As I was preparing to preach this week, I considered giving my sermon the title “Getting Serious About Joy”. Then I thought better of it and came up with “Joy Is No Laughing Matter”. All joking aside, were you aware that joy is currently the subject of a high-level academic examination? Nine years ago the Templeton Foundation awarded Yale University a $4.2 million grant to embark on an intensive and wide-ranging multi-year study under the banner “The Theology of Joy and the Good Life”. Since then the project has engaged some top scholars and religious leaders from around the world.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve spent more time than I should have reading articles and listening to interviews with some of those individuals. Here is a quote from one of today’s leading New Testament experts, Tom Wright: “Joy … has everything to do with God rescuing his people… when God finally does something that people have been waiting for… Joy is not just an emotion, but a whole way of looking at the world…” Wright also laments, “There is a serious lack of joy in our society today…,” a lack which he attributes to what he calls “the failure of the modernist dream”.
Another interviewee was renowned German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. When asked, “How do the pursuit of happiness, fun and optimism differ from joy?” this was his reply: “Fun is superficial. It must be repeated again and again. You cannot make yourself joyful—that would be self-satisfaction. Joy is unexpected. It comes as a gift. Joy in the end wins.”
If you’ve got the time, I commend those interviews to you. You can find them, along with a host of others, on YouTube. But this morning our focus is not on theologians and scholars, as learned and helpful as they may be. It is on that wonderful passage that we have just read from Isaiah 35.
Karen and I have a lovely Middle Eastern restaurant that we enjoy eating at from time to time. There is one particular dish on their menu that they feature as “bursting with flavour”—and it happens to be my absolute favourite. Well, perhaps you’ve noticed already that this morning’s verses from Isaiah are bursting with joy. So let’s turn to Isaiah 35 for the next few minutes and see what God has to teach us about joy through this great Old Testament prophet.
First, and just to get our historical bearings, let me fill in some background to say that Isaiah was writing at a critical time. The year was 701 BC, and the seemingly unstoppable forces of the Assyrian empire had overrun pretty well the whole of the little kingdom of Judah. The once fertile vineyards and fields that graced its hills and valleys were a scorched wilderness, its towns and villages heaps of smouldering rubble. Now those armies stood at the very gates of Jerusalem. I can only imagine the sense of doom and desolation that must have gripped the hearts of its people.
The joy of anticipation
Into the midst of this scene comes the prophet, with a message not of doom but of hope, words not of grim despair but of exuberant joy. So let’s turn to chapter 35 and let’s take a moment to count the number of times the prophet uses the word “joy”:
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad (1);
the desert shall rejoice (2) and blossom like the crocus;
it shall blossom abundantly
and rejoice (3) with joy (4) and singing.
Do you think Isaiah was getting his message across? It’s a good thing that the Hebrew of the Old Testament was a language rich in words for joy, because even with these four, Isaiah had not exhausted its possibilities. When we read farther along, we will see that he would still have three more to come before the chapter concludes.
Now the joy that Isaiah was writing about in these opening verses is what I would describe as the joy of anticipation. Certainly there was nothing in their current circumstances that Isaiah or his hearers could be happy about. Think of the situation in Israel and Gaza today (or Sudan or Burma or Ukraine for that matter) and you’ll have something of a picture of what the good citizens of Jerusalem were facing in Isaiah’s day. All they could feel was a sense of doom as the Assyrian armies advanced unrelentingly upon them, right up to their very gates.
But Isaiah bids them look not around but ahead. His goal was to help them see that while their present circumstances might be grim (to say the least!), there was a future that God was preparing for them that was nothing less than glorious.
Was Isaiah being excessively optimistic? Perhaps as far as the immediate future was concerned, yes. But Isaiah had his eyes set on a longer outlook—on God’s design for a glorious new heaven and earth. And this is the perspective that we find again and again in the New Testament too. Think of these words from the apostle Paul:
The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. … And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God! (Romans 8:19)
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! (echoes the apostle Peter) According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you… Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory… (1 Peter 1:6-9)
Surely this joy of anticipation is what Advent is all about, as we look forward with patriarchs and prophets and with Mary and Joseph to the coming of the Christ child—and even more as we await that day when Jesus will come again in his glorious majesty to claim all creation as his own.
