A Consequence, Not A Requirement

A Consequence, Not a Requirement

“We laughed, we sang, we couldn’t believe our good fortune.” That is the authentic Christian note, a sign of those who are on the way of salvation. Joy is characteristic of Christian pilgrimage. It is the second in Paul’s list of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23). It is the first of Jesus’ signs in the Gospel of John (turning water into wine). It was said of the Hasid Levi-Yitzhak of Berditchev: “His smiles were fraught with greater meaning than his sermons.”3 The same thing can be said of much of the Bible: its smiles carry more meaning than its sermons.

This is not to say that joy is a moral requirement for Christian living. Some of us experience events that are full of sadness and pain. Some of us descend to low points in our lives when joy seems to have permanently departed. We must not in such circumstances or during such times say, “Well, that’s the final proof that I am not a good Christian. Christians are supposed to have their mouths filled with laughter and tongues with shouts of joy; and I don’t. I’m not joyful, therefore I must not be a Christian.”

Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.

We come to God (and to the revelation of God’s ways) because none of us have it within ourselves, except momentarily, to be joyous. Joy is a product of abundance; it is the overflow of vitality. It is life working together harmoniously. It is exuberance. Inadequate sinners as we are, none of us can manage that for very long.

We try to get it through entertainment. We pay someone to make jokes, tell stories, perform dramatic actions, sing songs. We buy the vitality of another’s imagination to divert and enliven our own poor lives. The enormous entertainment industry in America is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture. Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal. But that kind of joy never penetrates our lives, never changes our basic constitution. The effects are extremely temporary—a few minutes, a few hours, a few days at most. When we run out of money, the joy trickles away. We cannot make ourselves joyful. Joy cannot be commanded, purchased or arranged.

But there is something we can do. We can decide to live in response to the abundance of God and not under the dictatorship of our own poor needs. We can decide to live in the environment of a living God and not our own dying selves. We can decide to center ourselves in the God who generously gives and not in our own egos which greedily grab. One of the certain consequences of such a life is joy, the kind expressed in Psalm 126.

Joy: Past, Present, Future

The center sentence in the psalm is “We are one happy people” (v. 3). The words on one side of that center (vv. 1-2) are in the past tense, the words on the other side (vv. 4-6) in the future tense. Present gladness has past and future. It is not an ephemeral emotion. It is not a spurt of good feelings that comes when the weather and the stock market are both right on the same day.

The background for joy is only alluded to here, but the words trigger vast memories: “when GOD returned Israel’s exiles. We laughed, we sang . . . . We were the talk of the nations—‘GOD was wonderful to them!’ God was wonderful to us; we are one happy people.” What happened that was so “wonderful”? On nearly any page of the Bible we find the allusions and stories. There is the story of God’s people in a long, apparently interminable servitude under the shadows of the Egyptian pyramids and the lash of harsh masters. And then, suddenly and without warning, it was over. One day they were making “bricks without straw” and the next they were running up the far slopes of the Red Sea, shouting the great song “I’m singing my heart out to GOD—what a victory! He pitched horse and rider into the sea! GOD is my strength. GOD is my song. And, yes! GOD is my salvation. This is the kind of god I have—I’m telling the world! This is the god of my father—I’m raising the roof!” (Ex 15:1-2).

We turn over a few pages and find the story of David. There were years of wilderness guerrilla warfare against the Philistines, a perilous existence with moody, manic King Saul, and all that painful groping and praying through the guilt of murder and adultery; then in his old age he was chased from his throne by his own son and forced to set up a government in exile. And, at the end, his song. It begins with gratitude: “GOD is bedrock under my feet, the castle in which I live, my rescuing knight”; it ends in confidence, “Live GOD! Blessing from my rock!” In the center there is a rocket burst of joy: “I’m ablaze with your light. . . . I vault the high fences” (2 Sam 22:2, 47, 29-30).

We turn a few more pages and find the terrible story of Babylonian captivity. Israel experienced the worst that can come to any of us: rape in the streets, cannibalism in the kitchens, neighbors reduced to bestiality, a six-hundred-mile forced march across a desert, the taunting mockeries of captors. And then, incredibly—joy. Beginning with the low, gentle words, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak softly and tenderly to Jerusalem, but also firmly and boldly, that she has served her sentence, that her sin is taken care of—forgiven!” (Is 40:1-2). And then the swelling reassurances of help: “When you’re in over your head, I’ll be there with you . . . . Don’t be afraid, I’m with you” (Is 43:2-5). The sounds combine and surge to a proclamation: “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the messengers bringing good news . . . . Voices! Listen! Your scouts are shouting, thunderclap shouts, shouting in joyful unison” (52:7-8). The gratitude and gladness build and soar. There is a sea-change into joy.

“It seemed like a dream, too good to be true, when GOD returned Israel’s exiles.” Each act of God was an impossible miracle. There was no way it could have happened, and it did happen. “It seemed like a dream, too good to be true.” We nurture these memories of laughter, these shouts of joy. We fill our minds with the stories of God’s acts. Joy has a history. Joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing. It is as real as a date in history, as solid as a stratum of rock in Palestine. Joy is nurtured by living in such a history, building on such a foundation.

Joyful Expectation

The other side of “we are one happy people”—verses 4-6—is in the future tense. Joy is nurtured by anticipation. If the joy-producing acts of God are characteristic of our past as God’s people, they will also be characteristic of our future as his people. There is no reason to suppose that God will arbitrarily change his way of working with us. What we have known of him, we will know of him. Just as joy builds on the past, it borrows from the future. It expects certain things to happen.

Two images fix the hope: The first is “bring rains to our drought-stricken lives.” The Negeb, the south of Israel, is a vast desert. The watercourses of the Negeb are a network of ditches cut into the soil by wind and rain erosion. For most of the year they are baked dry under the sun, but a sudden rain makes the desert ablaze with blossoms. Our lives are like that—drought-stricken—and then, suddenly, the long years of barren waiting are interrupted by God’s invasion of grace.

The second image is “So those who planted their crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest, / So those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing.” The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest. All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.

It is clear in Psalm 126 that the one who wrote it and those who sang it were no strangers to the dark side of things. They carried the painful memory of exile in their bones and the scars of oppression on their backs. They knew the deserts of the heart and the nights of weeping. They knew what it meant to sow in tears.

One of the most interesting and remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping. Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow. Pain and hardship still come, but they are unable to drive out the happiness of the redeemed.

A common but futile strategy for achieving joy is trying to eliminate things that hurt: get rid of pain by numbing the nerve ends, get rid of insecurity by eliminating risks, get rid of disappointment by depersonalizing your relationships. And then try to lighten the boredom of such a life by buying joy in the form of vacations and entertainment. There isn’t a hint of that in Psalm 126.

Laughter is a result of living in the midst of God’s great works (“when God returned Israel’s exiles we laughed, we sang”). Enjoyment is not an escape from boredom but a plunge by faith into God’s work (“those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing”). There is plenty of suffering on both sides, past and future. The joy comes because God knows how to wipe away tears, and, in his resurrection work, create the smile of new life. Joy is what God gives, not what we work up. Laughter is the delight that things are working together for good to those who love God, not the giggles that betray the nervousness of a precarious defense system. The joy that develops in the Christian way of discipleship is an overflow of spirits that comes from feeling good not about yourself but about God. We find that his ways are dependable, his promises sure.

This joy is not dependent on our good luck in escaping hardship. It is not dependent on our good health and avoidance of pain. Christian joy is actual in the midst of pain, suffering, loneliness and misfortune. St. Paul is our most convincing witness to this. He is always, in one way or another, shouting out his joy. The shouts are tympanic, resonating through every movement of his life: “We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next . . . . We sing and shout our praises to God through Jesus, the Messiah!” (Rom 5:3-5, 11). That is the fulfillment of the prayer “And now, GOD, do it again—bring rains to our drought-stricken lives.”

And then out of his prison cell we hear Paul’s trumpeting conclusion to his Philippian letter: “Celebrate God all day, every day. I mean, revel in him! Make it as clear as you can to all you meet that you’re on their side, working with them and not against them. Help them see that the Master is about to arrive. He could show up any minute!” (Phil 4:4-5). There is no grim Greek Stoicism in that; it is a robust Welsh hymn, striding from sorrow into song. It is the end result of the hope: “So those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing.” The witness is repeated over and over again, through the generations, and has scattered representatives in every community of Christians.

The psalm does not give us this joy as a package or as a formula, but there are some things it does do. It shows up the tinniness of the world’s joy and affirms the solidity of God’s joy. It reminds us of the accelerating costs and diminishing returns of those who pursue pleasure as a path toward joy. It introduces us to the way of discipleship, which has consequences in joy. It encourages us in the way of faith to both experience and share joy. It tells the story of God’s acts, which put laughter into people’s mouths and shouts on their tongues. It repeats the promises of a God who accompanies his wandering, weeping children until they arrive home, exuberant, “with armloads of blessing.” It announces the existence of a people who assemble to worship God and disperse to live to God’s glory, whose lives are bordered on one side by a memory of God’s acts and the other by hope in God’s promises, and who along with whatever else is happening are able to say, at the center, “We are one happy people.”