own kin.” Still, He marvelled at it. Such blindness, such perversity
is really amazing, nor does it become less by repetition. And when He came to
those to whom He was a stranger, like a Roman centurion or a woman of Canaan,
and they showed a penetrating insight into His character, and received Him with
prompt welcome and vigorous faith, again He marvelled. It was wonderful that
they whose faith had such distances to travel and such obstacles to surmount
should unerringly find their way to Him—a thing to think upon with wondering
thankfulness.
The instance of faith which specially excited
His wonder and admiration was that of a Roman officer, who, when he sought from
Jesus the healing of a favourite slave, expressed his conviction that Jesus
could bring this about from the spot where He was standing as easily as by His
actual presence at the sickbed. “For I myself,” he says, “am a man of
subordinate rank, owing obedience to my superiors; and I again have under me
soldiers, and when I say to one, Go, he goeth; and another, Come, he cometh;
and to my servant, Do this, he doeth it.” And he is sure that Jesus in the
region of His activity is vested with an authority no less efficacious and
far-reaching. If at the word of a centurion the well-drilled cohort moved like
a piece of perfect mechanism, at the word of Jesus the legions of heaven, the
angels of healing, will instantly obey. It was at this Jesus marvelled. He had
never before found faith like this, so swift yet so sure, flying like an arrow
to the heart of truth. He had not found it in His own disciples; He had not
found it in all Israel, not in a single representative of a nation whose
history was shot through with religious ideas and hopes. It was reserved for
this Gentile, this mere hanger-on to the skirts of the Chosen People, to form
this original and daring conception of Christ’s power, to see under the humble
exterior of the Prophet of Nazareth the great Commander of the invisible powers
of the Kingdom of God, and to set on His head the Messiah’s crown.
It is evident that the element of unexpectedness
entered into this wonder of Jesus. To find such faith in such a quarter was to
come upon an Elim in an arid wilderness. The centurion was a pioneer soul, who
followed no man’s lead, but made a path in which others should follow. The
story of every mission field has to tell of such pioneer souls; everywhere,
indeed, they are the makers of history in the Kingdom of God. Yet our Lord’s
wonder is not merely the wonder of surprise; it is the deeper wonder of
admiration. Such faith as the centurion’s is wonderful in itself, not merely
because of its exceptional circumstances. There is something marvellous in all
religious faith. So marvellous is it that to Jesus it once seemed a question
worth asking, whether at His coming He should find faith in the earth. We think
it wonderful if any man is an infidel, whereas really it is much more
marvellous that any man is a believer. Just as we esteem is strange if any one
is dumb, or lack any of his senses, or is an idiot, whereas the true marvel is
not dumbness but speech, not idiocy but intelligence; so, I say, the most
wonderful think about the human soul is not its worldliness, its atheism, but
is its persistent and unconquerable faith in God and the spiritual world. (Robert
Law, The Emotions of Jesus [Edinburgh:
T&T Clark, 1915; repr. Tipperary, Ireland: Tentmaker Publications, 1995], 60-62)
