Joy

Reading these passages

The verse most quoted about joy was said to a crowd that had just burst into tears, and the remedy prescribed was dinner.

Then he said unto them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength.

The famous clause is at the end. Everything before it is about food. The people had heard the Law read aloud for the first time in generations, understood how far short they had fallen, and started weeping — and the instruction is to go and eat something rich, drink something good, and make sure a portion reaches whoever has nothing to cook.

That is a striking thing to prescribe for a crowd in that state, and it is the whole context of the line about strength. Whatever the sentence means, it was offered as a reason to stop grieving and go to a meal, and the meal included provisioning strangers. The remedy is communal before it is emotional.

Which way round it runs

Notice the direction of that sentence. Joy is called the strength — the thing that produces endurance, not the thing produced by comfort.

That inverts how most people use the word. We treat joy as an outcome: get the circumstances right and joy follows. Nehemiah has it the other way up, and so does Paul, who lists it as fruit of the Spirit alongside love and peace and longsuffering — something that grows rather than something arranged. Fruit is not a mood anyone summons.

Romans keeps the same order and adds a purpose: Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope. The joy is not the destination. It is what produces the abounding.

The word doing the work

Habakkuk is the hardest verse on this page and the most important, and the whole argument sits in two words.

The prophet has just finished listing everything that has failed — no blossom on the fig, no fruit on the vine, the olive harvest gone, no herd in the stalls. Total agricultural collapse, which in his economy meant famine. Then: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.

Yet. That is not optimism, which requires believing things will improve. Habakkuk expects nothing to improve; he has just said so in detail. It is joy asserted against the evidence, located in a person rather than in an outcome.

Which is either the strongest sentence in the prophets or an impossible one, depending on the day you read it. The book does not soften it and does not explain how it is done.

Sowing and reaping

Psalm 126 uses an agricultural image that is slower than it first appears: They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.

Sowing and reaping are separated by a season. That is the whole point of the metaphor and the part that gets lost when the verse is offered as encouragement — nothing about it suggests the gap will be short, and anybody who has farmed knows the interval is the hard part.

The psalm alongside it works the same way: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. A night is given its full length. The verb behind endure carries the sense of lodging, of staying somewhere overnight as a guest, and the verse does not ask the weeping to leave early.

Read together the two verses agree on something the quotations usually skip. Both promise a reversal. Neither promises a schedule.

Rejoice evermore

Paul's shortest instruction is two words in English and one in Greek: Rejoice evermore.

Taken as a command about feeling it is impossible, and people have tied themselves in knots trying. Taken alongside everything else on this page it reads differently — the joy in question has already been described as fruit, as strength, as something belonging to God and made available, and as something that can be asserted while the crops fail.

None of those is a feeling that can be produced on demand. Whatever Paul is asking for, it is not a mood maintained by effort, and the brevity of the instruction is itself a clue. He does not explain how, because the mechanism is not in the person receiving the command.

The psalm makes the same move with a day rather than a lifetime: This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. Not because the day is good. Because of who made it — and the reason given is entirely about origin rather than content.

Full, and whose

Jesus gives a purpose clause that is easy to read past, and both halves of it are doing something: These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.

The joy is described as his first — transferred rather than generated, which fits everything else here. And the goal is fullness. Not a trace of joy, not enough to get by. Whatever he thought he was offering, he did not think of it as modest.

The setting sharpens it further. That sentence comes in the last conversation before his arrest, a few hours before the events the gospels spend their final chapters on. It is not said from a comfortable position.

And the psalm locates the whole thing spatially: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. Not a state achieved but a place occupied, which is the same claim the rest of the page keeps making in different vocabulary.