Where Does Joy Come In?

It was my husband’s gift to me last year after I announced, out of a deep world-weariness—baldly and without irony, in the middle of a discussion about the practicalities of Christmas and our expectations around gift-giving—that all I wanted was “to be close to God, and to be sustained in hope”. “He Comes”, which evokes the approach of Jesus, and speaks of the many longings fulfilled in that encounter, was my husband’s way of ministering to me.

I like many of the images in this song, but a particular combination in its themes has impressed itself on me as I’ve listened again this month. Jesus draws near as one with whom we are intimately familiar; his presence elicits joy as the presence of the beloved:

He comes, and we shall hear His voice
Not as some distant sound
But tones that make the heart rejoice
When love, long lost, is found.

But strikingly the song also asserts, with the same glad anticipation, that “He comes to judge the earth”.

Such joyful receptivity to God coming as Judge is powerfully present in Scripture, so it is strange that I should find it so arresting. My surprise in discovering it here reflects, I think, the current state of discourse about judgement in the church, which often fails to draw a proper distinction between God’s judgement and the imperfect judgements of others, and casts both in a negative light. In the give-and-take of human relationships, where everyone has interests to advance and to protect, and where our understanding of each other’s motives can only ever be partial, the judgements we make about each other become a source of hurt or offence. But our experiences of this can cause undue fear when it comes to God, who in his self-sufficiency has no interests to further at our expense, and whose judgements are always intimately bound up with his loving desire for liberation—our own, and that of creation. To shy away from God’s judgement is to shy away from an aspect of his grace towards us, and to ignore what should be a cause for the deepest gratitude.

But joy in God’s coming as judge pervades the Psalms, finding its most jubilant expression in Psalms 96-99 (“Let all creation rejoice before the Lord, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth!”). Likewise for the prophets of Israel’s exile, the Lord’s coming in judgement is the hope on which all other hopes turn, as in Isaiah 33 (“For the Lord is our judge… it is he who will save us”). The fierce joy of Isaiah’s proclamation is echoed in John the Baptist’s words about the one who will come after him, “his winnowing fork in his hand”, ready to clear his threshing floor and to separate the chaff from the wheat (in fact, John’s words are a direct reference to Isaiah 33:10-12). God’s saving works—establishing justice and equity and peace, bringing down the powerful and lifting up the poor—are inseparable from his unrelenting demand that the idolatries of the human heart be dismantled. For God to be with us means both judgement and salvation, and for the writers of Scripture, it is all cause for praise.

Welcoming Jesus as the judge of creation has been helpful this year as I have grappled with a question for myself and for the community in which I minister. How do we come to that great invitation of Advent, the invitation to “rejoice”, when we’re acutely aware of the suffering of others? What is the place, or the point, or indeed the possibility of joy, when injustice seems to hold the upper hand? I probably do not need to describe in detail the kinds of situations out of which these questions arise. The disconsolateness of the general mood was summed up to me by a friend a few weeks ago, while our children played on the monkey bars. She answered my enquiries after herself and her family with a deep sigh, a dispirited shrug: “Everyone is well. Everything is fine with us. I’m just not sure how you’re supposed to do ‘well’ given the state of the world at the moment.” It was a familiar conversation, one I’ve had many times this year. I have heard myself saying some of the same kinds of things. The moment of hesitation if someone asks how we are going (“We are fine”). The apologetic way in which I voice my own minor complaints—sick kids, work worries, some sleep-deprived nights—“Things haven’t been so great with us lately, but it’s nothing in the scheme of things.” We are a heavy people. It is the weight of the world.

And rightly held, it is proper for the people of God to carry this kind of burden, part of our priestly vocation to intercede for the world’s pain, to hold it before God. We are called to be a people of compassionate justice, and allowing ourselves grief or anger about suffering is an indispensable aspect of that calling. But as we’ve approached this new season, with the change of gear it invites, I’ve been prompted to ask, Where does joy come in? Was there the hint of the suggestion in my friend’s question (“How does one do ‘well’ given the state of the world?”) that rejoicing is somehow unfitting—that joy might even be antithetical to justice, a matter of privilege?

I am keenly aware of how forceful this kind of probing can sound in relation to something that by nature cannot be forced. Rejoicing is not a practice among practices, because joy is bound up with what remains out of our control. Joy erupts into life, and into the art through which we reach for life’s meaning, in graced moments of glimpsing something beyond what we thought was the sum total of reality, moments of turning-to-find. This is the case in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur”, where, despite the destruction of nature, creation’s irrepressible propensity for growth, funded by the brooding Spirit of God, gives rise to the acclamation we find in the final line (the “ah, bright wings!”). Or we could think of the turn in Christian Wiman’s poem “From a Window”, in which the narrator, locked in his own desolation, observes a flock of birds taking flight from within a tree, and feels as if he is observing the spirit of the tree rise into the air. In this instant, and whether or not he has participated in endowing the tree with new meaning, the world feels fuller, charged with an “excess/of life”. “That life is not the life of men.” the poem concludes “And that is where the joy came in.” In both poems, joy emerges suddenly with the revelation that something beyond us is at work, enlarging the limits with which we began. There is a sense of surprise here, a sense of something freshly given. And this is why joy is not much—or in fact anything at all—like putting “a brave face on things” as Rowan Williams reminds us. It is not about working harder with the facts in front of us or coming to a better sense of perspective. God, the author of joy is not the guidance counsellor telling you to “Think positive”, and we should not play this part with each other. After all, nothing is more irksome or more hurtful when we are in pain than having someone behave as if joy were something we could simply switch on for ourselves. This is not how the gift of joy comes to us.

Yet I still feel compelled to ask how we are with joy, for the simple reason that, while I believe joy cannot be forced, I suspect that it can be refused. And perhaps we are never more at risk of refusing it than when we have come to think of “rejoicing in the Lord” as an activity opposed to, or somehow irrelevant to, questions of justice. Where this is the case, we must clear the ground for joy by confronting our sense of ambivalence. To this end, I would argue that for the people of God “rejoicing in the Lord” and “being a people of justice” are inextricably tied together: these things cannot understood in isolation from each other. Joy and justice fold into and out of each other; they have the same provenance and the same end.

We know this from our shared experiences of joy itself. Our deepest intuitions about it—the same intuitions that tell us joy cannot be eked out of situations or imposed artificially on them—unsettle the assumption that joy and justice are ever truly at odds. The simple fact is, joy does emerge unbidden in the face of the most cruel injustices and amidst the most unspeakable suffering. And when it does, it is not because the situation is reassessed and found to be less desperate than first imagined. Neither is it because those who experience joy have wilfully turned their backs on the world’s pain. It is because, whether in the innocence of children, or some small thing of beauty observed, or in the intimacy of shared suffering, another word is spoken, a door cracked open, through which the light of a different reality shines. For Christians, such moments bear witness to a reality that underwrites all others, one in which God is ceaselessly at work, loving, healing and creating all things new. Within such a framework, the experience of joy insists on the provisional nature of injustice, which cannot prevail where God is present. And this is why joy has been a wellspring of resilience for many justice movements. We may think here of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s many resolute statements from within South Africa’s apartheid regime, which were often delivered with a spark of humour: “I’ve read the end of the book,” he once said; “we win.”

But I want to offer another way of saying this—no argument at all, but rather a reordering of these reflections that has come through my time of waiting and watching for and, I believe, experiencing something of Jesus’s approach this month. It is a restatement of the witness of Scripture, which itself has emerged out of the lives of people who have held the pain of the world before God, and found themselves profoundly addressed, in ways that resist easy description:

He comes, and to be with him is the heart’s delight, and to be with him demands something of us. He comes as light, and in that light the darkness of the world and the darkness of our lives is exposed. He is beautiful, and to glimpse his beauty is to be emboldened, and stricken with a kind of grief. He enters our city as a plumbline, and in his uprightness all of our crooked lines—our crude approximations of justice, built stone upon stone on faulty foundations—are laid bare. But because of this, and because he chooses ever to move toward us, new possibilities for ourselves and for the world come into view.

How cunningly the enemy clouds our vision of Jesus with fear and offence. How convenient for the rulers of this age that we have “pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certifying him ‘meek and mild’,” as Dorothy Sayers once put it. He comes bearing a winnowing fork, to sort our offerings, the wheat from the chaff. And to see him is at once to be made just—and it is joy.