Joy
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been using Old Testament promises and covenants to further illuminate the themes of Advent: hope, peace, joy, and love. This week, I’m writing about joy, but I’ll do a little recap first.
Hope and peace have always been our story. We were made for peace and we need hope because we lost both when we rebelled against God at the beginning of all things. Yet, from this very first rebellion, God has been making a way to get us back to the garden of peace and giving us signposts of hope along the way. The promise of Genesis 3:15 and the major Old Testament covenants (Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic) give us an increasingly clearer picture of exactly what God means to do when he comes himself in the person of Jesus and institutes the New covenant.
So, to joy. As before, we’ll start with a question: why do we need it?
Do you know what two things you cannot do at the same time? Experience joy and fear. It’s really hard to feel isolated when you’re celebrating with someone else over just about anything. It is also really hard to be ashamed of yourself when you’re joyful. We need joy because we are afraid, isolated, and ashamed of ourselves. The reasons are as diverse as our experiences, but the antidote is the same: joy. And I’m not just talking about happiness, though that is part of it. I’m talking about satisfaction, completeness, and an overall sense of well-being. Joy is closely related to worship.
Psalm 126 begins like this:
When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, ‘the LORD has done great things for them’, and we are filled with joy.
Notice that this is a Psalm of restoration, meaning that something has been lost. In this case, it is likely that this Psalm was written after the return of the exiles from Babylon, after ancient Israel had become a curse because they broke the Mosaic covenant. They lost everything that God had given them because of their rebellious hearts, must like all of humanity had lost their first home with God in the garden. But God brought them back to their homeland and, for them, it was like a dream. This is meant to foreshadow what it will be like for all of humanity when the world is restored at the end of all things, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, let’s focus on Israel’s response to the restoration of their homeland - they worshipped.
Joy, like peace and hope, does not come without pain. True joy like the Psalmist writes about here, comes only on the other side of loss.
The difficult thing about our situation is that you and I have never known a life without a fractured heart and a broken world. We know, deep down, that something is missing and that things are not as they should be, but we cannot consistently articulate how we think they should be, much less how to fix them. Culture and circumstance keep changing our answers. Nevertheless, we have all lost something that was once good, even if we cannot understand the ultimate nature of our loss. We’ve all lost a beloved friend, family member, pet, or home. We’ve lost jobs, cars, toys, and even our minds. We all know loss and, thus, we all have the capacity for joy.
Imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to regain the thing that you most deeply regret losing. For most of us it is probably a family member or friend. What would it feel like for them to walk through the door right now to be with you? You’d laugh and cry and I hope that you would praise God, as the ancient Israelites did.
Joy is forged through pain and the proper response is worship.
When Noah and his family step out of the giant boat that they had been living in (with literally every animal ever) for months, the first thing that they do is build an altar and worship God through sacrifice. I don’t know about you, but I, too, would have been ecstatic to get off that boat in those circumstances. They could walk on the ground again, as they were made to, and they were overjoyed. Their pain of losing the world that they knew and suffering on the boat resulted in joy when the ordeal was over. And they worshipped. Then God promised never to flood the whole earth ever again.
When God made his covenant with Abraham, he promised him many, many children, even though he and his wife were quite old. First Abraham (Gn. 17:17), then Sarah (Gn. 18:12), laughed. And when their son was born, they named him Isaac (literally “Laughter”), the sound of joy. God also promises Abraham that every nation on the earth will be blessed through his family. At the end of the Bible, in St. John’s Revelation, there is a picture of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev. 7:9). At the end of all things, every nation will joyfully worship God.
When the people of ancient Israel escape slavery in Egypt, they stop for over a year at a place called Mt. Sinai and God is on the mountain in the form of a thundercloud. They’re scared because God is holy and they are not. (Ex. 19) Yet, he means to dwell with them and bless them with joy, if they keep his covenant. Later, as a part of both the Mosaic and Davidic covenants, King Solomon (David’s son), builds a temple and God’s presence literally descends on it and fills it with a cloud (1Kgs 8:10-11). A few generations of the ancient Israelites joyfully keep the Mosaic covenant and they experience the joy of blessing after the ordeal of slavery.
Before his son Solomon builds the temple, King David brings the Ark of the (Mosaic) Covenant into Jerusalem with dancing, worship, and music. The King is so joyful that one of his wives criticizes him and he responds that he’ll go even further. The joy of the Lord cannot be contained – the Ark had been lost and without a home among God’s people and David rejoiced to bring it back. (2 Sam. 6)
Finally, there is no greater joy in human history than was found on Easter Sunday. Jesus’ closest friends struggled to believe that he had risen from the dead – a few of them could not even recognize him (Lk 24:13-35; Jn 20:11-18). They had come to believe that he was the Son of God, meant to come and fulfill all the promises of the prophets and the covenants and the law. Yet, he died. Their joy when they realized that he was alive and that death, that greatest enemy of mankind, had been defeated is still echoing through the ages. It is our joy and in it we look forward to the restoration of the cosmos as described in St. John’s Revelation, chapters 21 and 22. The tree of life makes a triumphant return and waters flow from the throne of God and the entire earth comes to worship and rest at God’s great garden city. And that joy will never, ever end.
Through the greatest sorrow, death, comes the greatest joy: eternal life with the one we were made for. While this theme may be harder to see than the others, God has meant to bring us joy since the beginning. We were made for joy, made for laughter, made for rest in the presence of our God.
Through pain and loss, we find joy. Psalm 126 ends this way:
Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them.
Whatever you’ve lost, your pain is not purposeless. It will turn to joy and a garden will grow.