The psalmist sang to the Lord, “when anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought me joy”. (Psalm 94:19) Habakkuk declared that “though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Saviour”. (Habakkuk 3:17-18) And Paul spoke of himself as “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing”. (2 Corinthians 6:10)
The angel that appeared to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’ birth told them “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.” (Luke 2:10) And Jesus himself told his disciples to remain in his love so that his joy may be in them and their joy may be complete. (John 15:11) So Peter could write “though you have not seen [Christ], you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy”. (1 Peter 1:8-9)
God, you make known the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy. (Psalm 16:11) So be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. (Romans 12:12) And may the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace as we trust in him. (Romans 15:13)
At the moment we are in the middle of a topical preaching series which asks “What does Christianity say about…?” where the blank is filled by suggestions from members of the congregation. Last week I talked about hope, and I said it is not a shallow or easy optimism but a deep and grounded trust. This week we are thinking about joy, and I want to start by suggesting that joy is to happiness what hope is to optimism. It is something with much deeper roots, which does not depend on a perfect environment, but which can grow through the cracks of even the hardest life. Sometimes it will have the same light sense of giddiness or excitement, but always there will be a much more solid sense of resilience and contentment. Joy can be wild and loud, but it can also be quiet and settled. And while it can ebb and flow, it is connected more to our selves than to our circumstances.
Like hope, joy is a theme I often return to, because I believe it is at the heart of God's vision for the world, and I believe it is central to our work in the world. Some of you may remember that on Christmas Day in 2022, we played a series of party games that picked up on the themes of our Advent services. I said then that “It may seem frivolous to be here playing party games when there is such struggle and sorrow in the world. Perhaps serious times call for a more serious message. But such frivolity can be a direct response rather than a distraction. Hope and peace and joy and love are radical and vital responses to a bruised and broken world, and we should be creating all the space for them that we can. Jesus came into a world with as much struggle and sorrow as our own, to transform that world and ours with a message of hope and peace and joy and love. May we do likewise, and may we do it in ways that lift our spirits and the spirits of those around us.”
I am still deeply taken by the idea of joy as an act of resistance, and I am not the only one. There seems to be a movement from marginalised communities towards joy, particularly on social media, with hashtags proclaiming #queerjoy #transjoy #disabledjoy #autisticjoy #blackjoy. People who have been treated as if their existence is invalid or offensive or pitiable are refusing to be shrunk down or shut up or shamed away. They are declaring that their lives have worth and meaning and beauty, and they are doing it through expressions of joy. It is right and necessary that there are activists continuing to draw attention to the specific hardships and injustices faced by oppressed groups, but I think it is glorious that there is this other thread now weaving through, one which offers an alternative narrative of celebration.
When it comes to understanding joy as a radical act of resistance, I think there is much to be learnt from Black theology, particularly from listening to African American theologians who have wrestled with what it means to engage with God and the serious work of joy in contexts of oppression and injustice. Willie James Jennings is an ordained Baptist minister and professor in systematic theology and Africana studies at Yale Divinity School, and he describes joy as an act of resistance against despair, and all the ways it wants to drive us towards death and make death the final word, where death does not just signify the end of life, but all the ways life can be made to seem not worth living. We might say that joy is a protest against all that should not be, and a promise of all that will come to be, and so it connects with and flows from and leads into justice and hope. We might even say that joy is hope on its feet and justice on its way.
There is something progressive about joy then, in the sense that it is progressing towards something. We are joyful not because we have reached paradise but because we know we are getting there. It is our response to living in the now-and-not-yet of the kingdom of God, and the not-yet part means that joy must exist in relation to suffering. Jennings says that it is making productive use of suffering, what I have described before as dragging a blessing out of it. Joy never dismisses or denies our pain, but it says that it is never the whole story or the final word, that there is always some goodness at the heart of things. There is a beautiful moment in The Lord of the Rings when things seem pretty desperate, but “there, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
I think what Tolkien is describing there is the joy that comes from hope, but that moment only happened because Sam made the decision to look up and see the star. Joy is a choice as much as it is an emotion, and so Jennings also speaks of joy as a work which can become a state which can become a way of life. This is echoed elsewhere by NT Wright, a White British theologian and former bishop, known to some of you as the voice of the narrator on David Benjamin Blower's album The Book of Jonah. He describes joy as a way of seeing and understanding, of living within the truth of the gospel. But what does that mean in practice? To quote the ever-wonderful Canadian author Sarah Bessey, “[joy is] a resistance of the false and broken to embrace and practise the true and the whole. We are prophesying with our lives. In the face of poverty, we practise generosity. In the face of ugliness, we practise beauty. In the face of injustice, we practise mercy. In the rhetoric of fear, we declare ‘be not afraid!’ In the face of racism, we practise reconciliation. In the face of despair, we practise hope. In the face of ignorance, we practise wisdom and knowledge.”
Many of those things call us to look outside of ourselves, and that is important. Jennings acknowledges that joy is embedded in communities, experienced and expressed in distinct and diverse ways, and so he suggests that we need the life of Jesus as a Christological intervention which reconceives joy as something which opens us out rather than closes us off. That's not to say there is anything wrong with community joy, but rather that in Jesus we discover there is a universal joy beyond it. The Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf has spoken of this as Pentecost joy, referring to the way the crowds were hearing their own languages but sharing a common joy. It doesn't need to be either/or, it can be both/and. But in order for that to happen, Jennings points out that joy needs public spaces and public rituals. We need to live our lives together so that we can live our joys together.
It may seem that not much of what I have said has been distinctively Christian, although all the thinkers and writers I have quoted have been. We do not have a monopoly on justice or hope, and anyone can engage with any of the practices we named earlier. If joy opens us out and if it is universal and public, then we have no special claim to it. And that is as it should be, because joy is what God wants for all people. I do however want to dare to say that all joy is a response to God, whether we recognise it or not, because joy responds to goodness and all goodness ultimately comes from God. For those of faith, this brings the additional joy of being able to celebrate its source. And I want to go further to say that there is something distinctive about Christian joy, because it is rooted in the resurrection, the ultimate assurance that in the end all will be redeemed. For those of us who believe in Christ, there is confidence that our joy is built on a firm foundation.
Joy may be our response to God, but I want to end by recalling that joy is also God's response to us. In Luke 15, Jesus tells three parallel stories about the lost being found. A shepherd celebrates when he recovers the sheep that has gone astray, a woman rejoices when she finds the precious coin that had been lost in her house, and a father throws a party when the son that he thought had gone forever returns home. Twice we are told that in the same way there is rejoicing in heaven whenever anyone turns to God. Likewise in Zephaniah 3:17 we read that “[God] will take great delight in you...will rejoice over you with singing”. And I am certain that God was grinning with glee over the creation that was declared to be “very good”. God loves us with an everlasting love, and in that love there is joy in abundance.
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