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“The Grace of Great Joy”
The great purpose of life is the joy of spending it on something that outlasts it.
We mainstream church folk call these last five weeks
Epiphany, culminating today in the vision this morning in the transfiguration
of Jesus on the mountain before Peter, James, and John. But outside this
mainstream—some might say so far outside this mainstream as not to be church at
all—this season is named Carnival, culminating in that wild, raucous celebration
of delicious diversity, fantasy garb, and comic couture called Mardi Gras. Most of us, I suspect, associate this celebration
before the fasting season of Lent with
But we’re getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. So, let’s go back the Scripture passage for today.
“And he was transfigured before them,” Matthew writes. “His face shone like the sun, and his
garments became white as light.” Moses and Elijah were talking to him. There
was a bright cloud overshadowing him (the kind of bright cloud that enveloped
Moses on
It is as strange a scene as there is in the Gospels. Even without the voice from the cloud to explain it, Peter, James, and John must have had no doubt what they were witnessing. It was Jesus of Nazareth all right, the one they’d hiked dusty miles with over rocks and plains, the one whose family they knew, the one they’d seen just as hungry and thirsty, as tired and footsore as the rest of them. But he was also, on that mountaintop, the Messiah, the Christ, in his glory that filled the skies. It was the holiness of the man shining through his humanness, his face so afire with it they were almost blinded. The vision of him standing them chatting with Moses the Lawgiver and Elijah the Prophet must have surreal and fantastic to those disciples, bringing them to their knees—or lower. But only for a moment. The light soon dissipated; and Jesus came, touched them, and said, “Rise up and have no fear.”
The exquisite joy of that moment Peter wanted to freeze-dry. He couldn’t. But it was a vision, an experience that obviously outlasted his life. That quintessential epiphany, that vision was an experience akin to visit of angels to the shepherds on Christmas: “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you news of great joy for all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is the Messiah, the Lord.” (Luke 2.10)
The news of this Jesus/Messiah’s birth. The vision of this Jesus/Messiah on the mountaintop. News of a heaven-sent joy that returns us daily to the one fixed point to which we cling in this world: God is good. To the heart full of gratitude the world is full of beauty. All of which is not for a moment to deny that the world is also doubled-up with hunger and with violence and fears. But it is to affirm that there is a joy in this Jesus/Messiah a foundation of faith that outlasts all the tragedies we cannot fathom and human stupidities we understand all too well.
“Emmanuel” is Matthew’s name for Jesus. And this Emmanuel was no John the Baptist eating health foods in the desert. He was called a glutton and a drunkard. He partied with those who came from the wrong side of the tracks. He changed water into wine and, no doubt, joined in the rollicking songs at wedding feast and publican dinner. He invited people to gladness at the prodigal’s return. Indeed, there is more joy in heaven, he told his disciples, over this sort of thing than over all the pious prayers of the righteous. Can you hear (I can!) Jesus straining to communicate that gloomy Christians are not Christians at all? They are people who have struck some kind of full bargain with life. In order not to feel too badly about some things, they won’t feel good anything.
And didn’t Paul write of this Jesus/Messiah that “for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross despising the shame.” (Hebrews 12.2) As if to say, Jesus knew joy because he knew that the great purpose of life was to spend it for something that outlasts it. (And aren’t saints only sinners who keep on trying?) Which brings us to the love that is of God, the love that “bears all things, believe all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (I Corinthians 13.7) For it is in being loved and in loving like this Jesus/Messiah that we find life’s deepest joy outlasting all the confusion and frustration, bitterness and failures, disappointments and griefs of the world.
Such joy reminds me of a story a colleague of mine once told about how he and his wife bought a Chevrolet Corvette. Bill and Ruth hadn’t intended to do so when they entered the dealer’s showroom that afternoon in the mid-fifties. Their minds were set on a gray station-wagon, something that would accommodate their growing family and fit into plans for cross-country camping trips.
But when the deal was almost complete, and the salesman was writing up the order, Bill strolled into the next room and saw there the fulfillment of every young man’s dream. A fire-engine red, low-slung convertible bomb! It stood there in the neon sunlight like a glimpse of Camelot.
The price was outrageous ($4,400), and it was utterly impractical from every point of view. But Ruth has recently come into a modest windfall. So, bless her heart, she said, “Let’s buy it.” And they did.
For the first time in his life, Bill tasted bliss. When he went off to speak at a school or college, young people would gather around this then-rare vehicle in awe and admiration. And the discovery that it belonged to “the preacher” shook up some quite outdated ideas about religion.
But there was one fly in the ointment of his delight. Bill’s Presbyterian conscience. The knowledge of what he had spent on this luxury item haunted the fringes of his happiness and kept him in a state of guilty self-examination. How many third-world children could be fed for how long on what he had plucked down for that Corvette? And did he have a right to cram his family into their aging and undependable old Ford sedan in order to indulge his adolescent love affair with THE car?
Then one weekend while Bill was attending a conference of
chaplains in upstate
There were murmurs of mingled dissent and agreement. And his anxiety began to intensify. Until one Episcopal priest asked him, “Have you never heard of the grace of great joy!”
“No,” our dour Scottish brother admitted. The phrase was unfamiliar to him.
“Well,” the Episcopal chaplain said (God bless our brother/sister Episcopalians!), “allowing yourself some harmless but cherished fulfillment can be a form of grace. It can give a lift to your spirit and add zest to your life. It can make you more able and willing to face the sacrifices that God may ask of you in other ways. Sure, the money that it represents might be used to feed the poor and heal the sick. But the same could be said of the house you live in and that beautiful quadrangle in which you teach. Stop tormenting yourself and accept the grace of this great joy.”
Well, those were some of the most comforting words Bill had ever heard. It let him see his toy in a new way and scattered the clouds of conscience that had been hanging over his spirit. And so he began enjoying the Corvette with unalloyed enthusiasm flattening mountains with 250 horsepower!
Of course, Bill could easily have taken the priest’s counsel to extremes of gross self-indulgence. But it did make a lot of sense to him. Joy is leaven for the soul. And so he delighted greatly in his red Corvette—until the day he chose to sell it a short time later and bought a station-wagon. (William Muehl, In Reflection)
I never did ask my friend what happened; and even if I had, I’m not sure he knew what happened. Maybe it was that having been set free to enjoy the car he was also free to give it up. Or that when the pangs of conscience were stilled he was able to hear the voices of his children and be persuaded by them. Maybe it was that the joy of loving and being loved within and beyond his family would outlast his boyish infatuation with the Corvette. Or that the ephemeral joys in the stuff of this world don’t hold a candle to the joy of loving down in the valleys of others’ needs beneath his own mountain.
For it is the joy of loving that is the name of this Jesus/Messiah and of our human journey toward him. And the highest purpose of the faith in this Jesus/Messiah is to make people loving in a way that will outlast everything else. So, dear brothers and sisters, rise up and do not be afraid. There is a heaven-sent joy coming your way in this Jesus/Messiah that is the purpose of your life: a love of God in him that will out-pray, out-suffer, out-love, and outlast your life and, in the process, give your earthly life a heavenly meaning for which you yearn every day of your life.