Wait, Jesus was Needy?

I don’t know about you but being needy has regularly been something in my life that felt like it should be avoided at all cost. Many of us are familiar with the stubbornness of a toddler attempting to do everything on their own. My wife and I have never had a toddler but have observed this season of life in the kids of our friends and members of our family. It’s not efficient at all, and really becomes their declaration of a life that is free of needing anyone else to accomplish what they want to do. It’s fascinating to me that this starts so young and persists really throughout all of our lives. In some ways, there is a healthiness to learning to do things on my own as a means to grow competent so that I can contribute to society in meaningful ways. In other ways, it contributes to a rugged individualism that often leads us to loneliness and disconnection from the people we want to experience connection with. I’ve certainly turned the corner in life stages where I feel like the primary value has shifted from proving and being proven to knowing and being known. I feel secure in who I am, to whom I belong, where I came from, and where I am going. Yet, my discomfort with being needy and having to depend on God or the people around me to meet my needs persists. 

The discomfort or flat-out denial that I’ve felt in relationship to being needy exposes some deeper things that I’ve been pretty guilty of avoiding. I’ve spent lots of years avoiding my emotional world in many ways so that I wouldn’t need anything. I would tell myself that, “if I don’t feel anything then I won’t need anything.” You’re probably already picking up how detrimental that could be to my emotional wellbeing and emotional connection to other people. Being needy is vulnerable. It highlights our limitations and insufficiency and puts us at the mercy of someone outside of ourselves to meet our needs. It requires us to trust. This brings up another thing that my discomfort and denial of being needy exposes, my trust issues. It’s led me down a path of discovering things that have contributed to my trust issues for sure, but it’s also been a beautiful place where Jesus has met me. The foundational invitation that the Gospel makes towards us an invitation to trust. Good Christian discipleship includes learning to trust again. For some of us that may mean we need counseling to help us dig into the things that stand in the way of us being able to trust again. This has certainly been the case for me! For others of us, it may mean we need the help of a couple of close and trusted brothers or sisters to walk this out in community. For most of us, a good combination of the two would be helpful. 

The reality is that we are wounded in relationship and we are healed in relationship. While it's often true that we may not be healed in the same relationship where we were wounded, the importance for healthy relationship still exists. Our souls are relational souls, the gospel is a relational gospel, and we live relational lives. Our brain is wired in such a way that it mirrors what we see and experience around us. Our souls are permeable, and we absorb the people around us. We recognize where things go wrong in relationship, but we also learn new ways in relationship. We learn not to trust in relationship and we’ll learn to trust again in relationship. This has been a primary benefit I've received from counseling and healthy community. It’s not always what these people in my life are saying with their words but also what I’m absorbing from their lives. All of this requires us to be needy, and as I have already said being needy is vulnerable because it requires us to depend on other people and other people have been the ones who have let us down or hurt us in the past. 

One of the greatest joys that I've experienced as I’ve grown in my emotional intelligence, awareness, and health are the things that jump off of the page as I read scripture. I’ve often contemplated and reflected upon the mystery of Jesus being both fully human, and fully God and honestly much of that contemplation and reflection has culminated in added confusion around the topic. If Jesus were not fully God that would create significant problems for me theologically and practically and the same could be said of Jesus not being fully human. There is a mystery to how this plays out and the theological term commonly used to explain this mystery is the hypo-static union. Hypo-static union is the technical term highlighting this mystery that is Jesus being both fully God and fully human in one individual existence. It’s vitally important, yet I’ve often found myself gravitating towards the reality of Jesus as God because that is much easier for me to understand. Lately though in my study of Scripture the Humanity of Jesus has been jumping off of the page. One such place in Scripture can be found in Matthew 26:36-44 when Jesus on the night he was betrayed visited the Garden of Gethsemane to pray with His disciples. 

In verses 37 and 38 of Matthew 26 we read; “And taking with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here and watch with me.” In this passage I see a few things:

Jesus’ honesty about His feelings

I think sometimes it’s easy for me to recognize all the beauty that comes through the death and resurrection of Jesus but it’s easy to overlook the humanity of Jesus in feeling overwhelmed and sorrowful about what was about to happen. Jesus recognized the loneliness that He was feeling, the ways that he was overwhelmed by what was going to happen over the next few days. He was sorrowful, perhaps because of the pain that he was going to endure both physically but also spiritually and emotionally as the weight of God’s wrath came crashing down upon Him. Jesus had lived all of His existence in perfect communion with the Father and impending was the reality that Jesus would have been forsaken by the Father. 

Jesus’ honesty about His needs

Being honest about His feelings equipped Jesus to be honest about His needs. Jesus needed His friends and that compelled him to ask His friends to come and “keep watch with him.” What was he asking them to do? Not solve the problem that was in front of Him, not strategize a way around what was next but to come and be with Him. Jesus recognized His needs and took responsibility to see that those needs were met by asking the disciples to keep watch with Him.

What heavy feelings, what heavy needs, and we see Jesus being honest with himself, with God, and with his disciples regarding His feelings and His needs. Jesus expresses a dependence on His disciples to meet these needs and as we read on in Matthew 26 we see that the disciples disappointed Him is they were not even able to keep watch with Him for one hour, as He says in verse 40. We even see Jesus being honest with His disappointments. I’m increasingly convinced that the Gospel frees us up to be honest with ourselves, God, and those around us. There isn’t anything that we can say or do or anything that is said to us or done to us that falls outside of the grace of Jesus in the gospel. What would it look like to fully believe that? How would it change the way we relate to our feelings? How would it change the way we express our needs? How would it change us into a community of dependence living in a culture of independence? What might be the invitation that the Spirit of God is making you in regards to the neediness of Jesus?

My prayer is that you would begin to declare to yourself and those around you that “it’s ok to be needy.” That you would grow in your affection for and contemplation of the Humanity of Jesus. I feel so much freedom to be needy, knowing that Christ in His humanity was needy and I hope that you would experience the same!

Submitted by: Matt Korte