John 16:17-33 "Pure Joy!" Scott Hoezee

A friend of mine used to have a coffee mug with the words, "Sometimes Life Is Pure Joy!" Probably most of us know the kind of tangible joy to which that coffee cup refers. Often it comes to us unbidden, not in special Kodak moments for which we had planned ahead for weeks but in ordinary moments when, for a few minutes at least, life seems to be firing on all cylinders. Maybe it's just an ordinary family meal on a Thursday evening. The dinner is quite literally just meatloaf and potatoes but on this night, for some reason, everything clicks. The kids are in a good mood, not sniping at one another or complaining about the food for once. Mom and Dad had good days, too--not extraordinary days, mind you, in which someone got a raise but just a good, solid day of work.

It's simply a meal of some calm, lovely family fellowship. And then perhaps one of the kids says something that is so precious or so hilarious (or so preciously hilarious) that you suddenly find yourself and the whole family with mouths full of laughter. And it's pure joy. Not just happiness, mind you, though there's some of that, too. But rather pure joy in the sense of reveling in life the way it ought to be, living life in a way that somehow is so tangibly filled with God's presence and the goodness of his creation designs getting fulfilled that it nearly breaks your heart to realize how much of the time you live without that sense.

In his book The Longing for Home Frederick Buechner describes a similar scene set in, of all places, Sea World in Orlando, Florida. One day some years ago Buechner, his wife, and his daughter were sitting in some bleachers at Sea World to watch a killer whale show. As Buechner describes it, what with the sun glistening off the water, the clear blue sky above, the handsome young people in bathing suits who were running the show, and in the center of it all the exuberant antics of those magnificent whales, suddenly Buechner, his wife, and daughter discovered their eyes were filled with tears. Why? Buechner thinks it is because they had caught a glimpse of God's peaceable kingdom, of the way things should be but mostly aren't, and the joy if it all nearly crushed their hearts.

In a real way you can't plan for that type of joy. You cannot orchestrate events guaranteed to bubble up joy in you. In its sheer emotive force, in the "bring-tears-to-your-eyes" sense I just described, you also are unlikely to feel this kind of joy all the time. And so we might join most people in the world in concluding that joy, like laughter and happiness, comes and goes depending on what kind of a day you're having. Yet the New Testament calls joy a fruit of the Spirit. That means Christians are supposed to possess joy every day. But that means joy and feeling happy are not necessarily the same thing. Indeed, they are not, and in a few moments we'll sort that out. But as we open this series on the fruit of the Spirit, let's spend a few moments defining these fruit in general.

Let's be clear up front on three facts about the fruit of the Spirit. One, these fruit are the result of grace, not the precursor to it. As a Christian, you cooperate with the Holy Spirit to produce fruit on the branches and boughs of your life not so that you can attract God's attention and so merit his salvation. No, this fruit grows only because God has already sunk the tap root of grace deeply into the soil of his kingdom. Things like joy and kindness are the fruit of the Spirit, not the root of it.

The second point, however, is that although an outgrowth of grace, these fruit are supposed to grow in our lives. In that sense we can helpfully distinguish between the fruit of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit. The Bible tells us that there are many different kinds of gifts in life, but that no one possesses all of them. We are each called to different tasks. And so God gives some people the gift of teaching whereas he gives others the gift of hospitality and still others the gift of discernment. Because of that the person who is great at being a host or hostess would be lousy if stuck up in front of a classroom and asked to teach. Similarly, the excellent teacher might be the world's clunkiest hostess.

The gifts of the Spirit do not all come to each person. The same is not true of the fruit of the Spirit, however. A person may not legitimately say, "Well, let's see here: I think I feel called to the fruit of patience but I simply don't feel like God is leading me to kindness or joy. But I'm sure that there will be others in the church who will cultivate those fruit and so balance things out!" No! The gifts of the Spirit are parceled differently to different people. But the fruit of the Spirit are meant to come to all. All of the fruit come to each.

A third and final general point has to do with the nature of these fruit. What is love or joy or hope or self-control? Are these mere emotions, feelings we are supposed to generate? As Robert Roberts pointed out in his fine book, Spirituality and Human Emotion, although there is an emotional component to the fruit of the Spirit, they are finally not meant to be feelings which come and go but rather abiding character traits. Emotions come and go depending largely on circumstances. The fruit of the Spirit are to abide. The fruit are how we go at life in general. Happiness comes and goes, joy remains, even in sadness.

