A PASTORAL PERSPECTIVE: Oh Joy

by Tyler Harper

Oh joy.

Maybe you’ve heard these words before, maybe you’ve said them yourself.

Admittedly, this phrase has largely been replaced in our society with language that is more peppery. But the phrase ‘oh, joy’ is typically not said with happy tones or even joyful ones. “Oh joy” typically accompanies frustration or hindrance.

Joy is a term that is encountered in many places, including in Christian Scripture, but do we know what joy is?

Joy is not happiness, it isn’t just a momentary pleasure, or a good feeling; joy is something deeper, something longer lasting. As the theologian Willie Jennings points out, joy is an action — it’s something we do and joy is subservice — it undoes or undermines the powers at work around us.

As an individual raised under the thumb of racial oppression Dr Jennings wants us to understand one the thing about joy. “The first thing that must be said about joy is that it is a work…it is a work of resistance of despair and death” (Willie Jennings, Gathering Joy).

Death and despair are realities that have been with our species since the beginning of time, one could argue that death creates time — we measure our lives because our lives are limited.

Death is the final severing of relationships by the termination of life. Despair comes from the misalignment of ourselves from what brings life, and despair is the feeling that things are not as they should be.

Joy is the work of opposing the brokenness of our world, resisting the things that make life difficult, that make life hard, that make life short.

Joy is particularly difficult in our context as society tries to ignore or hide these experiences from our lives: infrequently discussed in polite conversation and physically removed from our daily lives withdrawn to clinical settings. We are entertained out of thinking of thinking about these things that joy works against. Without acknowledging the problems, who has need of the solutions found in joy.

These are topics that we don’t like to talk about in our culture, I feel guilt just mentioning death and despair in an article like this. Yet, we all experience them and acknowledgement is the first step to recovery. This is exactly why joy is so important and why our lives are so often joyless.

Joy is an acknowledgement of death and despair, but also an activity that pushes back against these unnatural human experiences. Joy doesn’t shy away from death and despair, but overcomes these experiences.

Death and despair take too much from each one of us, joy is our avenue of recovery, joy is the action of dethroning the source of our sorrow.

Joy can do this because joy is always rooted in hope. Joy is the application, the living out of hope. Hope is the knowledge that there is more, that death and despair don’t need to define us, that there is a power greater than these.

The question before us is: do we have something to hope in? What is the source of our hope? What do we know is more powerful than the dominions of death and despair? These are the sources of joy and isn’t joy something we desire, something we long for, something that we miss in our lives?

Tyler Harper (tyler@chasechurch.com) is the Pastor at Chase Evangelical Free Church