Does God Feel Sadness?

I have been asked if God can be sad. The answer is that yes, God can be sad, but not in his complete form in heaven. In heaven there is no sorrow or sadness, because all who have eternal life there are present in their perfected forms where there is only love, no unmet needs, and no regrets. So God in his full form cannot be sad, because he is the entire containment of all that is good and eternal, and there is no lacking.

However, God can be sad in his relationship with specific people. When God interacts with each of his human children, God is perfectly capable of feeling sad about the state of that relationship, and does feel sad, frequently. This is because God is saddened whenever a person is estranged from him, is unhappy in the goodness of life, and/or is in a state of sin. We know this because Isaiah recognized that the Messiah will be "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53, 3). As Pope Benedict wrote, Jesus brought God to us, so that humans can learn more about God the Father and interact with him through Jesus. When Jesus sorrowed over the death of his friend, over the sinful state of the world, and at the rejection of his teaching and ultimately his very life, Jesus showed how God can and does feel sorrow in his interaction with individuals or groups of living humans. When people are cruel to each other, especially to children, God is both sad and furious. We learn this also by observing Jesus and his teachings. However, once one is outside of the earthly life, sadness no longer exists in God or humans, because in heavenly eternal life, there is no lack of any sort that would generate sadness. But to answer the question, yes, God can be sad about how a life is being lived by any of the human children.