The joy of accompaniment
But our joy lies not only in our anticipation of the future. It is also something that God desires us to experience in the present. And I want to affirm that it is a joy in which we can share even in the direst of circumstances.
Fortunately for the people of Isaiah’s day, tragedy was averted. The Assyrian armies were suddenly and mysteriously struck down overnight and forced to withdraw. (Isaiah reveals it was the work of an angel.) But little more than a century later the massive stone walls of Jerusalem would be breached and its thick wooden gates would succumb to the battering ram.
Those who survived the onslaught would be led out in chains to serve as slaves in the Babylonian Empire. Psalm 137 gives plaintive expression to the desolation that gripped the hearts of those exiles:
By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion…
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1,4)
But there were those like Esther and Daniel and others, who would not surrender to their outward circumstances. They remembered the promise that the Lord had made to Joshua centuries before: “I will never leave you or forsake you.” (Joshua 1:5) Even in the face of tragedy and adversity, they held firm to that conviction and to the God of promise.
In the New Testament, Jesus’ followers were increasingly burdened by the dark forces that brooded around them as they gathered in the upper room. Jesus recognized the heaviness that was weighing down on them and said, “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” (John 16:22)
A little story that has helped to make this real for me was told by Stephen Neill, a missionary who served in India eighty years ago. Here is what he wrote:
Some years ago the Christians of a village in India came to me and said “Our well is already dry, and there is no hope of rain for four months. What shall we do?” I said, “I think there is water deeper down; try boring a shaft in the middle of your well.” For six days they worked, and nothing came. The seventh, they came to me radiant with joy and said, “There is water in the well to the height of two men!” They had pierced the hard rock, and forty feet down they had found the hidden stream. Since that day the well has never gone dry. In the hottest weather, when everything all round is scorched and dry, it is always surrounded by a brilliant strip of green. The water was there all the time. When they went deep enough, they found it, and then their hearts were filled with joy.
I don’t want to underestimate the pain and sorrow experienced by those captive people of Judah during their decades of captivity under the Babylonians. Yet I do believe that they survived their enslavement because beneath the adversity and all the suffering and confusion of their exile, there was still for many of them a quiet joy. It was not like the cheers you hear in a football stadium or a hockey arena. But it was grounded in the deep and unshakeable conviction that God, who had led them out of Egypt and into the Promised Land, was with them still—even in their suffering—and that he would never let them go. And so it is that the apostle Paul’s words hold for us today as it held for them: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4)
The joy of arriving
But there yet remained a much greater joy that Isaiah looked forward to. It would be the joy that coursed through the people’s hearts on the day that they finally were permitted to resettle Jerusalem after a captivity of more than fifty years. And it was looking ahead to that event that Isaiah took the opportunity to use his two final words for joy:
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain gladness and joy,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Now there is something about this third joy that marks it out from the other two. In fact it elevates it to a whole new level. And that is because the joy of their celebration is not just their own. It is the joy of God.
It is the joy that Jesus spoke about at the conclusion of the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Do you remember the shepherd’s words when he returned to the fold? “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” Or how about the woman after she finds her lost coin? Jesus tells us, “She calls together her friends and neighbours, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’” (Luke 15:6,9)
Most movingly of all, it is the joy of the father in the parable of the prodigal son. No doubt there was joy in the heart of the son as he caught sight of his father waiting for him. But his joy did not even begin to compare with that of his father—a joy within him that was such that he ran down the road and embraced him and kissed him; a joy that was such that he put a robe on his back and a ring on his finger and called for a great celebration. (I must admit I always feel a bit for the fattened calf at this point!) But then do you remember his words when the older son complained? “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” (Luke 15:32)
So it is that this Advent season calls you and me not only to look forward to Christmas and to the celebration of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. It calls us to look farther ahead, to that day when we will join our voices with those of all the redeemed to sing,
“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory…”
(Revelation 19:6-7a)
And we will stand before the Father to hear his welcome voice, “Well done, good and faithful servant… Enter into the joy of your master.” (Matthew 25:23) And you and I will be joining in nothing less than the joy of God.
