Christian joy contradicts the world’s joy.
There is a joy that distracts us from reality – especially the reality of death. This joy is better called amusement, which, according to the OED, once meant:
Distraction or diversion of the attention from the point at issue; beguiling, deception. esp. in military tactics, diversion of the enemy’s attention from the real aims of the other side.
Amusement deadens us to death. It flattens our senses so we can’t hear or see the world-as-it-is. We fiddle while Rome burns.
Christian joy – by which I mean not the joy Christians do have, but the kind of joy they should have – enlivens us to life. We see the world-as-it-is and we say of that world, “This is our Father’s world!” We see it this way because we see it in and through Jesus, in the light cast from the darkness of his empty tomb. Because of the resurrection, we know what this world is for and we know what history is about. How could we not rejoice?
Because we know this as our Father’s world – and because we know our Father and His love for this world – we enjoy this world and its pleasures while we await its future redemption. As David Milch says, we know the shadow in which we live is cast by the sheltering hand of God.
Some Christians have (foolishly) thought that Christians shouldn’t laugh. They’ve insisted that too much is wrong with the world for us to waste our time in “worldly pleasures.” Too much is wrong with this world. And we must not forget it. But our awareness of this truth does not keep us from enjoying this world. Paul says, we do not mourn as those who have no hope. He also could have said we do not laugh as those who have no hope. The existentialist or nihilist has no reason to laugh, except ironically or cynically. The Christian can laugh heartily, because she hopes.
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“I do not give as the world gives” (Jn 14.27). This is the saving promise of Jesus. He neither gives what the world nor in the way the world gives. (In the final analysis, to say the one is to say the other, because a joy won a certain way necessarily means it is a joy of a certain quality.) Jesus’ joy, as I said before, is a joy that comes only through obedience – the long and hard obedience of the via dolorosa. But being hardly won, it is all the more delightful. If we’re going to understand what joy it is that he offers us, we shall have to keep this in mind.
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Worldly joy comes in the pursuit of satisfaction, in the ongoing attempt to possess, to have, to consume. Christian joy, conversely, is in desiring not in the attaining. “All the best havings are wantings,” says Lewis. And he’s right. We can’t “have” Jesus – he says to us as he said to Mary, “Do not grasp me!” But we can love him, encounter him, enjoy him, want him. And in his being different from us, we are nonetheless at-oned with him. Because this is true of Jesus, it is true of all reality.
