Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
My wife should preach the beginning of this sermon. She went through it twice. Several months of discomfort. Nausea, wild mood swings, a bladder compressed to the size where it needs to be emptied every 20 minutes. Then, at the end, hours of awful, agonizing pain. I stood by and held her hand and grimaced at every contraction that wracked my dear wife’s body. We both suffered, though Beth had ninety percent of the grief. Yet all of it faded almost instantly into the background at the moment when her doctor held up a wriggling little form and announced, “You have a baby girl!” That precious little bundle laid in her arms was pure joy, a joy not diminished, but only made greater by all the agony which had gone before.
Like a baby being born is how Jesus described the joy which would come to His followers, His friends. In our text today, in verse 16, Jesus warned His disciples of what was to come, “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.” In just a few hours, He would be arrested, He would be tried and condemned, He would be whipped and mocked, He would be forced up a hill carrying a piece of wood to which He would be nailed. The most faithful disciples stood by and watched, grimaced with their Master’s pain, cringed with each stroke of the lash, each blow of the hammer. Then He died, was rolled up in cloth, and placed in a hole in the ground. For three days and two nights, Jesus was seen no more. His disciples grieved.
Yet as we remember in all the weeks of this season of Easter, their grief was turned to joy, as Jesus promised. The women found His tomb empty and heard the angels say He was risen. They ran from there “filled with joy” Matthew tells us. Jesus came and stood among them and they all rejoiced. They saw Him alive again, they talked with Him and ate with Him. And as they did, the terror and pain of the Cross faded away into wonderful joy.
In verse 22 of this text, Jesus promised that this joy which would come to His followers would be lasting. “I will see you again and you will rejoice and no one” He assured us, “will take away your joy.” The Lord means for joy to remain with those who believe in Him, to be the constant possession of the Christian.
So joy is the second of the fruit of the Spirit. Only love comes before it. Knowing joy is a key part of the experience of spiritual life in Jesus Christ. Our Lord promised that even out of the worst suffering life can offer, there would grow a crop of joy which no one can take away from us.
Life in the Lord, then, produces rejoicing. Scripture is full of admonitions to be joyful. We began the service with one from Paul’s letters, Philippians 4:4, “Rejoice in the Lord always! I will say it again: Rejoice!” Psalm 149 says that Israel will “rejoice in their Maker.” And that theme is repeated over and over. Joy is the proper expectation of the people of God. We should look for and anticipate the fruit of joy springing up among us.
Yet you may be wondering where exactly such joy is growing for you, or even the Christians around you. As you contemplate your own life in Christ, all you may be feeling is at worst positive misery and at best merely a bland sort of resignation. Your experience is hardly what anyone would call joy.
Part of feeling that joy is lacking in our lives comes from confusion over what joy really is. We live in a culture which has done its best to culture, to cultivate in us, false images of joy. We are taught from our youngest years to substitute pleasure for true joy. So when we are not experiencing pleasure, when pleasure is not possible, we suppose that joy is impossible.
The first thing to understand about real joy is that it is ultimately rooted in God. Paul asked us to rejoice in the Lord. The psalm pictured Israel rejoicing in their Maker. There are other joys in the world – even great ones like the birth of a child – but the spiritual fruit of joy grows out of roots dug deep into God Himself. God is the source and spring of joy.
We will always be disappointed then when we seek for joy in things which are merely pleasures, especially when we let the world around us teach us what those pleasures ought to be. That is what advertising does, you know. It creates in us the desire for pleasures we never knew we needed or wanted.
Thursday’s Register-Guard carried the story of the fiftieth anniversary of one of the great – and literal – milestones in sports. On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister did what everyone had long said was humanly impossible. He ran a mile in less than four minutes. It was a monumental achievement that, again literally, has set the pace for runners ever since.
One of the most remarkable things about Bannister’s story is to compare it to the way track records are sought and achieved today. Unlike today’s athletes, Bannister had another life. He was a medical student. All his training was in his spare time. And he had no trainer. He worked at running completely on his own. This was long before computer designed running shoes, videotapes of a runner’s stride, and carefully calculated diets. Bannister simply worked his shift at the hospital that morning, ate in the hospital cafeteria, then walked to the track for his history-making run. He received no endorsement by a running shoe company and he made no money from his accomplishment. He ran for the sheer joy and thrill of it.
