Van Gogh’s “Old Man in Sorrow.” It’s interesting that the posture of sorrow is similar to a posture of worship.

Few Christians are familiar with the term “orthopathos.”

We’re familiar with orthodoxy, which is “thinking like Jesus”.  And many of us hope to be “orthodox.”

Some of us have heard of the term orthopraxy, which is “acting like Jesus”.

But orthopathos, which means “feeling the feelings of Jesus” is an idea that few of us are familiar with because so few of us believe He actually feels.

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It’s said that we become like the object/person we worship. And when you worship God, you become like who or what you think He is.

Do you worship God as patient?

Do you worship God as just?

Do you worship God as love?

You will eventually become all these things if you believe they are apart of God’s character.

What happens when you see God as immutable … as unchangeable?

What happens when you see God as impassible … as emotionless?

So many Christian traditions believe that God is utterly unable to change and utterly unaffected by emotion. Should it be a surprise that so many of us become unmoved and emotionally repressed?

So, when we say “orthopathos” most Christians think that the “proper way to feel like God” is to feel nothing at all.  To never grieve, to never have joy, to never get angry … because the One they worship, the One they are trying to reflect has no emotion Himself.

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The ultimate example of orthopathos is found on the cross. The prophet Isaiah, in what is perhaps one of the more powerful prophetic utterances of the Old Testament writes,

“He was despised and rejected by mankind,

a man of suffering,

and familiar with pain. …

Surely he took up our pain

and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God,

stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

he was crushed for our iniquities ….

This laying on of the iniquity, bearing of our suffering, this taking of our pain, this familiarity with pain, this man of suffering who took so much of the world’s grief into his heart that it’s recorded in Mark 13:34:

“”My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death”.

Overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death!

This wasn’t Jesus being punished by the Father per se, but Jesus taking the heart of the Father in human form by seeing what God sees, acting as God would act and ultimately feeling like God feels. It was the ultimate act of representing the Father in human form!

And then, I believe, Jesus died, not from the wounds of the cross, but from the wounds of the heart.

Sure, we can begin to understand right thinking, we can begin to understand right action, but who can feel the heart of God and live?

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Why don’t Christians feel sorrow?  There’s a couple reasons: 1.) our theology doesn’t allow for it and so 2.), we think it’s unlike our God if we do so.

Wendell Berry’s famed literature character “Jayber Crow” states this:

I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss.  As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die.  I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world.  Just a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another.  To allow that love to exist fully and freely, He must allow it not to exist at all. His love is suffering.  It is our freedom and His sorrow. ….  And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.

Some of us will feel God’s missional love for the world, but all of us will feel the sorrow of death.  And it’s high time that we as Christians believe it’s okay to sorrow.  It’s high time we believe it’s okay to weep, for when we do so we aren’t becoming unlike our God; we are, in fact, worshiping.