Advent Season—Week Three: ‘Joy’
We’re now passing the halfway mark in our series of reflections on the four-week season of Advent. This week’s theme is ‘joy’, memorably exemplified in the angel’s greeting to the shepherds in Luke 2:10: “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.”
I’ve obviously been aware for a few weeks now that joy was coming (so to speak), and I’ve been umming and aahing on what to say about it. I assume the angel was right (obviously)—but in what sense was he right?
I can’t help thinking about the many millions of people for whom not only is Christmas not a time of great joy, but whose entire lives have no joy. While we sit in our warm, comfy middle-class churches, enjoying our Christmas carols proclaiming ‘Joy To The World, The Lord Has Come’, spare a thought for how that is true for those we know are suffering contemporaneously across the world: cold, hungry, poor, homeless, abused, and endangered. It is, of course, true that most of us encounter some level of sorrow and struggle in life—no one is immune. But the risk of suffering a potential hell in the afterlife (per the traditional evangelical fear-based gospel motivator) has limited impact if you’re already suffering a real hell in this present life. Hope of heaven is, of course, rightly comforting. But did the angel forget to clarify, “What I mean is, good news that will cause you great joy when you die”? We’ll come back to that in a moment.
If you come from a good evangelical background, I suspect you’ve heard preachers insist that ‘joy’ is not the same thing as ‘happiness’. Joy, they say, is deep-rooted and centred in God, whereas happiness is superficial, circumstantial, and comes and goes. Happiness is about superficial worldly things—money, possessions, and success in life—but joy comes from deep spiritual things. I came across a trite Facebook meme that summed it up: ‘Happiness depends on happenings, but joy depends on Jesus’. (Is it wrong to hate trite Christian Facebook memes?)
I can’t help thinking that it’s much easier to say that joy from deep, spiritual things is what really matters, if we already have sufficient money, possessions and success in life to be comfortable.
I’ve tried to research where this dualistic thinking came from. It’s a mid- to late-twentieth-century theological novelty that (so far as I can tell) originated with Oswald Chambers. Either way, it has been imbibed and repeated by many evangelical preachers since. How did this come about? As Randy Alcorn says, “Unfortunately, because Bible teachers such as Chambers saw people trying to find happiness in sin, they concluded that pursuing happiness was sinful in and of itself.”
The question is whether that dualistic contrasting of joy versus happiness is biblically valid. And I’m afraid the reality is, it’s another instance of ‘folk theology’—ideas that get passed around in evangelical circles and are assumed must be true because they’ve been said so often. However, it has no credible biblical support.
I won’t go all Bible nerd on you, but beyond the two most frequent Hebrew and Greek word groups to convey joy, there are more than a dozen other words used for aspects associated with it—words commonly translated, for example, as ‘blessed’, ‘happy’, or ‘glad’. They’re frequently seen in connection with feasting, celebrating, and rejoicing—in God, in his presence, and in the things he has done. The simple fact is that there is no material division between biblical word groups that supposedly convey what preachers cite as ‘joy’, versus ones that supposedly convey something called ‘happiness’—the distinction simply isn’t there. In fact, we often see them used in combination and interchangeably.
‘For the Jews it was a time of happiness and joy, gladness and honour.’ Esther 8:16.
‘For you, O Lord, have made me happy by your work. I will sing for joy because of what you have done.’ Psalm 92:4.
‘As your words came to me I drank them in, and they filled my heart with joy and happiness because I belong to you, O Lord God . . .’ Jeremiah 15:16
There is no verse or passage that I know of which supports a ‘spiritual versus secular’ difference between happiness and joy. I rarely have cause to agree with John Piper, but he’s right to say:
“If you have nice little categories for ‘joy is what Christians have’ and ‘happiness is what the world has’, you can scrap those when you go to the Bible, because the Bible is indiscriminate in its uses of the language of happiness and joy and contentment and satisfaction. Scripture uses the terms interchangeably along with words like ‘delight’, ‘gladness’, and ‘blessed’. There is no scale of relative spiritual values applied to any of these.”
The contrast should not be between word groups, but in the objects and sources of our joy and happiness. Chambers and his peers were not wrong insofar as it is entirely possible to be seeking—and even finding—joy and happiness in the wrong things. But by no means does joy and happiness have to be confined to supposedly ‘spiritual things’—that in itself reflects an unhealthy, unbiblical dualism.