Bannister’s story appeared in the sports section. On the front page of that same Register-Guard was a story announcing a new running shoe designed by Adidas. It will be the first “intelligent” shoe in history. It will contain a tiny electric motor, computer chip and servos that will actually mold the shoe to a runner’s foot while in motion. The price will be about $250. Could Roger Bannister have ever imagined that runners would someday “need” such a shoe? What would he have thought if someone had tried to tell him he could not enjoy running to its fullest extent without “intelligent” shoes? Yet it’s easy to imagine that in the future, no more records will be broken without the new footwear.
The pleasures which are advertised and sought so avidly by us all are not joy because they are always supplanted, always replaced by the next pleasure when we get bored or discontented. Unlike the joy Jesus promised, pleasures are taken away all the time, often by the same route they were given to us. Your pleasure in a new computer arrives and then is taken away within a month or two by the better models which appear from the same manufacturer. The same is true of cars and homes and bicycles and new clothes. It’s not what the poet Byron meant, but Philip Kenneson is right to see this reflected poignantly in the line, “There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away.” Our purchases provide us moments of happiness that are gone in the next instant as we are convinced once again that we need something new, something better, something more.
There is nothing wrong with many of the pleasures of the world. God created them and gave them to us to enjoy. Jesus appreciated good food. He apparently liked to go to dinner parties. He liked wine enough that some called Him a drunkard. Those pleasures are not bad. Yet we will only be dismayed and disappointed if we suppose that such things will produce the sweet fruit of real joy. We will only give into the advertisers and buy more and more, newer and newer, better and better, only finding that in the end none of it lasts.
What we must realize is that joy cannot be pursued, much less bought and sold. As I said at the beginning of this series, the fruit of the Spirit may be cultivated, but ultimately they are gifts. Just the same as literal fruit, God makes them grow. Joy is a gift. It is not something we seize hold of in this world. It is a sudden visitor arriving from outside the world.
In an essay on fairy stories, J. R. R. Tolkien coins the word “eucatastrophe,” a good catastrophe, to name the turn in a story which brings it all to a happy ending. It’s Gollum biting the ring from Frodo’s finger only to fall into the fire of Mt. Doom. It’s the woodsman turning up to save the day at Grandmother’s house. It’s Sleeping Beauty waking at the kiss of Prince Charming. Sorrow and failure are not denied. In some way they are even necessary, but what is denied is that failure and defeat are universal and lasting. So Tolkien says these happy endings are evangelium, glimpses of the Gospel, “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world.”[1]
Real joy comes from beyond this world. We may experience joy in the world, but it comes from beyond. It comes from God, because God is joyful. God created us and saved us out love, but also for the sheer joy of it. In Luke 15, we are told that the God rejoices when His lost people are found. He has His own great, deep and utterly complete joy which every now and then pokes through the covering of the world so that it can be seen and experienced by us.
Frederick Buechner wrote the story of a young minister who lost his wife and was left to raise two little girls on his own. He completely loses his way and almost loses his faith. He drives to his father’s place in the country and goes out to the apple orchard. There he struggles to pray and can’t find anything to say, can’t even at first speak the name of Jesus. Finally, lying on his back, looking up at the sky, he croaks out, “Please come,” then “Jesus.”
Nothing happens. Then he hears – and it is all he hears – two apple branches blown by the wind slap together with a click and a clack. But what he felt was “a fierce lurch of excitement… Oh Jesus, he thought, with a great lump in his throat and a crazy grin, it was an agony of gladness and beauty falling wild and soft like rain. Just click-clack, but praise him, he thought. Praise him.”[2]
Later he tries to communicate what he experienced: “Reality…,” he says, “the air we breathe… this emptiness. If you could get hold it by the corner somewhere, just slip your fingernail underneath to peel it back enough to find what’s there behind it, I think you’d be…” He’s interrupted, but then tries again: “…the dance that must go on back there, way down deep at the heart of space where being comes from. There’s dancing there.”
That’s what I believe is underneath and all around everything we see and touch and taste and feel. The dance of the joy of God. And God means by the glimpses we get, through stories or through a vision in an apple orchard or through a baby being born to peel back the corner and show us the bigger joy, the complete joy that is waiting for us.
