The Joy of Jesus
"'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited.
I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 'Ill and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene?' 'Bravely,' said he, 'for I of late have been Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.'
O human soul! As long as thou canst so Set up a mark of everlasting light, Above the howling senses' ebb and flow To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam, Not with lost toil, thou labourest through the night, Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home." (Matthew Arnold)
"These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." (John 15:11)
JESUS is the Man of Sorrows; the title is His forever, like His Crown of Thorns. It captures something true about Him as the One who bore the full, crushing weight of a sinning and suffering humanity. But it doesn't fully express Him, and it doesn't even get at what is most fundamental about Him. We instinctively recoil from describing Jesus as an unhappy person, as someone who moved through life in a state of misery. We instinctively sense that the ground-tone of His life, present even beneath its harshest discords, is joy. And when we consider what His mission actually was, what He set out to accomplish and claimed He would achieve, we can see that it couldn't have been any other way. No pessimist could ever be a savior. "Such as we have give we unto thee." Unhappiness can never produce happiness, nor can sickness produce health. Only the person in whom joy is a living, contagious, conquering force, ringing in his voice and gleaming in his eyes, can strengthen those who are wavering.
That is exactly how Jesus came. He came with glad tidings, arriving like a Divine Physician into the world's vast hospital. His words are beatitudes. He lifts His hands in blessing. The gifts of the Divine Kingdom He was bringing to humanity, He could compare to nothing so fittingly as the festive joy of a wedding (Mark 2:19). He and His disciples were like a wedding party. He was the bridegroom whose joy spills over into the hearts of his friends and turns fasting into feasting. Even at the last, standing on the edge of Gethsemane with Calvary already in sight, He speaks not of His sorrows but still of His joy. He is the Lord of joy, and His deepest desire for His servants is that they would enter into the joy of their Lord and have it fulfilled completely within them.
Jesus is the Man of Sorrows, and it is precisely because He is the Man of Sorrows that His joy is such a precious legacy, such a strong anchor for our souls. He is no "sky-blue" optimist. This Man of Joy has dwelt in the heart of the darkest night. He has seen hell here on earth, in men's hearts, flaming in their eyes, triumphing in their deeds. Yet His joy remains unconquered.
No one has ever sounded the depths of reality, or penetrated to the ultimate core of life, as Jesus did; and what He finds there is not an abyss of evil but an infinite of good. I want, then, to speak of the joy of Jesus, of His joy rather than of His joys. There are joys that are transfigured sorrows, like the rainbow that shines in the very substance of the darkening cloud. But the rainbow is the child of the sun. And I want to speak of that unfailing source of joy which, for Jesus, transcended every cause of sorrow, which made the sunshine of His life, and which alone can make the sunshine of ours.
1. The Joy of Trust. Now, all deep and lasting joy must be rooted in faith, in our conviction about reality: the eternal reality that lies within and beyond the outward show passing before our eyes moment by moment. What does life mean? What lies at its heart? Stevenson used to say, in his half-humorous way, that he had a tremendous belief in the "ultimate decency of things." And a biographer, speaking of the gaiety of John Wesley, says that it was the kind of gaiety that could only be seen in one "who felt his religion to rest upon the whole nature of things, and who was at rest in his religion."
Jesus Christ is forever the Author and Perfecter of this joyous faith, this firm confidence in an ultimate rightness and goodness at the heart of all things. To put it more plainly: He had absolute, invincible faith in God, and this was the root of His joy. "This is life eternal," He said, "to know Thee, the only true God." We seldom realize, and never fully, what a staggering thing it is simply to believe in God: a God who is truly God, whose presence, thought, and power permeate all existence, whose eternal purpose shapes all events, overrules all wills, and directs all destinies. Such belief, if sincere and vital, must color every dimension of life. God must be its strength and joy, or its terror and despair. And Jesus Christ believed in such a God as no one else ever has. To no other person has God been a reality at once so universal and so immediately near. He believed in God not occasionally, as we do, but constantly; not as a last resort, but as the first, last, and supreme factor in every situation; not only in moments of crisis, on the mountaintop, but on the ordinary plain, in the daily and hourly unfolding of events. God was the light in which He saw, and the very atmosphere He breathed.
