Joy...

Holy Week approaches. The story fascinates me. I suppose it always has. As long as I can remember (that's getting longer all the time), I have been curious about what Jesus thought and felt during that week. I had a hard time buying one of the common explanations of dealing with the tragedy of Holy Week--that Jesus knew he was God and knew the outcome of the week…therefore he was willing to go through the death. If Jesus was fully human, he couldn't have known the outcome. We don't know the future except in nebulous ways…like trusting in the sovereignty of God.

So what enabled his willingness to put himself in danger, danger he pretty clearly knew existed in Jerusalem?

I was reading The Longing for Home: Reflections at Midlife by Frederick Buechner. He describes a moment at Sea World (surprising) when the killer whales came out in "one great, jubilant dance of unimaginable beauty." Tears filled his eyes and, he found out later, the eyes of his family members.

That led him to a conversation about joy. In a "tourist trap" in Florida he says "there is joy unimaginable." And his words are beautiful and significant as we approach Holy Week:

The world does bad things to us all, and we do bad things to the world and to each other and maybe most of all to ourselves, but in that dazzle of bright water as the glittering whales hurled themselves into the sun, I believe what we saw was that joy is what we belong to. Joy is home, and I believe the tears that came to our eyes were more than anything else homesick tears. God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by him, his mark is deep within us. We have God's joy in our blood.

I believe joy is what our tears were all about and what our faith is all about too. Not happiness. Happiness comes when things are going our way, which makes it only a forerunner to the unhappiness that inevitably follows when things stop going our way, as in the end they will stop for all of us. Joy, on the other hand, does not come because something is happening or not happening but every once in a while rises up out of simply being alive, of being part of the terror as well as the fathomless richness of the world that God has made. When Jesus was eating his last meal with his friend, knowing that his death was only a few hours away, he was in no sense happy, nor did he offer his friends happiness any more than he offers happiness to you and me. What he offers is more precious than happiness because it is beyond the world's power either to give or take away. "These things have I spoken to you," he said, "that my joy may be in you"--joy, as poignant as grief, that brings tears to the eyes as it did to mine that afternoon in the crowded bleachers.

Perhaps that is the power that gets Jesus through the last week of his life. That's why some people with terminal disease exhibit a peace and trust that takes our breath away and makes us wish we could be them for a moment. There are those who serve in areas of intense suffering and describe the miracle of intense joy they experience.

It rings true to me. Joy is home. "God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy…"

It's a nice way to be defined, don't you think?