This is a good place to stop talking about the fruit of the Spirit in general and to explore joy in specific. Joy is meant to be the bedrock foundation of how we go at life every day. In the Bible you can find a fair amount of talk about joy, very often in situations where people are said to be rejoicing, expressing their joy in song or thanksgiving. The Book of Psalms is particularly filled with rejoicing, with an abiding sense of finding joy in the fact that God is gracious and has saved and is still present with and available to his people. The presence of God brings joy.

Indeed, even the psalms of lament give evidence of joy. The situations of those psalmists were not happy. There was no laughter in their lives. They were not having a good day. But joy remained because they still knew about God, they could still pray to God, knowing that God always cares for his people (even when, inexplicably, he seems not to be doing anything to fix what's broken).

One of the highest anticipated joys of the Old Testament was the promise of the Messiah. The advent of God's Christ would spell the fulfillment of all joy. And indeed when Jesus the Christ came to this earth, we do find an explosion of joy-talk in the New Testament. Curiously, however, as Jesus makes clear in John 16, his presence on this earth may well be the advent of true joy but for now it will be a joy which many days must co-exist side-by-side with sorrow.

Jesus was himself experienced at holding onto joy even in the midst of a painful, hurting world. As the Book of Hebrews put it, Jesus endured the agony of the cross "because of the joy which was set before him" (Hebrews 12:2). So he wanted to pass on that same knack to his disciples. So in John 16, as he face the cross, Jesus gives a brief primer on joy by freely mixing talk of grief with talk of joy, talk of a troublesome world of hardship with an abiding sense of joy in Jesus' living presence.

Jesus said, "In a little while you won't see me, and then you will." None of the disciples could puzzle that sentence out but they knew it didn't sound good. They didn't want to lose Jesus at all, not even for a little while. And so grief starts to well up in them. Jesus responds, "Yes, you're sad now and it's going to get a lot worse. As in childbirth, so in what is about to happen: the greatest pain comes at the very end. But then you will see me again and that will give you a joy no one will take away from you--not no one, not ever! I'll be with you as a living presence forever and that will make your joy complete."

It sounds wonderful. It is wonderful. What it is not, however, is the key to happiness as this world defines happiness. Because before this passage is finished, in verse 33, Jesus predicts that despite having a post-resurrection joy which no one will ever be able to snatch away from the disciples, they would nevertheless have lots of trouble in this old world. Yes, their grief over Jesus' death would be acute, but it would turn to joy when Jesus returned to them as a resurrected Lord of life. But though that particular grief would end, Jesus does not promise that all grief would end. Though that terrible and tough time would pass, Jesus does not predict the end to all terrible and tough times. Quite the opposite: Jesus predicts a snoot-full of trouble in this world. Yet somehow, some way, by the mystery of the Holy Spirit, joy will remain. In the midst of sorrow, trouble, persecution, and hardship, joy would abide.

But if joy is not just happiness, if you can have joy even when you are crying, then what is joy? If joy really were the same thing as happiness, it would actually be far easier to define. We know what happiness looks like: bright smiles, easy laughter, high spirits, shiny-eyed conversations punctuated by giggles and knee-slapping good times.

As I said earlier, there surely is joy in happiness. Joy and happiness are not strictly speaking the same thing, but that doesn't mean they have nothing to do with each other. In fact, the truly joyless seldom have genuine happiness. They may think they are happy but really they're just drunk. They may think they experience happiness, but really they're dead on the inside, literally "living for the weekend" when they can get high, get soused, get some sex, and try to forget that they have to go back to work Monday morning.

As C.S. Lewis wrote, God created us for joy but some don't know what to do with their yearning for joy. If you have God's joy in your heart, then you can mingle that joy with food, drink, fellowship, laughter, sex. Real joy makes those things even better. If you do not have any real joy, though, then you grab hold of these other things to take the place of joy. Lacking real joy, you look for happiness in a bottle of whiskey, in watching the James Bond marathon on TNT over the weekend, in the brief bliss of a sexual ecstasy. As Lewis wrote, "Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is often a substitute for Joy, however."

