The joy of hoping for joy

Isaiah 35:1-10

1The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad;    the desert shall rejoice and blossom;like the crocus 2 it shall blossom abundantly    and rejoice with joy and shouting.The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,    the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.They shall see the glory of the Lord,    the majesty of our God.

3 Strengthen the weak hands    and make firm the feeble knees.

4 Say to those who are of a fearful heart,  “Be strong, do not fear!  Here is your God. 

He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.”

5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,    and the ears of the deaf shall be opened;

6 then the lame shall leap like a deer,

  and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.For waters shall break forth in the wilderness    and streams in the desert;

7 the burning sand shall become a pool    and the thirsty ground springs of water;the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp;    the grass shall become reeds and rushes.

8 A highway shall be there,    and it shall be called the Holy Way;the unclean shall not travel on it,     but it shall be for God’s people;    no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.

9 No lion shall be there,   nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;they shall not be found there,    but the redeemed shall walk there.

10 And the ransomed of the Lord shall return    and come to Zion with singing;everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; 

they shall obtain joy and gladness,and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Matthew 11:2-11

2 When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples 3 and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” 4 Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5 the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. 6 And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

7 As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? 8 What, then, did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. 9 What, then, did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. 10 This is the one about whom it is written,

‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,    who will prepare your way before you.’

11 “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. 

When was the last time you truly rejoiced?  Perhaps that’s easy to answer - or maybe it’s hard to think of anything.  What brings you joy?  And what do you imagine would bring you joy, if only it would somehow happen?  

Perhaps you, like me, have heard or read the distinction between happiness and joy described as as the difference between a temporary feeling and an abiding state of mind, that happiness comes and goes but that joy endures despite circumstances.  While I basically buy this distinction, it must be said that joy and rejoicing typically arise in Scripture following some event, some transformation, the in-breaking of a new reality.  

The passage from Isaiah envisions a day when the whole earth will be transformed, that what is dry and dead will burst forth with life, the flowers themselves rejoicing.  The deaf will hear, the blind will see, the lame will leap, the mute will speak, and all shall rejoice at the restoration of their health and vitality.  Threats of harm like the ravenous beasts will disappear, and all will be as it should be.  

These images would probably be more compelling to those who lived in an arid land, whose existence depended upon the rains, who endured years when the land produced little, who rarely knew abundance but who were very familiar with suffering and death.  They could much more easily imagine rejoicing when the rains finally came, when they saw the first shoots springing from the ground, when the flower bloomed.  We are quite far removed from the earth all this, seemingly secure in our prosperity, insulated from contingency and precariousness.   For this very reason we’re probably also far removed from any event that might bring us joy, any experience of transformation, any witness of death giving way to life. 

Even though we live in a age of widespread disenchantment, it is nevertheless difficult for us to imagine how things could be different.  We’re discontent but also more or less comfortable, restless but complacent.  We might want things to change but we’d really just rather watch Netflix.  Our politics is furious, but it’s all heat and no light.  The Right wants some kind of returned to an imagined past and the Left is completely out of of ideas.   Who out there has a compelling vision for the future?

I happen to believe that the church has a compelling vision for the future, that we are a people who can bring hope to the hopeless.  Or, at least, we should be.  One of the goals of Advent is to return to the prophets and be re-reminded of those visions of the future which give shape to our hope and inform our lives in the present.  We are those who look forward to the coming kingdom, who live as if it were already present, who long for it to come in full.  But that’s easier said than done.  Perhaps the first task - this season especially - is to meditate upon this vision and to become captured by it, for it to be for us - however unlikely it seems - the desire of our hearts.   

One odd aspect of Christmas is that, while we’re celebrating the arrival of a child, we also, like at perhaps no other point in the year, use language not of future hope but of realized expectation, of not just promise but of fulfillment.  This odd voice is found most explicitly in the words of Mary, with whose joyful song we began our worship service.  The messiah is still in her womb yet she speaks of the powerful having been brought down and the lowly lifted up already, the rich sent away empty but the hungry filled already.  And yet, at that point in the story these things had not yet happened, and many would argue that they barely ever have, if at all.  

There is a temptation for Christians to overstate the difference that Jesus makes in our lives, to describe reality in a way that seems quite unreal - including to other Christians.  So the tempting over-corrective is to essentially give up on Jesus making any difference now, or maybe ever.  

We might take some comfort that John the Baptist himself seemed to doubt if Jesus was really the one in whom he should place his hopes.  Earlier in the Gospel John had seemingly declared Jesus the expected one, but in the passage we read he no longer seems so sure.  He’s in prison and sends some of his own disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”  Presumably this doubt arises because Jesus’ ministry didn’t look like whatever John was expecting.  Perhaps John wanted more direct confrontation with the powers of this world - he himself was in jail for condemning Herod - or maybe he just thought it was all going too slowly.   We don’t know.  Jesus responded to this question with an indirect answer; he doesn’t declare who he is but rather points to the fruit he has borne: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”  The things Isaiah envisioned are happening.  Draw your own conclusions.  

Of course, there were plenty of people who observed Jesus and who did not draw the conclusion to which this evidence pointed.  In fact, the authorities saw him not as source for rejoicing, but a source of trouble.  And of course the crowds eventually grew disillusioned with Jesus as well.  He wasn’t making things happen the way that they’d hoped, he didn’t conform to their desires.

We might easily find ourselves in more or less the same position, disappointed that Jesus isn’t making the difference in our lives and in the world that he’s supposed to make.   How are you meant to find joy when things remain the same and you see little reason to hope that this will ever, could ever, change?

One of the reasons we love the Christmas season is that it holds out the promise that all will be well in our lives.  We so want to have a moment when all is at peace, when there are no worries.  So many of the stories we tell are about everything coming together on this day, of everyone being together, of our hopes being realized.   That Christmas never quite comes together for us like it does in the movies doesn’t necessarily dampen our hopes for next Christmas.  One of these days it will be as it should be.  

In a way this a microcosm of the life of faith.  We live in anticipation of the day when all will finally be as it should be, when everything finally comes together, even when our actual experience does less to confirm that expectation than we would like.   What we celebrate at Christmas is that Christ has indeed come, that God took on human flesh, that God became incarnate, that God came to deliver us from oppression, to make the kingdom come on Earth as it is heaven.  God’s true character and ultimate intentions have been revealed, the downpayment of God’s promises irrevocably made.   

The life of faith is to find joy in the anticipation that God has shown us the very nature and destiny of creation, that if God is God then not only might something like this happen, but, in fact, it must happen, that we insist on insisting that this is the only conclusion to the story that we’re willing to accept.  We open our eyes to the harsh realities of what is even as fix our eyes on the hope of what will be.  

It is precisely hope which makes abiding joy possible.  And it is also that hope which might inspire us to live in the confidence of what is to come, which teaches us not just to hope that the kingdom will eventually come but that we can already, even here and now, live on earth as it is in heaven. John’s question to Jesus is the world’s question to us, one we might even hope to answer by being an Incarnation ourselves.  Imagine if we lived together as a body of Christ where people really do find healing, where the lowly are lifted up, where the poor hear good news.  Imagine the joy we would know.  In fact, take joy in the hope that it just might happen.