Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers

by Dane C. Ortlund

Inextinguishable fury seizes upon him. . . . It is death that is the object of his wrath, and behind death him who has the power of death, and whom he has come into the world to destroy. Tears of sympathy may fill his eyes, but this is incidental. His soul is held by rage. . . . The raising of Lazarus thus becomes, not an isolated marvel, but . . . a decisive instance and open symbol of Jesus’ conquest of death and hell. What John does for us . . . is to uncover for us the heart of Jesus, as he wins for us our salvation. Not in cold unconcern, but in flaming wrath against the foe, Jesus smites in our behalf. He has not only saved us from the evils which oppress us; he has felt for and with us in our oppression, and under the impulse of these feelings has wrought out our redemption.9

While Christ is a lion to the impenitent, he is a lamb to the penitent—the reduced, the open, the hungry, the desiring, the confessing, the self-effacing. He hates with righteous hatred all that plagues you.

Are you angry today? Let us not be too quick to assume our anger is sinful. After all, the Bible positively orders us to be angry when occasion calls for it (Ps. 4:4; Eph. 4:26). Perhaps you have reason to be angry. Perhaps you have been sinned against, and the only appropriate response is anger. Be comforted by this: Jesus is angry alongside you. He joins you in your anger. Indeed, he is angrier than you could ever be about the wrong done to you. Your just anger is a shadow of his. And his anger, unlike yours, has zero taint of sin in it.

As you consider those who have wronged you, let Jesus be angry on your behalf. His anger can be trusted. For it is an anger that springs from his compassion for you. The indignation he felt when he came upon mistreatment of others in the Gospels is the same indignation he feels now in heaven upon mistreatments of you. In that knowledge, release your debtor and breathe again. Let Christ’s heart for you not only wash you in his compassion but also assure you of his solidarity in rage against all that distresses you, most centrally death and hell.

His heart takes shape as our never-failing friend.

One of the most arresting references to Christ’s friendship comes just before the lodestar text of our study in Matthew 11:28–30. In Matthew 11:19 Jesus quotes his accusers as contemptibly calling him “a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (that is, a friend of the most despicable kinds of sinners known in that culture). And as is often the case in the Gospels—such as when the demons say, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24), or when Satan himself acknowledges Christ to be “the Son of God” (Luke 4:9)—it is not his disciples but his antagonists who most clearly perceive who he is. Though the crowds call him the friend of sinners as an indictment, the label is one of unspeakable comfort for those who know themselves to be sinners. That Jesus is friend to sinners is only contemptible to those who feel themselves not to be in that category.

What does it mean that Christ is a friend to sinners? At the very least, it means that he enjoys spending time with them. It also means that they feel welcome and comfortable around him. Notice the passing line that starts off a series of parables in Luke: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him” (Luke 15:1). The very two groups of people whom Jesus is accused of befriending in Matthew 11 are those who can’t stay away from him in Luke 15. They are at ease around him. They sense something different about him. Others hold them at arms’ length, but Jesus offers the enticing intrigue of fresh hope. What he is really doing, at bottom, is pulling them into his heart.

Some of us are forced to acknowledge that we do not have one true friend, someone we could go to with any problem knowing we would not be turned away. Who in our lives do we feel safe with—really safe, safe enough to open up about everything? Here is the promise of the gospel and the message of the whole Bible: In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence. This is a companion whose embrace of us does not strengthen or weaken depending on how clean or unclean, how attractive or revolting, how faithful or fickle, we presently are. The friendliness of his heart for us subjectively is as fixed and stable as is the declaration of his justification of us objectively.