But though joy lives at the heart of the happiness we experience as Christians, joy does not depend on happiness. Indeed, as we've already said, joy needs to be there when we're crying, too. Joy needs to be near the heartbeat of our happiness in a delivery room when that dear infant first comes into the world, but joy needs to be near the skipped heartbeat of our sorrow at a deathbed when we bid farewell to someone leaving this world.

So what is this fruit called joy that could be present at such wildly divergent events? Listen: joy is the deep-down, never-fleeing sense that God in Christ is here, that he has saved us and this whole blessed creation, and that because of that we, as well as bobcats, lynx, lady bugs, and parrot fish, have a future. Someone once noted that when young children wake up in the middle of the night, afraid because of a thunderclap or a nightmare, the child will cry out, "Mommy, Daddy!" Good parents typically respond to this cry by answering back, "It's all right, it's all right." What is that which we say to our children? Those words "It's all right"? It is either a grand lie or the dearest of all truths.

Because in this world there are things that terrify, threaten, sadden, and kill. If life is, nevertheless and at bottom, really "all right," then we need a good reason for saying and believing that. Christians think they have that good reason: it is the resurrected presence of Jesus Christ in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is the delicious foretaste of a promise which Jesus has given us; a promise of a time, a world, a new creation, a kingdom in which all truly will be forever and ever "all right." And insofar as we are already now hidden in Christ, we also are already "all right," alive in Jesus and enlivened by him.

The presence of this kind of joy in our hearts leads to at least two things--maybe it leads to a million things, but tonight I can detail but two of them. This joy leads us, paradoxically, to both happiness and sorrow. It leads to happy times because if we are able to celebrate life--if we are able to revel in hiking through the woods, climbing a mountain and having our breath taken away by alpine meadows dotted with deer, if we are able to get together with friends and really laugh, if we are able to sit at the dinner table some typical Thursday night and joy in simple pleasures--if we are able to do any of that as Christians, then it is because we know we are authorized by our God to so enjoy his creation. It is because we know we were created for just such joy; because we know, as C.S. Lewis wrote, that one day Joy will not be some frivolous or fleeting thing but that Joy will truly be "the serious business of heaven." Hence joy is what lets us live life at a deeper level already now.

But this same joy leads to sorrow, too. In fact, Lewis Smedes once wrote that only the heart that hurts has a right to also joy. Because the same joy that lets us know Jesus is with us always, the same joy which previews for us the way things are supposed to be, is what makes us all the more keenly aware of how out-of-whack things are for now. We may bless and celebrate God's gift of life only if we also spend a fair amount of time sorrowing over all those people who have no quality of life today, whose existences are as pock-marked by hunger and want and terror as a moonscape created by cluster bombs. We may only joy in the beauties of God's creation if we are also able to weep over all those ecosystems which wink out of existence, over all those oil-slicked birds and soon-to-be-extinct fish, the sullying and death of which breaks the heart of the Creator first and foremost.

As John Henry Cardinal Newman once wrote, true joy is thoughtful, not merely spontaneous. Easter joy in the resurrection of Jesus is highly wrought and refined because this joy passed through the hell of the cross and the agony of Jesus' death. It does not forget those things, it does not set aside what Jesus had to do to rescue the lot of us. Our joy has a long history behind it, and much of that history is not pretty. For that reason, Newman wrote, joy is a last feeling, not a first one.

"In this world you will have trouble, but I have overcome the world," Jesus said. Therein lies the tension: joy in the midst of trouble. But in it all, weaving through the fabric of our existence like a golden thread, is the joyful sense that "it's all right." Many things can eclipse that sense for a season: acute depression, searing pain, unaccountable loss. But the bedrock promise of the gospel is that even so Jesus is here, weeping with us perhaps, upholding us with tragically pierced hands, but still here, still alive, praying for us even when we cannot pray for ourselves.

To know real joy in this world is a two-way ticket, shuttling us back and forth between a genuine ebullience which those without joy can never know and a wrenching sorrow which our joy creates because of how much we delight in how things are supposed to be but so often are not. Joy tells us that this life is worth celebrating if we can. Joy tells us that God's own divine delight is the purpose behind this whole, vibrant thing called creation. But joy tells us, too, that we are right to lament and weep over all that is wrong even as we still believe that somehow, some way, it's all right for God will make it so--God has made it so. Joy reminds us of Jesus' promise: "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh." Amen.