Joy to a Christian can’t be reduced to ‘feeling good’

Gifts at Christmas bring happiness. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Sometimes we will feel just fine. Most of the time we won’t feel anything.
  • Sometimes we will feel pain and suffer loss.
  • We may even be reduced to enduring the loneliness and dread that made Jesus sweat blood in the garden of Gethsemane.

As the twelve days of Christmas come to end, the Christmas carol bearing that name comes to mind.

It’s all about the blessings “my true love gave to me.” Perhaps you remember the lyrics: Twelve lords a leaping, ten drummers drumming, five golden rings...

The last day of Christmas is all about gifts. The three wise-men presented gold, frankincense and myrrh to the baby Jesus.

God gives us his greatest gift—the proverbial “partridge in a pear tree”(A partridge was a symbol of absolute purity and the pear tree a symbol for the Church; so Jesus is the Holy One of God united to the Church).

It will be another year before we intone carols but we’re always “singing a new song for the Lord.” We were created for joy. This does mean that Christians are spared suffering.

On the contrary, we must travel the “hard road that leads to the narrow gate”—a road Jesus described as a path “that very few follow.”

FAITH WILL PREVAIL

Christian joy can never be reduced to “feeling good”. Sometimes we will feel just fine. Most of the time we won’t feel anything. Sometimes we will feel pain and suffer loss.

We may even be reduced to enduring the loneliness and dread that made Jesus sweat blood in the garden of Gethsemane. But even in our darkest moments, faith will prevail.

We will experience in our own flesh the truth of the words from the letter to the Hebrews 5:7 “During his life on earth, he offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death, and he submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard.”

A Christian ought never to fear death. Indeed, the closer we come to death, the more intensely we will feel a longing for that other world where “every tear will be wiped away” and “he will raise us up on the last day.”

The book of Psalms 42:1-6 teaches us to pray with such convictions in our hearts: “As a deer yearns for running streams, so I yearn for you, my God. I thirst for God, the living God; when shall I go to see the face of God?

Send out your light and your truth; they shall be my guide, to lead me to your holy mountain to the place where you dwell. Then I shall go to the altar of God, to the God of my joy. I will rejoice and praise you on the harp, O God, my God.”

For pagans, pain is the big thing. It dominates their lives. Joy is a little thing that so easily slips through their fingers. For Christians, pain is the little thing they have to endure for a short while, whereas joy is the big thing that will last forever.