John 16:22

JOY WHICH ABIDES

‘I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.’

John 16:22

Why is it that the word ‘joy’ has nearly dropped out of our vocabulary? We speak of happiness, cheerfulness, good humour, and so on; but these are all words which have their exact equivalents in classical Greek. The first Christians required a special word for ‘joy’ as a moral quality; we, it appears, do not require it. We should have a slightly uncomfortable feeling of unreality in using it freely.

I. One is inclined to fear that this most beautiful flower of the Christian life has become a little dusted and faded in eighteen hundred years.—The peculiar happiness of the Christian must have been a very real, visible, unmistakable thing in the first century. John, at the end of his long life, remembers the Saviour’s promise, ‘Your joy no man taketh from you,’ and his first epistle shows clearly that the promise had been fulfilled in his own case.

II. This visible feature of the Christian character must have lasted on— slightly dimmed, perhaps— through the early centuries.—In the Shepherd of Hermas, a favourite religious book of the second century—a kind of Pilgrims Progress—we read ‘Grief is more evil than any other spirit of evil, and beyond all spirits destroyeth man. Put on, therefore, gladness, which is always acceptable to God, and delight thyself in it; for every man that is glad doeth the things that are good, and thinketh good thoughts.’ Somewhat later Augustine, before his conversion, was struck with this feature in his Christian friends. He speaks of the ‘holy dignity of self-restraint, serene and quietly merry.’

III. Mediæval theology was thoroughly alive to the moral aspect of happiness and unhappiness, though in this, as in other things, it dwelt rather too much on the negative side. They tell us much about the deadly sin of ‘acedia’—‘accidie’ as Chaucer gives it in English. This now forgotten word was intended to express that compound of gloom, sloth, and irritation, which kills joy in ourselves and in those who have to live with us. It is ‘the sorrow of the world which worketh death,’ as St. Paul says. Very few people now read the mediæval casuists. Some of you have, no doubt, read Dante, and remember how those who, under the bright sun, were gloomy and sullen, are plunged into a horrible slough of despond, and the doleful lament which rises to his ear from their place of punishment. Perhaps the Middle Ages treated acedia somewhat harshly. When we are gloomy ourselves, we put it down (I do not say that we are wrong) to our nerves or our digestions, and it never occurs to us to consider whether we are or are not guilty of one of the seven deadly sins.

IV. Unhappiness is not always a sin, but happiness is always a duty.—The question of our responsibility for failure belongs entirely to God, not to us; but let us be quite clear what we ought to aim at—what success in this direction means. And I am afraid that in our days it is not very easy to find wholly satisfactory models of what we are looking for. We have met healthy, energetic people, whose excellent physique inclines them to take a cheerful view of everything, themselves especially; we know the breezy optimist, who says, like Robert Browning, ‘God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world’; we may have observed, with rather mixed feelings, the somewhat vapid hilarity of the seminary or theological college; we have probably seen, and been the better for seeing, the gentle patience and noble courage of some suffering invalid. But not one of these types gives us quite what we are seeking. Indeed, I doubt whether we often see joy written clearly on any face except a little child’s. Perhaps it is part of a childlike character which our Lord recommends to us so strongly.

—Professor Inge.