And for Jesus, this was a joy both perfect and beyond words, because God was to Him not only the Supreme Ruler, the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent One. He was all of that, but He was also the Father, who is Love itself, and who has bound Himself to us in our weakness, our ignorance, and even in our sinfulness, by ties that cannot be broken. Because He is who He is, He must care, must provide, must pardon, guide, deliver us from evil, and carry us safely to the goal of eternal life. To truly grasp the joy of Jesus, we would need to know the Father as Jesus knew Him: to feel the emotion with which He lifted His eyes to heaven and said "Father," to share His breathtaking vision of the Father's infinite goodness, His adoring sense of the Father's glory, His burning trust in the Father's work of redeeming love, and that deep responsiveness to all the Father is and wills, which we can only describe as what perfect sonship is to perfect fatherhood.
That joy is reflected in the Gospels exactly as it must have been present in His daily life. He doesn't pause in His work to speak of His joy. It doesn't announce itself in sudden, brilliant bursts so much as it is the steady light that shines across an ordinary day and colors the whole landscape. Yet consider what it must have been like to hear Jesus say, "Have faith in God," to watch His face glow with an inner joy, and to catch the ring of gladness in His voice when He spoke of doing the Father's will and finishing His work. Joy in the absolute, all-embracing goodness, wisdom, and sovereign power of the Father, and joy in sharing that joy with others: this was the joy of Jesus.
No one can reasonably deny that trust in God is the only foundation for joy strong enough to bear the weight of rational, thinking people. We are dependent beings. Our lives are brief, and against the force of circumstances we are comparatively powerless, and in the end, wholly so. Only this pinpoint of a present moment on which we stand belongs to us. We cannot see tomorrow; we know only that every tomorrow is one step closer to the end of everything we seem to be part of. There is a Power, however we may conceive of it, that holds us in the hollow of His hand, carrying us along "like flakes of foam upon a swollen river." Can we trust that Power, or can we not? Get to the center of things, and there is only one question worth asking and answering: Can we trust, joyfully trust, that Power? And when people today press strong and plausible reasons why we cannot, telling us that the world of facts is soulless and conscienceless, a world of blind, relentless forces bearing no trace of divine origin or purpose; and when we can see for ourselves so much that seems to confirm this, when we face the inexplicable inequalities of life, the long misery and degradation of the world, the gaping wounds of nature and humanity, let us remember that Jesus Christ saw everything we see, and more. For no one has this world ever worn so godless a face as it did for Him who died under the unparalleled iniquity of the Cross, with the hideous taunt ringing in His ears: "He trusted in God that He would deliver Him." He knew the absolute worst, and for a moment even He was nearly overwhelmed. The world, with all its gathered forces of evil, stood on one side; the solitary faith of the crucified Man stood on the other. But in that decisive conflict, faith won the day. It was decisive. Though the fight continues still, and will never cease while the world stands, the battle has been won. Jesus calls people to repeat His victory, and He does not call in vain.
To this He calls us, not by His example alone, but by the revelation of God that He has brought, or more precisely, that He is. You and I are not Jesus Christ. In one sense, we cannot share His faith, His vision of God, His original and direct and certain gaze into the heart of the Divine Fatherhood. But He doesn't merely tell us what He has seen there. In fact, He couldn't do that; the vision was not given in words and cannot be conveyed in words. Instead, He holds Himself up as the living mirror in which we too may look upon it. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father" (John 14:9). The character of Jesus is the character of Almighty God: the holiness of Jesus is the holiness of God, the wrath of Jesus the wrath of God, the compassion of Jesus the compassion of God, and the Cross of Jesus the revelation of the sorrow and self-sacrificing love with which the sin of humanity fills the heart of the Eternal.
