Honestly, so does everything worth having. We always have to die in order to rise.
The scriptures command us to rejoice with those rejoice and weep with those who weep (Romans 12). That’s a lot harder than it sounds.
It is, I think, almost impossible to rejoice with those who rejoice until someone has wept with you while you weep. Which means that pastoral ministry should include a fair number of tears. Never underestimate the gift that you crying with someone can be.
When you’ve struggled, when life has given you lemons but you’re all out of sugar for lemonade, when the terrible stench of death pervades your every step and the valley in which you walk is paved with daggers, it can feel impossible to rejoice with others. Their joy seems an imposition into your pain, offensive in its loud, inconsiderate magnitude.
This is particularly true when their joy comes at the point of your pain; when they seem to have achieved what you cannot. Perhaps they are getting married, or having a baby, or buying a home, or have a new job, or new friendships or opportunities or a thousand other things that grate at the place you’re raw. It is an act of painful self-immolation—or so it seems—to grit your teeth into the semblance of a smile and congratulate them on their undeserved victory at the game of life.
That is not, by the way, rejoicing with those who rejoice. This is a hard thing, and I know so from bitter experience, but to rejoice with someone you have to be with them in their joy. You have to move beyond your own pain at ubiquitous and never-ending lack and instead remember that you love this person and therefore allow yourself to experience as best you can the delight that they are experiencing at whatever turn of events has befallen them.
It’s not easier when it’s spiritual progress either. Perhaps rejoicing in their repentance could be, except it ought to prick our own hearts to repent too. Answered prayer is always a minefield because you’re reminded almost unbidden of all the prayer that hasn’t been answered in your life.
Here’s the thing. Joy is a sacrifice, because we have to put aside all of our own sense of unfairness and self-righteousness and common-or-garden pain, in order to pick up our friend’s joy. It’s a kind of death, we are choosing to die to our self and our perceived rights—in a very small way to take up our cross (Matthew 16)—for the benefit of our brother or sister.
That shouldn’t be too surprising, because Jesus’ joy took him to the cross (Hebrews 12) and allowed him to endure its pain. I’m not saying that the pain of rejoicing is something we should shut away. I’m trying to say the opposite, I think we need to feel it and endure it for the sake of others.
This also means we shouldn’t avoid sharing our joy with our friends who we think might find it difficult. Doing so is tantamount to stopping being their friend. Of course, we should be sensitive about how and when we share our joy. Sharing particularly painful joys via text can sometimes be helpful as it gives the person an opportunity to respond without having to work out their emotions on their face right in front of you—though people managed this before we invented the phone five minutes ago. However we do so, we must share our joys, we should treat our friends with the dignity of assuming they actually love us and would like to rejoice with us.
It’s a kind of death we must go through to rejoice with another, to put our selves aside and instead focus on the person in front of us. It’s the kind of death that in Christ is always followed by resurrection. That is the pattern of the Christian life: after death, life. Inexorably.
Forgiveness is a kind of death. Repentance is a kind of death. And, surprising though it may be, joy requires a kind of death. We always have to go down into the valley to ascend to the mountain, that’s the pattern of the Christian life.
It’s the pattern of the Bible’s stories too. I’ve just preached Jonah’s descent to the underworld and his rescue by Leviathan, who vomits him out into new life. The pattern is everywhere though: down and up again, death and resurrection. It’s the shape of the human life, the pattern for the work God does in us, even the shape of every sentence in the Bible (they’re chiastic).
To return to the mundane, what do you do when someone gives you their joy and it makes you want to knock their block off? Well, you don’t need to repent of your pain, though you need to repent of the block-knocking, but for the sake of your friend and your own soul we need to ask Jesus for the perspective and endurance that will allow us encounter their joy with rejoicing. A good thing has happened and it is good for us to be pleased. If the same good thing has not happened to us then it is appropriate, good even, to be sad. We’re more complex than you think, and can manage all of that at once.
Photo by Francisco Gonzalez on Unsplash
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