We want our joy complete

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/042816.cfm

Acts 15:7-21
John 15:9-11

Jesus told us to remain in the Father’s love. “I have told you this so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete.”

What is this “joy” that Jesus speaks about? How is the joy of Jesus “in” us? Where does this joy show up?

God works with what he has in order to answer our questions. That’s why there are no coincidences in our personal revelations, where God speaks to our hearts in the midst of life’s progress. So, on the return from a recent trip with family, an East Coast vacation to Topsail Beach in North Carolina, I felt God’s urging to review my questions with that vacation fresh in my mind. I could grasp a perspective of Jesus Christ’s joy in us by reviewing how our family enjoyed ourselves. I knew that I was going to find out what I might be missing about Jesus’ notion of joy that he speaks about in John’s Gospel today. 

A vacation should be the perfect encapsulated image of joy. Right?

But first, I looked up joy in the dictionary. Most definitions define that, “Joy is the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune.” Somehow that doesn’t quite explain what Jesus seemed to be talking about, though. Other, secondary, definitions go on to explain joy as jubilation, triumph, exultation, exhilaration, euphoria, ecstasy, rapture and bliss.

All together, those words evoke something much more important, regal, and fulfilling than an emotion or two. So, I went to scripture. The Hebrew words for joy are all over the map. Some 25 different words combine to make up our primary English use of the concept of joy. The most used Hebrew word means gladness, but the second most popular form of joy is “shouting.” What seems to grasp most of the Hebrew notions of joy is a combination of those two. In fact, loudly singing with glee may best capture what the Hebrews considered about joy. 

In the Greek, only one word stands out. “Joy.” It stands by itself. In Greek, joy is simply its own word.

My vacation review of joy was surprisingly quite difficult. I spent several days trying to get my hands around the seminal idea of Jesus’ joy. I had flashbacks on the highlights of the week, the moments where the extremes of emotion filled my heart, which I thought would capture the essence of joy. But one experience kept popping up. I didn’t consider it important to my questions about joy. It was a moment on the very last day of the vacation where my young grandson, Zeke, sat on the couch with his hands crossed over his chest and he was trying very hard not to cry. He was distraught. No matter how many times I thought about the grandchildren dancing around, their frantic running and chasing during a water balloon fight, my daughters holding their babies and hugging and kissing them over and over, or their husbands jumping in the waves of the ocean absolutely engaged in happiness, that image of distraught Zeke kept coming back.

In fact, talking with my daughter Jill on the phone, after I thanked her again for the fabulous time that she and her husband Jason had orchestrated for everyone, she also brought up the incident with her nephew, Zeke. The boy was so deeply upset because he didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want the vacation to end.

I have a very bad habit of getting trapped in the frosting syndrome. You may know about that. When I get a slice of cake from a birthday party (Jill had her 34th on our vacation with the family), my taste buds, eyeballs, and fork immediately make an assessment of the frosting on the cake. I poke at it a bit, take a tiny taste, and judge the entire cake’s merit on the last thing the baker did in baking. It’s not the cake that counts. It’s the frosting.

I know I’m doing it, too. It’s not accidental. In fact, the frosting has become the determining factor in most people’s success/pass/fail gradings of cakes. The frosting catches our eye, overloads our sense of taste, and clothes the entire purpose of the thing itself — the cake.

That’s what I was doing when revisiting the highlights of the vacation. I kept pushing away that incident with Zeke. Each time I did a mental review of the vacation time, searching for joyful points, I’d start by looking at the pictures my daughter Judy put up on Shutterfly, or I’d recall one of the five or six things that Joanne organized with the grandkids. I wanted to re-capture the high points of the week in my memories, the exultations of moments, those grandiose experiences. But God kept reminding me of the experience with Zeke sitting on the couch.

I see Jill standing there with her hands on her hips, her eyes tearing up over Zeke’s pain, and she called Zeke’s expression of sadness the greatest compliment that anyone could give her. “He doesn’t want it to end. His tears make me so happy, Dad.”

She spent innumerable hours, lengthy email conflagrations arranging times and travel arrangements, negotiations over the beach house that would work best for everyone, and handing off duties to her siblings. Yet, the thing that put joy into her heart was Zeke’s desire that the vacation she had orchestrated would never come to an end.

She’s right. Zeke’s right. That’s what joy is. That’s what Jesus was talking about. We are at our happiest, our most concentrated and extended experiences of bliss, when what we do fills our deepest desires of loving and being with each other. Zeke dearly loves his brother, his cousins, his uncles and aunts, and playing with them, being with them, right now, in an amazing place, where the fun fills everyone up 24 hours a day. Jill was at her happiest, experiencing pure joy, when she saw the clear evidence that all her hard work at organizing happiness had paid off. 

What more could you want, Jill was saying? She was so happy because she had brought authentic joy to the family, and Zeke was the proof.

While the rest of us were inwardly cautious about not getting too excited, because we know we have to leave everyone to their separate lives, where we cannot be available to them at every moment, both helpful and loving, face to face, Zeke had let himself go completely anyway. While the rest of us were outwardly hesitant to go to all the trouble of planning a vacation where some folks might not make it, where some folks would get ill, or hurt, or frustrated with their plane flights, Jill plowed ahead and planted the seeds of joy for a harvest.

Zeke was all in on the vacation, shouting loudly with glee at every chance. When the time came to leave everyone and go back home behind, he struggled to let the joy go. And it hurt. Jill was all in on the vacation, too, up to the final hours of helping folks pack up to leave and get going. And saying goodbye to them hurt too. 

That’s how we know what joy is.

Jesus said to his disciples: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.

“I have told you this so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete.”