Joy is not the opposite of sadness.

Maybe we could say happiness and sadness are opposites. But joy, especially within the Christian testimony, is something more ultimate than happiness, and something much larger than the opposite of sorrow. Joy honors sadness and embraces tragedy, all within the larger reality of the tremendous beauty and great goodness we find when we let God into the picture.

This is why we weep tears of joy. We weep tears of joy when a baby is born. We weep tears of joy when two people commit to the love they share in marriage. We weep tears of joy when a great and terrible struggle is finally won.

We weep because the beauty of the moment is more than our hearts can bear. We weep because within the joy is the pain and loss that led up to that moment of fulfillment. We weep for the great love and deep gratitude and wide new horizons of possibility that are born in that joyous realization.

I’ll end this brief reflection with something that Archbishop Desmond Tutu said about joy. This came in the course of a dialogue between Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama of Tibetan Buddhism, Tenzin Gyatso (from “The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World”):

 “Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say, save us from the inevitability of hardships and heartbreaks. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”

(Delivered before our joyous Christmas pageant at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, on December 15, 2024)

Image by Piyapong Saydaung from Pixabay