The Journey Of Joy

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: