Rejoice!
Rejoicing and mourning are supposedly on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Roman church: Rejoice with those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn (Romans 12:15, NIV). In modern times to rejoice is to show or feel great joy or delight. To mourn, on the other hand, is to feel or show deep sorrow or regret. Rejoicing demonstrates delight while mourning demonstrates sorrow. On the surface, it appears that never shall the twain meet. However, I’m not convinced that these two human emotions are as far apart as we may claim or want them to be. I beg the reader’s pardon for my momentary sacrilege in noting that Sunday morning’s Psalm 30:5 is a sermonic surety to elicit approval (and consciousness), and while I agree in principle, I believe the great distance we mentally inject between weeping at night and rejoicing in the morning is largely superficial. These two seemingly contradictory and incongruous emotions are, in fact, more closely related and, better still, unequivocally dependent upon one another.
Christians spend far too much time praying away, wishing away difficulties in our lives rather than learning and leaning on God, searching and seeking God’s work in difficulty, and strengthening and disciplining ourselves as we weather the storm. In lieu of remaining open to the will of God, we close ranks in a posture St. Augustine termed in curvatus in se,1 turning in on ourselves and predictably becoming an end to ourselves.
I assert that to truly know and experience joyous mourning is an inalterable necessity. My assertion beckons an understanding espoused by Christians that in order to “live,” you must die; in order to live eternally, it is a physical and spiritual fact that one must encounter and succumb to a mortal death. Thus, our faith dictates that what may appear to be losing is, in fact, winning. Death is an incontrovertible albeit mysterious passageway to life.
Nowhere biblically is this very point more salient than in our friend Job. In Job 1:21 he says “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.” In this emotional space, many people will sit on the mourner’s bench (or better yet a mourner’s pile of ashes) next to Job and together feel the depths of sorrow. We revel in the victimization of life’s inevitabilities to the chagrin of our belief and faith. Most of us stop here. But Job did not. Job finished not on a low note surrounded by his sorrow and mourning, but instead on a raised one with exultation and rejoicing: “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” What manner of man is this that in the midst of losing everything, he can lift up his eyes to see the glory of the God who is the Author and Finisher of his fate? Unlike so many Christians, Job did not allow his circumstances to become a cataract on his vision of who God was to him. To be certain, Job was both affected and effected by his monumental losses, but he refused to allow ephemeral woes to disrupt his dependence on the God he knew and trusted. Even Job’s empathetic, misguided, and “mal-informed” friends were blinded by pretense of righteousness in lieu of acknowledging that sometimes sorrow’s occur even when nothing was done to deserve it.
With his world seemingly turned upside down, Job lives up to God’s description of him – “There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.” Job demonstrates a faith toward which all Christians should strive. After processing that all he had is gone, Job declares “blessed be the name of the Lord.” Therein is joy in the midst of sorrow. Certainly, Job was not likely exhibiting his joy outwardly, but exhibiting joy does not always equal having joy. In his joyous cry of worship, Job strikes at the core of not only what ‘joy’ is but also what ‘joy’ can do.
Why does a deeper understanding of rejoicing and mourning matter? Looking around at the catastrophic devastation wrought by successive hurricanes that have ravaged the southern United States and the Caribbean, there does not appear, on the surface, to exist much to rejoice. Lives have been lost, homes have been destroyed and jobs have been shuttered. Once comfortable people are now housed in shelters or bunking with family and friends. They are now faced, like Job, with dire circumstances they did nothing to deserve. They are now tasked with piecing together tattered lives with little-to-no resources and no idea of where to begin.
Mourning and sorrow prevail in the immediate aftermath of Harvey (Houston), Irma (Cuba and Florida), Maria and Jose (throughout the Caribbean). It would be a gross dereliction of duty to suggest that the only way these people or anyone else for that matter can truly experience joy and rejoicing is to experience a devastating storm. However, how sorrow and mourning shape our perspective of joy and rejoicing can be shared with those who have lost much. In John 16:22 Jesus teaches “So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” Sorrow provides for us a basis from which we can define the depth and breadth of true joy. Without sorrow and mourning, joy is rendered untenable at best. Joy must have some measure of opposition and tension in order for its meaning to be sufficient.
During our summer training for the fall football season at the University of Georgia, the strength and conditioning coaches set our workout times during the hottest times of the day. Making it through those grueling workouts was no small task. Seeing one of my fellow teammates pass out from either the heat or pure exhaustion was not an uncommon sight. While we players would have preferred to train later in the evening when that hot Georgia summer sun was descending beneath the horizon, there was method behind what we saw as madness. Principally, most of our games would be played on Saturday afternoons, the hottest time of the day, and we were also reminded that our opponents were training at the same time of the day. What this taught us was that if we could thrive in difficult summer days with the sun at its highest peak and no one to watch how strenuously we labored, we could be in the position for victory when the college football world was watching.
Our brothers and sisters in hurricane-affected areas have an uphill battle to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives in the midst of hopelessness. The journey back will be even more difficult if they are mired by dwelling on the tragedy without the forward and upward posture of Job who, surrounded by hurt and pain, was still able to speak confidently “blessed be the name of the Lord.” Rejoicing in the name of the Lord may, for some, lends credence to the Marxian philosophy of an “opiate of the people,”2 but for the true believer, it is an absolute necessity. It facilitates a belief that God is omnipresent and lives up to the promise “to never leave you, nor forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6).
Rejoicing gives us strength and courage to face life’s daunting challenges, but we are repeatedly challenged to “be of good cheer” even as we face seemingly insurmountable odds. Rejoicing and mourning are two peas from the same pod; they are two sides of the same coin. A life without one renders the other moot and meaningless. Life is lived both through the highs and the lows; through the good times and the bad times, and it takes both for our lives to develop so that we are shaped and molded into the instruments God needs us to be to mete out God’s intended purposes not only for our lives but also for the fulfillment of God’s divine plan for creation.
Notes
1. Phrase most likely coined by St. Augustine of Hippo and used and expounded upon by many theologians and philosophers.
2. Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher – a journal published in Paris by Karl Marx and Arnold Ruge, 1843.F