What if you had a friend at the center of the bull’s-eye of your relationship circle, whom you knew would never raise his eyebrows at what you share with him, even the worst parts of you? All our human friendships have a limit to what they can withstand. But what if there were a friend with no limit? No ceiling on what he would put up with and still want to be with you? “All the kinds and degrees of friendship meet in Christ,” wrote Sibbes.

what a friend we have in Jesus

Consider the depiction of the risen Christ in Revelation 3. There he says (to a group of Christians who are “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked,” v. 17): “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door”—what will Christ do?—“I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (v. 20). Jesus wants to come in to you—wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, naked you—and enjoy meals together. Spend time with you. Deepen the acquaintance. With a good friend, you don’t need to constantly fill in all gaps of silence with words. You can just be warmly present together, quietly relishing each other’s company. “Mutual communion is the soul of all true friendship,” wrote Goodwin, “and a familiar converse with a friend has the greatest sweetness in it.”3

Companion is another word for friend, but it specifically connotes the idea of someone who goes with you on a journey. As we make our pilgrimage through this wide wilderness of a world, we have a steady, constant friend.

What I am trying to say in this chapter is that the heart of Christ not only heals our feelings of rejection with his embrace, and not only corrects our sense of his harshness with a view of his gentleness, and not only changes our assumption of his aloofness into an awareness of his sympathy with us, but it also heals our aloneness with his sheer companionship.

Do you see the common strand? Notice the word “mutual” or the phrase “one another” throughout these various facets of Christ’s friendship. The point is that he is with us, as one of us, sharing in our life and experience, and the love and comfort that are mutually enjoyed between friends are likewise enjoyed between Christ and us. In short, he relates to us as a person. Jesus is not the idea of friendship, abstractly; he is an actual friend.

But Christ’s heart for us means that he will be our never-failing friend no matter what friends we do or do not enjoy on earth. He offers us a friendship that gets underneath the pain of our loneliness. While that pain does not go away, its sting is made fully bearable by the far deeper friendship of Jesus. He walks with us through every moment. He knows the pain of being betrayed by a friend, but he will never betray us. He will not even so much as coolly welcome us. That is not who he is. That is not his heart. As his friendship is sweet, so it is constant in all conditions. . . . If other friends fail, as friends may fail, yet this friend will never fail us. If we be not ashamed of him, he will never be ashamed of us. How comfortable would our life be if we could draw out the comfort that this title of friend affords! It is a comfortable, a fruitful, an eternal friendship.8

What is the role of the Holy Spirit? What does he actually do? There are many valid biblical answers to that question. The Spirit: Regenerates us (John 3:6–7) Convicts us (John 16:8) Empowers us with gifts (1 Cor. 12:4–7) Testifies in our hearts that we are God’s children (Gal. 4:6) Leads us (Gal. 5:18, 25) Makes us fruitful (Gal. 5:22–23) Grants and nurtures in us resurrection life (Rom. 8:11) Enables us to kill sin (Rom. 8:13) Intercedes for us when we don’t know what to pray (Rom. 8:26–27) Guides us into truth (John 16:13) Transforms us into the image of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18)

It is one thing, as a child, to be told your father loves you. You believe him. You take him at his word. But it is another thing, unutterably more real, to be swept up in his embrace, to feel the warmth, to hear his beating heart within his chest, to instantly know the protective grip of his arms. It’s one thing to hear he loves you; it’s another thing to feel his love. This is the glorious work of the Spirit.

nothing but stories of my love. . . . All his speech in your hearts will be to advance me, and to greaten my worth and love unto you, and it will be his delight to do it.”2 Goodwin then makes the explicit connection to Christ’s heart:

The Spirit loves nothing more than to awaken and calm and soothe us with the heart knowledge of what we have been graced with.

common perception among Christians is that, yes, to some degree anyway, the Father is less inclined to love and forgive than the Son. This is not what the Bible teaches.

world vs word view

A correct understanding of the triune God is not that of a Father whose central disposition is judgment and a Son whose central disposition is love. The heart of both is one and the same; this is, after all, one God, not two. Theirs is a heart of redeeming love, not compromising justice and wrath but beautifully satisfying justice and wrath.

This is who he is, Father no less than Son, Son no less than Father.

He is the tangible epitomization of God. Jesus Christ is the visible manifestation of the invisible God (2 Cor. 4:4, 6).

