Theological Journal - March 18: What's Joy Got To Do With It?
Well, pretty much everything, we’ve discovered. Imperial
domination of our lives reduces us to a simulacra, a parody of the life God
intends for his creatures. It robs us of our energy, strength, creativity, and
power rendering us somnambulent unparticipants in our living.
Joy restores all that to us and for us. It is a gift of God
that often unexpectedly lays hold of us and reorients our lives back to their
true north. This paragraph at the beginning of 1 Peter says it well:
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and
into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in
heaven for you, 5 who are being protected by the power of God
through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In
this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various
trials, 7 so that the genuineness of your faith—being more
precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to
result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Although
you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see
him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy,
9 for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the
salvation of your souls.
“In this you
rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials”
(v.6). “Although you have not seen him, you love him, and even though you do
not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and
glorious joy” (v.8). There’s our joy in the midst of a life beset by troubles
and trials for following Jesus. This is Joy 3, that disposition or affection or
set of mind and heart that keeps our eyes on the ball when circumstances are
(far) less than ideal. This disposition of Joy is not an emotion or a feeling
though it may include such and guides our capacity to feel and respond in
appropriately joyous ways to our circumstances.
C. S. Lewis gives
us some insight into this disposition of joy. He sometimes called it by its
German name “sehnsucht” – yearning or wistful longing. He describes a childhood
experience of this “sehnsucht” while beholding a toy garden his brother had
made:
“There suddenly
rose in me without warning, as if from a depth not of years but of centuries,
the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought
his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough
for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden [...]
comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire
for what? Not, certainly for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though
that came into it) for my own past [...] and before I knew what I desired, the
desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned
commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just
ceased. It had only taken a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything
else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.” (Surprised
by Joy, 21)
This helps, I
think. Though the feeling was fleeting, this joy marks Lewis for the rest of
his life. That mark, or disposition, was a longing or anticipation, in light of
which everything else is revaluated (everything else that had ever happened to
me was insignificant in comparison”).
This joy is based
in an experience. What Christians call an encounter with the risen Christ. And
though that experience is fleeting (though it may recur at later points in our
lives) it marks us (through baptism) as belonging to a new master, having died
for that master (in baptism), and now willingly living for this master (baptismal
vocation) enduring the hardships that inevitably come from following him.
Baptism, in its occurring, remembering, and sharing in others’ baptisms reminds
and reinforces our own and the joy that attended it.
Tomorrow we will
pick up here.
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