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Many years ago I had a conversation with a good friend and she coined a phrase I had never heard before and it sounded strange to me. She said, “I’ve lost my joy.” She was a Christian of a more charismatic variety than me. She had been taught that joy is one of the fruits of the spirit that Christians receive through the workings of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22,23). These spiritual fruits like fruit on a tree develop and ripen over time in followers of Jesus as a result of a deepening devotional life.
Being raised your typical Presbyterian I had hardly heard of the Holy Spirit let alone that the Spirit works in us and brings forth these fruits. I thought being a Christian simply meant being good and sticking to God’s rules all on your own efforts because that’s the deal if you want God on your side.
My friend was the most committed and devout Christian I knew at the time and always seemed so joyful. She was the first person I met who went to church and actually worshipped. She said she lost her joy, that at the end of the day she wasn’t feeling joy anymore, but rather profound disappointment. People she loved had let her down and hurt her. These people wouldn’t give her the space to sort things out. On top of all that she didn’t feel close to God anymore. She lost her joy. It even came to the point that this worship-filled person pulled away from church. For a couple of years, she couldn’t worship. She lost her joy.
Thankfully, her story is not tragic. In time her joy returned. God brought her life together in the way she felt he promised he would. She married, became an elementary teacher, and had children. She had hit a period where she just needed to walk alone, a period of time for God to heal some deeper hurts in her than just her present ones.
This friend is one of those people I think of when I hear Mary’s Song. Let me give a rather expanded translation. “My soul, the entirety of my being, worships the Lord and my spirit, that within me that makes me feel alive, rejoices greatly in the God of my salvation. For, He has looked with favour on his overwhelmed servant. From now on people will call me blessed! God has done great things for me that only God can do. His mercy is for all those who trust their whole lives to him.” Mary sang that song the moment she realized that God truly did have his hand in her troubling circumstances. The angel had told her that her elderly relative Elizabeth was pregnant and so she was.
There is great joy in Mary’s Song, in Mary, but it leaves me with a few questions. I don’t think that what she means by joy and by being blessed is what we think they mean. Let me start with what it is to be blessed.
These are holiday times and most of us gather together with our families and have a big meal. Usually someone will say grace and in that prayer begin to count the many blessings the family enjoys. Everybody is reasonably healthy. Everybody enjoys a comfortable life. The family has a good name. We give thanks that God has blessed us in so many ways. Gratitude is a good thing to feel towards God, but I don’t think this sort of “count your many blessings” is what Mary meant when she said people would call her blessed.
For Mary, being blessed meant God had included her in his mission to bring healing salvation to his hurting, broken, suffering world. Oddly, this blessing came by means of an unexpected pregnancy that was troubling, indeed scandalous in so many ways. In our eyes Mary was disturbingly young, probably somewhere between 13-15. It was not unusual back then for marriage arrangements to be made between a father and a man between 25 and 50 years of age to marry his daughter. Such was Joseph.
Mary and Joseph were only betrothed and not yet married when she was discovered to be with child. Archaeologists tell us that the wee town she lived in, Nazareth, appears to have been very law-of-Moses-abiding Jewish. A pregnancy out of wedlock there would have been horribly scandalous. Nobody but Cousin Elizabeth and Joseph believed Mary that the child in her was the Son of God conceived by the Holy Spirit.
Then, after Jesus was born Joseph and Mary had to become refugees in Egypt. Jealous King Herod wanted to kill the baby. That meant Joseph had to leave his job as a respected carpenter. They would have struggled financially as strangers in a foreign land.
Add to it all that, the difficult reality that as Jesus progressed through childhood, he apparently wasn’t your "normal" child and people knew it. So, Mary had to bear the stigma of having a child who appeared mentally unstable. And after finally leaving home at age 30, Jesus started his “Kingdom of God” ministry on the coattails of crazy cousin John - John the Baptizer...locusts, honey, camel hair…that John. Then, Jesus appeared to be dealing with his paternity issue by claiming God as his Father and seemed to prove by doing and saying things that only God could do and say.
Then, Jesus, her son, was arrested and tried for treason. Mary had to watch her son die a public execution by crucifixion and as she stood there utterly heartbroken people certainly would have mocked her for being the mother of this humiliated false Messiah. Whatever she felt when she encountered Jesus raised from the dead would have certainly been tempered with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Mary said people would call her blessed but when you consider what she went through because of Jesus, you have to ask: How was that a blessing? Mary is called blessed not because she was a good, hardworking person, a good mother and all that and so God rewarded her with health, wealth, and a respected family name. Mary is called blessed because God was working through her and she remained faithful through all that she suffered for being the mother of Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah.
Blessing always comes in the face of suffering. In this fallen world full of evil, God’s workings, his mission to save and heal it will always meet with adversity. Yet, the blessing one receives for being a disciple of Jesus and living according to him who is the light of the world is, well, him; the assurance of his presence, the Holy Spirit, being personally with us. It’s the blessing of enjoying God’s favour, God’s faithfulness to us. Health, wealth, and a good name are quite often distractions that keep us from being faithful and enjoying the fullness of life that Jesus has for us.
If blessedness comes in the face of suffering, what does this say about joy? We live in a culture that sees the pursuit of happiness as a basic human right. But we also live in a culture in which corporate advertisers tell us we can’t be happy unless we have this or have that and there’s never enough. True happiness in this broken world is not found in wealth and security. It’s when your whole being rejoices from saying “I know my Jesus is with me and that he is working through me and that my dis-ease at not having the “good life” that so many around me enjoy is not in vain. God…yes, God is working through me. I am blessed!” There’s a joy in God’s blessing. It’s when all Hell has broken forth against you trying to break your faith and you somehow find yourself singing, “When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
At the end of the day when we are alone with ourselves, what do we come back to? Is it joy? Do we lift our hearts in the wonder that we belong to Jesus, that he is with us and we are a part of his reign in this hurting world? At the end of the day what do we come back to? Is it joy? Amen.