This is the Christian faith. And isn't it a joyous faith? Isn't there a joy deeper than all sorrow in knowing that the One who holds the helm of my life, who holds the helm of the great universe, is One whose character is the character of Jesus? This includes everything. Such a God calls us to absolute trust. We can't trust Him at one point and withhold trust at every other. We can't trust Him for ourselves and not for every other being, for today and not for all eternity. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the Son of His love. God is what Jesus is. That truth rules out any fear that ultimate victory could rest with evil anywhere; it forbids all acceptance of imperfection and assures us that every purpose of righteousness and love will reach its goal. If this faith is ours, our religion is one that rests on the whole nature of things, one in which we can truly rest. It should fill our lives with joy far more than it does. Though clouds and darkness may trouble the edges of life, at the center burns that eternal light whose radiance, when we behold it, is both joy and strength.
2. The Joy of Obedience. In bringing humanity a new understanding of God, Jesus also revealed a new kind of obedience: new not only in its perfection, but new in its very nature. It was free, reasonable, and spiritual, rooted in a shared spirit and purpose, responding to God's will the way a son responds to his father. And because of that, it was joyful.
Obedience is not, in itself, a joy. It isn't for the drudge, or for the slave under the taskmaster's whip. It wasn't for the rigid, legalized Judaism of Jesus's time either. The Pharisees were meticulous in their obedience; one might even say their delight was in the Law of the Lord. But to them, the Law didn't represent a genuinely moral ideal to be embraced with all one's heart, soul, and strength. It wasn't an expression of God's character and will as something inherently loving and righteous. God was, in their view, essentially a supreme dictator issuing arbitrary decrees to test His subjects' compliance, and His Law was a statutory requirement whose primary use was to help men accumulate merit in the eyes of the Divine Potentate. One of Jesus's deepest joys was to be free Himself, and to free others, from this purely external, mechanical, and servile relationship to the will of God. He labored at the Father's work as no Pharisee ever did. But the idea of merit has no place in the spirit of Jesus; it belongs to an entirely different plane.
He obeys because He loves what the Father loves, hates what the Father hates, and wills everything the Father wills as most holy, wise, and good. He unites Himself in spirit and truth with the Father's purpose. This, Jesus Himself declares, was His joy. To respond, day by day and hour by hour, to every prompting of the Father's will; to take up and complete another portion of the Father's work; to make Himself the channel of the Father's pitying, patient, and mighty love toward humanity: this was, in life and in death, His ruling passion, the "meat" that so satisfied and refreshed His whole being that it made Him forget weariness, hunger, and thirst. For this He went to the wilderness, to the crowded city, to the cross, and to the grave.
It's true that this is a joy won only through the birth-pangs of pain. There must be a "no" to self before we can say "yes" to God. And so it was for our Lord Himself. He was tempted in every way we are, really tempted, to take the short and easy path rather than God's long and grueling one. At least once, as we read, there was a "but" standing between His will and the Father's; once it was not "Thy will and Mine," but rather "Not My will, but Thine be done." And that "but" was stained crimson with the blood of Christ's soul. It marks the ultimate triumph over self, the point beyond which self-surrender simply cannot go. Only in this way could He exhaust every possibility of obedience, and His victory become a potential victory for every person. Yet even here, to overlook the presence of joy would be to misread the spirit of Jesus entirely. Had we been able to hear that "Thy will be done," we would not have heard a groan of reluctant submission, nor a sob of acquiescence wrung from an exhausted will; nor, for that matter, any triumphant shout of relief. It was the quiet yet glad and loving "yes" that Jesus whispered into the Father's ear in that final struggle, not the voice of refusal but the ultimate affirmation of life: its arrival at the supreme joy of surrendering self to the divine purpose of life through death.