He is not cautious in his tenderness toward you. He multiplies mercies matched to your every need, and there is nothing he would rather do. “Remember,” said the Puritan John Flavel, “that this God in whose hand are all creatures, is your Father, and is much more tender of you than you are, or can be, of yourself.”6 Your gentlest treatment of yourself is less gentle than the way your heavenly Father handles you. His tenderness toward you outstrips what you are even capable of toward yourself. The heart of Christ is gentle and lowly. And that is the perfect picture of who the Father is. “The Father himself loves you” (John 16:27).

The incarnate Son does not send our understanding of who God is spinning off in a new direction. He simply provides in unprecedented flesh-and-blood reality what God had already been trying to convince his people of down through the centuries. As Calvin put it, the Old Testament is the shadowy revelation of God—true

This doctrine gives us unspeakable comfort since it teaches us that nothing can happen to us by chance but only by the arrangement of our gracious heavenly Father, who watches over us with fatherly care, sustaining all creatures under his lordship, so that not one of the hairs on our heads (for they are all numbered) nor even a little bird can fall to the ground without the will of our Father.

But at the theological bull’s-eye of the whole book, we are told that God does not bring such pain “from his heart.”

But something recoils within him in sending that affliction. The pain itself does not reflect his heart. He is not a platonic force pulling heaven’s levers and pulleys in a way that is detached from the real pain and anguish we feel at his hand. He is—if I can put it this way without questioning his divine perfections—conflicted within himself when he sends affliction into our lives. God is indeed punishing Israel for their waywardness as the Babylonians sweep through the city. He is sending what they deserve. But his deepest heart is their merciful restoration.

Mercy is natural to him. Punishment is unnatural.

We must tread cautiously here. All of God’s attributes are nonnegotiable. For God to cease to be, say, just would un-God him just as much as if he were to cease to be good. Theologians speak of God’s simplicity, by which we mean that God is not the sum total of a number of attributes, like pieces of a pie making a whole pie; rather, God is every attribute perfectly. God does not have parts. He is just. He is wrathful. He is good. And so on, each in endless perfection.

expertly worded

Yet at the same time, if we are to follow closely and yield fully to Scripture’s testimony, we are walked into the breathtaking claim that from another, deeper angle, there are some things that pour out of God more naturally than others. God is unswervingly just. But what is his disposition? What is he on the edge of his seat eager to do? If you catch me off guard, what will leap out of me before I have time to regain composure will likely be grouchiness. If you catch God off guard, what leaps out most freely is blessing. The impulse to do good. The desire to swallow us up in joy.4 This is why Goodwin can say of God that “all his attributes seem but to set out his love.”

For God to be merciful is for God to be God.

What do you think of when you hear the phrase “the glory of God”? Do you picture the immense size of the universe? A thundering, terrifying voice from the clouds? In Exodus 33 Moses asks God, “Please show me your glory” (33:18). How does God respond? “I will make all my goodness pass before you” (33:19). Goodness? Isn’t the glory of God a matter of his greatness, not his goodness? Apparently not. God then goes on to speak of showing mercy and grace to whomever he wills (33:19).

“Merciful and gracious.” These are the first words out of God’s own mouth after proclaiming his name (“the Lord,” or “I am”). The first words. The only two words Jesus will use to describe his own heart are gentle and lowly (Matt. 11:29). And the first two words God uses to describe who he is are merciful and gracious. God does not reveal his glory as, “The Lord, the Lord, exacting and precise,” or, “The Lord, the Lord, tolerant and overlooking,” or, “The Lord, the Lord, disappointed and frustrated.” His highest priority and deepest delight and first reaction—his heart—is merciful and gracious. He gently accommodates himself to our terms rather than overwhelming us with his.

But the Lord is long-nosed. He doesn’t have his finger on the trigger. It takes much accumulated provoking to draw out his ire. Unlike us, who are often emotional dams ready to break, God can put up with a lot. This is why the Old Testament speaks of God being “provoked to anger” by his people dozens of times (especially in Deuteronomy; 1–2 Kings; and Jeremiah). But not once are we told that God is “provoked to love” or “provoked to mercy.” His anger requires provocation; his mercy is pent up, ready to gush forth. We