I’ve often felt a tension in my theology when it comes to the concept of joy. On the one hand, in Galatians (5:22) Paul counts joy among the “fruit of the Spirit.” As Christians, our joy is to grow like fruit, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and that joy is to be a steady, stable, even permanent experience as we mature. I’ve often heard pastors describe such joy as persistent even in the face of negative or difficult circumstances.
On the other hand it seems the Christian is not to be inured to life’s pains and disappointments as a Stoic might be. Indeed, Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:28-37), and he fretted in the Garden of Gethsemane at his impending death (Matthew 26:36-46). If Jesus is our example (he is!), then it seems appropriate for Christians to feel the pain and disappointment of life.
Are these two teachings at odds? They’ve often felt so to me. In my experience, the degree to which I am emotionally available to life’s painful vicissitudes is the very same degree to which joy eludes me. At times, the level of my joy has seemed to ride the ups and downs of life and has lacked the steady, stable, permanent character of Spiritual fruit. In such times, assertions from the pulpit that Christian joy is “deeper” or “abiding” or “present regardless of circumstance” didn’t help (even if they were true). They only added to my confusion.
Aquinas on Christian Joy
More recently, I’ve found Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on Christian joy in his Summa Theologica to be helpful in dispelling the confusion. In the Secunda Secundæ, Question 28, Article 1, Aquinas says the following:
For joy is caused by love, either through the presence of the thing loved, or because the proper good of the thing loved exists and endures in it; and the latter is the case chiefly in the love of benevolence, whereby a man rejoices in the well-being of his friend, though he be absent. On the other hand sorrow arises from love, either through the absence of the thing loved, or because the loved object to which we wish well, is deprived of its good or afflicted with some evil. Now charity is love of God, Whose good is unchangeable, since He is His goodness, and from the very fact that He is loved, He is in those who love Him by His most excellent effect, according to 1 John 4:16: “He that abideth in charity, abideth in God, and God in him.” Therefore spiritual joy, which is about God, is caused by charity.
Here Aquinas claims that joy is brought about in two ways: (1) by being with someone you love and (2) by the well-being of someone you love. So it brings me joy to be with my wife, my children, or my friends, but it also brings me joy to know that they are doing well, even if I can’t be with them. Conversely, as Aquinas says, sorrow arises from the absence of those I love, or from knowing that they are not doing well. In this way, joy is a function of the status of those we love and our relationship to them.
(As an aside, I take it that Aquinas would say our joy and sorrow for ourselves works similarly. There is a proper love for self implied in the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” So assuming I love myself, when things go well for me, I have joy, and when they go badly, I have sorrow. Similarly, we might say that when I’m at one with myself—a kind of “being with” myself—I have joy, and when I am alienated from myself—a kind of estrangement from myself—I have sorrow.)
Now, says Aquinas, consider the case of God. First, if we love God, then God abides in us, according to 1 John 4:16. But, God’s abiding in us is just a kind of “being with” someone you love, which, Aquinas told us, is a source of joy.
Second, God’s well-being is never in question. As Aquinas puts it, God’s “good is unchangeable.” So our assurance that God is doing well is another source of joy. What’s more, both sources of joy are as stable as our love for God. To the extent that we experience love for God, to that extent Christian joy is available to us, since God is with us and doing well.
We can also see that such joy is compatible with genuinely experiencing the pain and difficulty of life. While I might suffer sorrow because one person I love isn’t doing well (me, for example!), I can still experience abiding joy because my beloved God is with me and is always doing well. This is the joy of being with a friend even when other circumstances of my life are poor. There is genuine joy, because of my friend, alongside genuine sorrow, because of my circumstances.
So Christian joy can, indeed, be abiding and stable, even as we confront with honesty the troubles of life, since such joy is rooted in God’s unchanging wellbeing and in our abiding love for God.