All the great teachers of the spiritual life agree on one point: perfect joy is found only in union with the will of God. My revered teacher, Principal Cairns, the Scottish theologian, sent a message to his students from his deathbed: "Tell them that the chief thing is to forget self utterly in the service of the great cause." The secret of life, says another, is "freedom from pride, prejudice, and self; absolute simplicity of truth; resignation to the order of the world and to the Divine Will, and not resignation only, but active co-operation with them, according to our means and strength, in bringing good out of evil and truth out of falsehood. He whose mind is absorbed in these thoughts has already found life eternal. He may be a cripple or blind or deaf. His home may be a straw-built hovel; but he has learned to see and hear with another sense, and is already living in the house not made with hands." Here is where true joy lives. Without it, a person may be many things. He may be a drudge, a hewer of wood and drawer of water, a living tool to be discarded when it breaks or wears out. He may be an egotist who places himself on a pedestal and wonders why no one recognizes his greatness: "a selfish, feverish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world does not devote itself to making him happy." But the only path to joy is to rise above self, and the only real way to rise above self is by reaching toward God, uniting ourselves with the Infinite Good for which we were made.
This is the joy of Jesus, and it is a joy, the one joy, that we may all possess. It is a joy that can shine through even the humblest details of daily duty. You can unite yourself with the Infinite and live the eternal life by doing the most ordinary task in the spirit of Christ. I once knew an old laborer, a member of my congregation, whose job, year in and year out, was to push a wheelbarrow. After his death, some of his fellow workers mentioned that he had a habit of talking to himself while he worked, and when they listened closely they would sometimes hear this: "The chief end of man is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever." Was that not sublime? A man meditating on the chief end of man and the glory of God between the handles of a wheelbarrow. He found the Infinite, found eternal life, in his modest daily work. So may you. Yet none of us is confined to "the trivial round, the common task." We all have a larger role to play in building up the Kingdom of God. We are called and drawn in many directions to place our lives alongside God's great work in this world: in the work of the Church, in its missionary efforts at home and abroad, and in everything that advances social, civic, political, and industrial progress. We must build a community without slums for the poor and without unnecessary dangers for the vulnerable, without conditions that make virtue needlessly difficult and vice easy and inevitable; a community of truth, holiness, and love, a city of God. We must press on to bring in the "Christ that is to be." And this is joy: the service of duty in the spirit of love, the service of God and of humanity in the spirit of Jesus. This is life; this alone satisfies. And of this we may have as much as we choose, for it is the only thing of which that is true. Be certain that if we are not getting what we want out of life, it is because we are not yet wanting the best. The best is unlimited. "These words have I spoken unto you, that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be filled full" (John 15:11).
3. The Joy of Hope. The third and completing element in Jesus's joy was hope. For Jesus, God was the present reality that embraced and transcended everything else, and the will of God was the supreme good. The one glorious vision the future held for Him was the Kingdom of God. He already saw Satan hurled from his throne. God would arise; righteousness, peace, and joy would triumph. He foresaw every difficulty and accounted for every disappointment, yet despite all obstacles, He never doubted that God's fatherly rule would find its way into human hearts. Not even in the darkest hour of His life and the world's history, when injustice, hypocrisy, and hatred were at the height of their power, did He fear that wrong would ultimately triumph over right. He Himself was the seed of the Kingdom, the seed that must fall into the ground and die. His life was the price of victory, the ransom for many. For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross.
This joy of hope should fill our lives as well. We cannot hope too greatly if our hope is grounded in God, in His character and His purpose. Nothing can be too good to be true; the only real possibility is that what we consider good, even very good, may not be good enough for God. We cannot take too bright a view of the future, whether our own future, our country's future, or the future of the Church and the world, as long as we place Jesus Christ at the center of that vision: crucified, risen, and enthroned.
This was the joy of our Master. It can be ours in ever-growing measure, and it will be, if we have the courage to entrust ourselves to His God and our God, to surrender ourselves fully to living for God's purposes, and to keep trusting Him when we cannot see clearly, and hoping in Him when everything seems uncertain. Lift up your hearts. Enter the New Year without fear. Go not seeking joy, but with a fresh resolve to live for what is highest, and the joy of Jesus will be fulfilled in you more and more. For joy is never given to those who seek joy, but always to those who seek first the Kingdom of God.
