This is the text from our free study guide to the free booklet, Joy: The Third Sunday of Advent.
Joy seems like an obvious theme for the “holiday season” as sound systems everywhere blare songs about having a holly jolly Christmas during the most wonderful time of the year—and yet, wonder and joy are missing from so much of the world. What, then, does it really mean to be joyful during the waiting time of Advent and the rest of the year?
The Bible is clear: joy comes from God, and he expects we will joyously respond to the joy he provides. In God’s presence is the fullness of joy (Ps 16:11), and we should “rejoice always” (1 Thess 5:16; cf. Phil 4:4) with what Peter describes as “an indescribable and glorious joy” (1 Pet 1:8, NRSVue). Furthermore, this joy isn’t merely for Christians alone, or even humanity, because Isaiah goes on to poetically describe the entire creation rejoicing, with mountains, hills and trees singing and clapping their hands (55:12). With such powerful, inspiring verses about our glorious God and our relationship with him, it is no wonder William Tyndale says the Bible contains “good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad, and maketh him, sing, dance, and leap for joy.”
This joy isn’t simply an emotional response to particularly powerful writing, but instead comes from God himself. Anselm of Canterbury says God is the joy of our hearts, and that in God we “have found a joy that is full, and more than full,” and when we rejoice in the joy of God we “shall wholly enter into that joy.” Notice what he then says: he knows the suffering of this life—and our human limitations—interferes with this joy, but he nonetheless prays to increase in joy a little bit each day. John Donne takes this further and says the joy we experience in this life is merely a foretaste of the ever-increasing joy we will experience throughout eternity in our relationship with God (for this reason in other sermons Donne refers to the natural joys in life as “accidental joys,” and the joy to be found in relationship with God as “essential joy”). This eternal and increasing joy, he says, will be “superinvested in glory.”
This joy should infuse and permeate our worship, both when alone and gathered together. Martin Luther, recognizing that our understanding of God can be stultifying, pointedly says God “hates dreary doctrine, gloomy and melancholy thought.” Instead, he proclaims, “God likes cheerful hearts. He did not send His Son to fill us with sadness, but to gladden our hearts.” Our worship should therefore “instruct, inspire, and refresh” us. The 3rd-century bishop Methodius reinforces the need for joyful church services, reminding us of the words of the psalmist, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing” (Ps 100:1–2, NRSVue). We therefore, he says, “bless Him who is blessed, that we may be ourselves blessed of Him.”
When we can live this way, our lives—and the existence of everything else—can become a wondrously flowing cycle of joy and love. We can then experience, as The Hymn of Joy says, that “all Thy works with joy surround Thee.” Truly, we can be “joyful, joyful.”
