The heart of Jesus—you know, Jesus had a heart, passions, motivations
and values that drove him from deep within.
Just as he preached to others, that heart was love, agape. A commitment to act
out of a deep concern for the good of others.
The gospels sometimes give us a glimpse of heart driving Jesus’ life: “When he
saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed
and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” At his core, he had a concern for the
helpless, the lost, and the needy, and this concern drove him to heal and to
provide. He was like his father, who
sent his son because of his great love for
the world and the lost within it. (We
should remember, however, that some, many, or possibly all of his miracles were
also done for the sake of saying something
about his messianic identity). Importantly,
this heart of compassion or love was also the motivation for him teaching.
“Jesus saw the huge crowd…and he had compassion on them…So he
began teaching them many things” (Mr 6:34, NLT). Jesus’ ministry, his healing, his providing, his teaching, even perhaps
his whole vocation, was driven by a love for people.
Do Christian intellectuals have this heart? I’m a student at Princeton Theological
Seminary; I’m surrounded by people who either love or at least devote
themselves to studying the Bible, church history, theology, or other intellectual
issues of relevance to the Christian faith.
And these people surround themselves by scholars in the field who devote
themselves to research and writing about these topics. Are we doing this out of a love for the
church? Perhaps the harder question, and
it is indeed harder because it is more concrete, is, Are we doing this because
we have compassion on people, because
we see the needs of real people and want to meet that need? Aren’t the students and professors here at Princeton
the best of the best? Certainly they’re
top tier. But are these the people who are most performing their impressive labours out of
a concern for the real needs of people whom they wish to love and serve by
their work?
This kind of heart seems
conspicuously absent among Christian intellectuals, (perhaps proportionally to
how “academic” they are?). We are the
ones who live in the church’s treasury; we examine, study, and appraise all of
its resources—the word, its saints, etc. And yet we are often the ones least
concerned for the ways that people need the resources to which we have such
access and exposure. We have the
knowledge, but do we have the love to serve with it? We are the ones who know the mind of Christ; but do we have his heart? At the end of the day, Christian
intellectuals are to model their lives after their savior, and I don’t see how
that can avoid meaning that they are compelled to appropriate his heart into their
lives—leading them to research, think and write about the Bible and theology for the real, (most likely spiritual) needs of real Christians.
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