trying to find the source of this joy within the terms of Christianity. Christian art, is joyous because it is free, and its art is free because of the fact of Christ’s having died to redeem the world. One need not die in art nor save the world in it, those matters having been, so to speak, attended to. What is left? The blissful responsibility to enjoy the world . . . .”33
I am not sure that a Reformed theologian could have said it better. This last week in theology class we read about what it means that “Jesus takes away our sins.” The loss we often bewail of being exposed as a sinner who seeks in fact to be God is actually a great liberation, says Karl Barth. It is a nuisance, and at bottom an “intolerable nuisance” always to be pretending to be divine. And it is very hard work. To discover that this matter has been taken out of our hands, that we are not in fact judges of ourselves or others, is liberation. “A great anxiety is lifted, the greatest of all. I can turn to other more important and more happy and more fruitful activities. I have a space and freedom for them in view of what has happened in Jesus Christ.”34
Space and freedom to “enjoy the world.” Maybe the poet Mandelstam’s joy derived from the freedom he discovered in not having to undertake the hard work of saving himself.
June 21, 2006
In one of his essays, W. H. Auden comments on the difference between classical comedy (as found, say, in the plays of Plautus and Terence) and comedy in a culture that has been influenced by the Christian faith (e.g., Shakespeare). In classical comedy, the comic figures are all lower class fools, slaves, and rascals. (If you have seen, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, you will know exactly what Auden has in mind.) The comedy comes from watching these knaves connive and fool the noble classes, deceiving them with underhanded tricks. But in the end, these rascals are found out and shown to get what they deserve. Christian comedy, on the other hand, exposes all classes and conditions of folk, especially the heroic and virtuous, to the unsettling gift of grace. And at the end of the play, no one gets what he or she deserves, though all are revealed to be recipients of grace. At the end of a classical comedy, Auden notes, the audience is laughing while those on stage are weeping. In Christian comedy, he adds, both the audience and the actors are laughing together.35
That is how forgiveness works its healing way, and gives in the end, not what we deserve but the deep, deep joy of something better, the gift of God’s grace.
October 18, 2006
More on Schmemann and joy:
To love—one’s self and others—with God’s love: How needful this is in our time when love is almost completely misunderstood. How profitable it would be to think more carefully and more deeply about the radical peculiarity of God’s love. It seems to me sometimes that the first peculiarity is cruelty. It means—mutatis mutandis—the absence of the sentimentality with which the world and Christianity have usually identified that love. In God’s love, there is no promise of earthly happiness, no concern about it. Rather, that love is totally submitted to the promise and the concern about the Kingdom of God, that is, the absolute happiness for which God has created man, to which He is calling man. Thus the first essential conflict between God’s love and the fallen human love. ‘Cut off your hand,’ ‘pluck out your eye,’ ‘leave your wife and children,’ ‘follow the narrow way,’—all of it so obviously irreconcilable with happiness in life . . .
What has Christianity lost so that the world, nurtured by Christianity, has recoiled from it and started to pass judgment over the Christian faith? Christianity has lost joy—not natural joy, not joy-optimism, not joy from earthly happiness, but Divine joy about which Christ told us that ‘no one will take your joy from you’ (John 16:22). Only this joy knows that God’s love to man and to the world is not cruel; knows it because that love is part of the absolute happiness for which we are all created . . . 36
November 1, 2006
Today is All Saints Day. The Old Testament lesson to be read today is Isaiah 25:6–9, a portion of which reads: “Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces . . . ” (vs.8), an image picked up again in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, “he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Rev 21:4) A strange text to be read on All Saints Day, except that this eschatological vision hints that insofar as saints are those who follow Jesus Christ, their way, while not tearless, will end with One who wipes tears away. Think about what this image is portraying. At the end of all things, we are met not by the “Almighty” or “Sovereign Lord of History,” but the loving parent who stoops to wipe away tears from a child who has hurt herself. What a vision of the end! What a vision of the saints who are gathered around the saint, Jesus Christ, and in whose presence have their tears and sorrows dried and healed.
A great Scottish pastor and hymn writer, George Matheson, wrote the hymn, “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go,” whose words may seem to some old-fashioned and full of nineteenth century piety. Still, the theology of that hymn rings deeply true. In its third verse, it knows that as much as the joy of the gospel is inseparable from the pain we often suffer, the promise of God is not vain, “that morn shall tearless be.” Tearless. Just as there is no crying in baseball, so there will be no crying in heaven. The saints are not sad and long-faced but joyful. May it be so on earth as it is in heaven.
January 20, 2010
Yesterday I got to meet my granddaughter, Corinne, for the first time. She was born the day before. She’s beautiful. She’s dainty and sweet but I suspect after a few rounds with her older brothers, she will be able to more than hold her own. I won’t go on to list all her virtues here, but I do want to relate something that I was thinking about driving back home from this visit.
In Luke 15 there are three (or 3.5) parables: “The Lost Sheep,” “The Lost Coin,” and the somewhat inaccurately named “Prodigal Son” (which includes what Robert Capon has called the “Lament of the Responsible Child.”), all of which end with an invitation to rejoice. The phrase that is used is, “Rejoice with me!” That is what the good shepherd says to his neighbors and what the woman who has found the lost coin tells “her friends and neighbors.” And of course, it is basically what the father says to his elder son, whose particular hell is that he cannot rejoice.
In one sense there is nothing that extraordinary about the birth of a child. It happens every day. On the other hand, when you see such a little one begin her first day on earth, breathing with her own lungs, sleeping on her mother’s breast, her fingers and toes just perfect, well you look at all of that in awestruck wonder and then say something like those folks in the parable: “Hey, look at this! Come and rejoice with me!”
I know that parallels are not perfect: my granddaughter was not lost, her parents did not have to go looking for her, etc. But the joy such a gift brings compels the telling of it to others. “Come, rejoice with me!”
There are plenty of reasons to be discouraged in this world and indeed, not all days and not all lives and not all places are so full of joy. Children who are born in Haiti, for example, are born into a very different world than my granddaughter. Still, I would venture to guess that even in that island that has known such misery, the birth of a child brings great joy.
What motivates us to care about the child in Haiti or support those who are seeking to relieve their pain is not unrelated to the joy we receive in the gifts God has placed in our hands, most especially the gift of another baby, whose life connects us to the little girl born here and the little girl born there. The only sin, I believe, is to refuse to rejoice, to choose to stay away from the party, to ignore the gifts in our midst. Joy is not the whole answer and cannot be used to do things that only medicine and money and labor can do, but it is what makes medicine and money and labor gifts that fill this world with hope.
A little baby teaches such things even to grandparents. Maybe that is why we babble on in such astonishment. “Come, rejoice with me!”
August