Equally, of course, we can be gauging God’s love and concern for us based on the wrong evidence. First-century Israel had its own version of a folk theology (it’s a human trait in all places and eras) that credited health, wealth, and happiness as proof of God’s favour on someone (presumed it to be evidencing a holy and righteous life) versus sickness, poverty, and suffering being proof of God’s judgement on someone for their sin. Compare, for example, the assumptions in Matthew 19:24–25 and John 9:2–3. This is fundamentally wrong on both counts.
To finish, let’s return to joy and happiness in this present life, and especially thinking of those for whom this present life is already hell in one way or another. Evangelicals rightly affirm the Bible as a uniquely inspired source of divine truth. And yet, when the Bible is mined for inspiring and encouraging stand-alone proof-texts, taken and quoted on their own, those extracted verses can end up conveying half-truths—only one aspect of a truth—or even, something that on its own is not a truth. The fault then lies not so much in the Bible but in how we have ‘used’ the Bible. In our desire to be inspiring and encouraging, by choosing only selected ‘promises’, we have given an impression (of God and of life) that is incomplete. This becomes a particular problem when people’s experiences do not align with the promises they’ve been fed. The result is that either God or the Bible gets the blame.
Otherwise, what are we to make of Jesus’ John 10:10 statement that he came to bring life in abundance? How are those for whom life is anything but abundant to make sense of that as a divine promise? In part, by giving equal weight to the rest of the verse, that in this present life, there are concurrent enemies of human thriving with an agenda to steal, kill, and destroy life in people. It’s the paradox of a victory won by Jesus that is both now and also not yet.
The reality is that if we read the Bible from cover-to-cover—and the problem here is that, by and large, Christians don’t, so all the more onus is on preachers to be theologically aware enough to be presenting it from that perspective—we see troubles, abuses, pain, and suffering affecting people throughout its pages (even God’s people; even the heroes of the stories). We do see inspiring and encouraging verses and promises, but that’s by no means all that we see. The Bible does not gloss over human suffering and experiences of ‘hell’ in this present life, even if proof-texting is inclined to.
Even the outcome of biblical ‘faith’ (for which a long list of Old Testament characters—heroes of faith—were commended in Hebrews 11) is not all chocolates and roses; far from it:
. . . others were tortured, refusing to turn from God in order to be set free. They placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection. Some were jeered at, and their backs were cut open with whips. Others were chained in prisons. Some died by stoning, some were sawn in half, and others were killed with the sword. Some went about wearing skins of sheep and goats, destitute and oppressed and mistreated. They were too good for this world, wandering over deserts and mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground. All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised. Hebrews 11:35–39.
At Christmas time, we celebrate Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity, entering into our world to experience life as we experience it. The whole point of Jesus being recognised theologically as ‘fully man’ as well as ‘fully God’ is that he experienced life as we do—not as God ‘dressed up’ as a human being, insulated from its hardships and suffering by a cocoon of divinity.
It’s true that we can’t say “Jesus experienced every single adversity that any human may experience” (for example, he was not a woman), but that would be a literal impossibility for any one person (certainly a real person). The point is that Immanuel (as ‘God with us’) came to suffer with us, in every representative way. He laid aside (literally, ‘he emptied himself’—Greek: kénōsis, see Philippians 2:6–7) of everything to do with divinity that would be incompatible with complete humanity, including its suffering. He entered into our human experience to redeem it from within.
Only by fully entering into humanity could Jesus fully redeem humanity. As Gregory of Nazianzus put it, “That which He (Christ) has not assumed He has not redeemed” (‘healed’, or ‘saved’). Complementarily, and echoing Irenaeus before him, Athanasius said, “He became as we are, so that we might become as He is”—uniting divinity and humanity in his person.
This reflects one of the early understandings of the atonement (‘how’ Jesus saves us), which doesn’t get as much airtime today as it should, but is profoundly significant for the necessity of the incarnation. It underlies Jesus being understood as a ‘second Adam’, remaking (or ‘re-birthing’) humanity for those who are ‘in Christ’, according to a different mould or template, uniting our otherwise finite human life with the Son’s eternal divine life.
For more on this, search for ‘Adam Christology’, or the ‘Recapitulation Model of the Atonement’. Or better still, read my little book, Telling The Old. Old Story: In A Postmodern World: