A funny thing happened when I sat down recently to do a little word study on “joy” and its occurrences in the Bible. I found what I surely should have realized long ago. “Joy” is a big word for Isaiah, a huge word for the Psalms and very nearly a minor concept for everybody else. Oh yes, if you count up all the related words, the notion is certainly present in Scripture. Someone has counted up to 330 direct and indirect references. But I was surprised by how few occur in the New Testament.
Certainly if there is one thing the people of God need these days it is a bit of joy. Here where we would so often settle for a little quiet happiness. A bite of chocolatey goodness. Something decent to watch on TV.
An exhausted friend said the other day, “It’s not a good sign, is it, when your favorite emotion is relief?” Exactly. If there’s something our stressed out generation needs it’s a theology of joy. On our worst days some of us think that you might find joy in what they call in parts of the old south an “O Be Joyful.” As in, “Why how nice to see you, do come in, and may I offer you a glass of O Be Joyful?”
Of course most of us know very well that it will not do. The kind of joy that can be had in a cup or pill ultimately serves only to remind us what we really want is more. More of the real thing. More of that deep or heightened or intensely pure kind of pleasure we call joy.
In an article published last year in The Atlantic, educator Susan Engel says she believes teachers of young children are being pressured these days to treat pleasure and joy as enemies of competence. “Think of a 3-year-old lost in the pleasures of finding out what he can and cannot sink in the bathtub. … A child’s ability to become deeply absorbed in something and derive intense pleasure from (it) is something adults spend the rest of their lives trying to return to.”
Becoming educated should not require giving up joy, she says. Because all learning, all growth – human life itself – is driven by the pursuit of joy.
She’s right of course – and on ski slopes and white water rafts, at baseball stadiums and on sugar sand beaches, in fast cars and yes with fine vintners … we prove it.
We are driven by the desire for joy. Thank goodness in the New Testament writer John we find someone who knows a good deal about that.
The term “joy” occurs nine times in the Gospel of John and once in each of John’s epistles. If you add to that the number of times the verb form of the word appears you get a grand total of 25 occurrences. But the key to understanding John’s use of “joy” is found in John 15, in a poignant passage where the words occur all clumped together near the end of Jesus’ story. Here in this one magisterial verse you might say Jesus sums up his entire mission when he says, “I have said these things that my joy might be in you and that your joy may be complete.” With this verse, he links “joy” to the vine-and-branches union with God that he has been teaching. He connects “abide in me and I in you” to “my joy in you and your joy complete.”
For John, joy is a gift – the product of our being in God and God being in us. A great verse and the perfect reminder for all Jesus’ stressed-out 21st century followers. Somebody should put John 15:11 on a placard and hold it up in the end zone. The sight of that would certainly give me joy.
JANA CHILDERS is dean and vice president for academic affairs at San Francisco Theological Seminary.