You see the Cross and the Resurrection is not quite the whole story of what Jesus told His disciples here. “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.” Yes, that came true. Their immediate grief at His death was changed to joy at His rising from the dead. But it wasn’t long, was just forty days, until once again they didn’t see Him. He ascended into heaven we’re told in Acts chapter 1. Jesus Christ ascended and left this world behind and no one has seen Him in the flesh since then.
So that “little while,” when we don’t see Him was not just then, not just three days and two nights of dark grief. It’s now. You and I know of the joy that Christ is risen from the dead, but we are still waiting a little while for our joy to be made complete. We are waiting for the covering on all the joy there is in God to be peeled back. We are waiting for the day Joy will find us and fill our hearts to overflowing.
That’s why the fruit of joy is the way it is now. It’s not yet complete. It’s only a glimpse. And it grows out of the worst ground, out of the darkest places, out of the most awful grief. The baby comes after the pain. And that reminds us that Christ rose after the crucifixion, and that the complete joy of life in Christ will come to us, will be given to us only after we have suffered a little while in this world.
So the Bible makes this strange link between suffering and joy. Hebrews 12:2 says that Jesus endured the Cross, for the sake of the joy set before Him. Jesus’ wonderful words of blessing, the Beatitudes end by telling us, “Blessed are you when people shall revile you and persecute and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets before you.” In Acts 5:41 we learn that the apostles “rejoiced that they were considered worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name.” And James 1:2 says, “Consider it pure joy… whenever you face trials of many kinds.”
As unbelievable as it seems, as difficult as it is to practice, the sufferings of this world are the fertilizer out of which God chooses to grow the fruit of joy in our lives.
In 1942, the city of Leningrad was besieged, surrounded by the Nazi army. Supplies were cut off and people were starving. One man remembers that his mother sold everything they had to buy a little food and some carpenter’s glue, which they ate. In the middle of it all, in April, there was an announcement in the Leningrad Pravda that a series of symphonies would be performed, and the finale would be Shostakovich’s latest, his seventh symphony. A light plane flying a few first aid supplies over the Nazi lines had also carried four thick books, the composer’s manuscript.
The Seventh Symphony was a massive work, complicated and full not only of string parts, but of major sections for woodwind and brass. They gathered whatever musicians they could find, many of them sick from starvation. At the first rehearsal they began to play the opening bars. When it came time for the trumpet solo, there was silence. The trumpeter did not have enough breath to keep playing. That first rehearsal, which was supposed to have lasted 3 hours, broke up in fifteen minutes. It was all anyone had the strength for. But they came back the next day, and every day after that, six days a week for 4 months.
One day a man did not show up for rehearsal. The following morning he explained that his wife had died. The conductor, Karl Eliasberg, told them all, “If your wife or husband dies, you must be at rehearsal.” They came and they practiced, in spite of their weakness, in spite of the Nazis surrounding them, in spite of the friends and loved ones they saw dying every day.
Then August 9 arrived. They assembled in the hall that evening. Hunger gripped the city, but there was a crowd in the seats. People were also hungry for music. Silence fell as the conductor turned toward the orchestra. Outside, even the German artillery was quiet. Huge speakers were set-up there and the concert was being broadcast even to the enemy. They began to play.
I understand that the Seventh Symphony concludes with great, heroic notes of victory, something that was barely conceivable in Russia in 1942. One musician remembers, “'The finale was so loud and mighty I thought we’d reached a limit and the whole thing would collapse and fall apart. Only then did I realize what we were doing, and hear the grand beauty of the symphony.”
Eliasberg remembers, “'People stood and cried. They knew this was not a passing episode but the beginning of something.”[3] We all know that they were right. The hope and joy of their music bore fruit. The Nazis were defeated, the siege was lifted.
We cultivate the fruit of joy in our Lord now because we are promised that it is not just a passing thing. It is the beginning of something. We seek to let go of that which is mere pleasure because we believe and trust that there is something much better to be enjoyed. The glimpses of joy which come to us as we worship, as we pray, as we see the beauty of Jesus Christ in and behind this world, those glimpses are not of something which comes and is gone like the pleasures of the world. Our greatest joys are visions of that which is always there, that to which are lives are ultimately directed. We rejoice in the hope of our Lord’s complete and final victory, the joy pictured in our text from Revelation this morning. Every tear wiped away. No more death. No more mourning. No more crying. No more pain. All that will be left will be the joy. The joy… and the love.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj