Theological Journal – February 21 What Does Joy Have To Do With It?




“God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by him, his mark is deep within us. We have God’s joy in our blood.”

(Frederick Buechner, “The Great Dance” in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, 240)



So far we have seen Karl Barth suggest the joy is the chief attribute of God, evoked by his glory. That joy is a chief mark of God’s people and that the New Testament makes some rather startling, intimidating claims about the place of joy in a Christian’s or church’s life. My focus in this series is to try and make sense of joy impacts or should impact my life with God.


I suppose the place to start is to distinguish between happiness and joy. Simply put, happiness is circumstance dependent while joy is not. We are a happiness-drunk people in America. Constantly on the search for new or better circumstances to make us feel happy or happier. But Robert Louis Stevenson speaks the truth when he writes, "To miss the joy is to miss all. No matter what we possess or experience and irrespective of how we act, if we miss joy we have missed all” ("The Lantern-Bearers").

And I don’t "want to miss joy!

I want to focus on James 1:3-4:  “whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.” It’s the “nothing but joy” phrase I need to work on. I can understand joy in the aftermath of some ordeal (as in Heb.12:2) but joy in the midst of the ordeal I don’t quite get. Nothing but joy? Let’s take a look at this verse beginning with a grammatical survey (sorry, that’s just the way I roll).

v.2:

-The grammar makes clear that the troubles in view are considered certain to befall James’ readers.                                                                                                                                                         -The “trials” are struggles particularly related to their being Christians, not the general troubles that come into each human life.                                                                                                -“Consider” means to “think about,” “reflect on,” a mental operation.                                             -“All joy” or “sheer joy” (rather than “nothing but joy” in the NRSV; the adjective is intensive). The phrase is placed in the emphatic position in the sentence. Makes my problem with it even worse.

v.3:

-“knowing” ties in the “consider” of v.2 and again points to a perspective we adopt (not one natural to the situation.                                                                                                                  -the “testing” most likely refers to the whole process we go through rather than the occasions or means of the testing;                                                                                                                 -“your” faith is emphatic and stresses the corporate belief of the community.                               -“The noun ὑπομονή, -ῆς, ἡ, “patience,” “endurance,” “fortitude,” “staying power,” is rare in the Gospels but is common in the letters and Revelation as a virtue particularly vital for an oppressed community (cf., e.g., Rom 8: 25; Rev 3: 10)” (Vlachos, Chris A.. James (Exegetical Guide to the Greek w Testament) (Kindle Locations 1076-1078). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition).  

v.4:

-“mature and complete, lacking in nothing” – the expected result of the process.

These exegetical notes may seem dry and unhelpful but they help me get oriented to the task at hand.


So, according to James, as a church struggles to be faithful to Jesus, their faithfulness will evoke opposition and rejection. To make it through we must set our minds and hearts that we are suffering for Christ in spite of it all and we will hang in there in the struggle. In this endurance we will find joy, the sure mark of God’s presence with us, and God’s work in us will continue moving us to good end he has designed for us.


 Questions:

-what does it mean to be faithful to Jesus?

-how do we “set our minds and hearts” to endure?

-my basic question: what can joy be in such a situation?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spikenard Sunday/Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

by Columbia Lutherans on Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 11:55am • THE SERMON “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by-and then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don’t know. How could I know? I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea’s being born. “I choose as my text the first eight verses of John twelve, which deal not with Palm Sunday but with the night before-with Palm Sunday Eve, with what we might call ‘Spikenard Saturday.’ I hope that will be close enough to Palm Sunday to leave you more or less satisfied. I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about PalmSunday itself. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumst...
Read more

The Parable of the Talents – A View from the Other Side

May 18, 2010 http://godspace-msa.com/2010/05/18/the-parable-of-the-talents-a-view-from-the-other-side/ As promised here is the second article on economics as presented in the Parable of the Talents .  It presents a very compelling and challenging view of this parable that I think has a lot to say in our present economic situation . This articles is from “Towering Trees and Talented Slaves”, commentary of Ched Myers and Eric DeBode, originally published in  The Other Side Online, © 1999 The Other Side, May-June 1999, Vol. 35, No. 3. The complete article was originally published atwww.theotherside.org/archive/may-jun99/myers.html. The article is no longer available at that site and apparently has all but disappeared from the Internet. The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30   Even more problematic than our sentimentalizing of kingdom parables is the way we misread Jesus’ parables about the world, reading them as if they were kingdom parables—with disastr...
Read more

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

Image
  It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House. By Matt Taibbi May 10, 2012   President Barack Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act alongside members of Congress in 2010. ROD LAMKEY JR/AFP/Getty Images Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history ." Th...
Read more