SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 November 1921, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

“THE JOY OF THE MAN OF SORROW.” ‘‘These thingy have I spoken unto you, that My joy may be in you and that your joy may be fulfilled.” * —Saint John, XV. IL (By Rev. A. H. Collins, New Plymouth.) “My joy! The joy of Jeeus! The joy of Jesus, our prized possession. But I thought He was “the Man of Sorrow and acquainted with grief.” I thought “His visage was marred more than the sons of men.” I thought it was written: “Surely He hath borne our grief and carried ohr sorrows.” Yet here He speaks of “My joy.” He was the Lamb of God, standing within four and twenty hours of His death, Ills feet already treading the grim and darkening way; and He speaks of His joy! A Man of Sorrow giving joy! Are not such words a contradiction in terms? They are com- i plementary, not contradictory. The sorrow explains the joy. Both are needful, like the shower and the sunshine which make the rainbow, and I want to engage your mind with a set of ideas which underly this phrase, in the exposition of which the sense of incongruity will pass i away and we shall come to see that they belong to the natural order of such a life as Jesus Christ’s. DEEP, PURE JOY. We have dwelt too long and too exclusively on the sombre side of our Master’s life. We have too rarely allowed our mind to rest on the thought of His deep, pure joy, His radiancy of soul. To some it would almost savor of irreverence to speak of the happiness of Christ. We have heard it confidently asserted that Jesus never smiled, and when we have asked proof, we have been told the Bible does not say He smiled. This is not convincing. The New Testament does not pretend to record al) that Jesus said and did. Indeed, it expressly states the very reverse. If I could believe that Jesus never smiled, that gladness never rippled His face like sunshine on a summer sea, the Son of Man would seem less human and less Divine. But the New Testament is not silent on the subject. < Saint Luke records: “In that hour Jesus ' rejoiced in spirit,” and here is Saint John preserving for us the words of Jesus: “These things have I spoken unto you that My joy might be in you.” A LIFE OF TRIUMPH. These passages would suffice to establish my contention on Biblical ground, but they do not stand alone. Jesus Christ was not only the suffering Messiah; He was the Son of Gladness dwelling in conscious oneness with the Father. He lived a life of triumph, and it was “for the joy that was set before Him f that He endured the Cross, despising I the shame.” Never once did He speak of Himself as unhappy. Never once did | He bemoan His fate. He wept for the ( sorrow and the sin of others, but never for his own. He needs must pass through Gethsemane, and walk the Via Dolorosa of pain and anguish, but He came forth like a garlanded conqueror and a throned

Across the gulf of twenty centuries we catch the exultant strain of His words, the bravery, the triumph of them, the deep, full gladness of their love immortal. We have not read our New Testament wisely if we have read it only as the story of suffering and anguish. These notes are struck, but these notes are not all or chief. The regnant note is joy, wonderful joy, triumph, deathless and final. From Mary’s Magnificat to the first Easter Day, it is the story of life’s burden lifted on the shoulders of Omnipotence, the sadness of the ages set to the music of redemption, death itself made the servant of Love. awl Love crowned Lord of All. It is the story of sin, the sin of the world, known, measured, endured and conquered. the story of sin put away and made contributory to the eternal purpose of “the all-wise God our Saviour.”

It is outside the scope of this sermon to discuss the reason for the lost note of joy in the modern church. We need to recover the lost note of apostolic joy, not joy divorced from religion, for that is light and transient as a foam-bell on a passing wave: not religion separated from joy, else it will be robbed of its charm, like a rose that has lost its fragrance. But joy, what Newman Smythe calls “happy seriousness.” Not levity, not boisterousness, not religious larrikinism. but. joy. cleansed, and refined, and sobered, and religion inspired and set to music. “Happy” is a word of pagan origin, derived from the idea of “luck,” or “chance,” or “blind fortune.” Happy is “to hap.” Socrates and Plato, groping blindly for the secret of pleasure, concluded that it came from easy circum-

stances. Then came the Teacher sent from God, who taught the world better in His Sevenfold Beatitude. His great word was not “happy.” but “blessed,” the deeper, richer word which banished the idea of chance and in its place put sacrifice, for the root meaning of blessing is “blood-shedding.” or self-surren-der. In the Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrated at Athens every fifty years, candidates were compelled to purify themselves and offer sacrifices. When the time of initiation came they were ushered into the temple, where visions were seen and voices heard, and it was the opinion of those who went through the ceremony that they had the secret of happiness. That is fancy; this is fact. To see the vision of God and listen to His voice is the secret of joy, glad joy. THREE ELEMENTS OF JOY. But to return. T have said the New Testament tells of the joy of Jesus. The four Gospels are full of the idea, and the Primitive Church was the home of “happy seriousness.” Can we track the footsteps of the “Good Shepherd” and reach the pure sources of llis joy—the joy that He designs us to share? T think we can. There were three elements in the joy of Jesus. One is Sonship. He lived in filial relations with God. He did the things that are pleasing in His sight. Living in the full blaze of day, and watched with eyes made keen by jealousy and hate. His flawless Fife compelled the confession of His foes that He had “done nothing amiss,” but this is not all. The Father saw "no fault in Him.” “This is My beloved Son in whom T am well pleascil.” Think what that means. Think of twelve waking hours with no disloyal thought, no low desire, no slip of a word! Then multiply that into a life-time. Does it then

seem incongruous to hear Christ speak of His joy? And this joy of Sonship may be ours, for we also are the sons of God, and to realise that, and be able to say with quiet assurance, “I am God’s child,” is to enter into the joy of our Lord.

SERVICE. A second element in Christ’s joy was service. You remember how gentle Willie Shakespeare sings: “Mercy is twice blessed, It blesseth him who gives and him who takes, ’Tis mightiest in the mighty; it becomes The monarch better than his crown.” John Howard’s recipe for shaking off trouble was this: “Set about doing good. Put on your hat, and go and visit the sick and poor in your neighborhood; enquire into their wants and minister to them; seek out the desolate and the oppressed, and tell them of the consolations of religion. I have often tried this medicine, and always found it the best medicine for a heavy heart.” Mrs. I Elzabeth Barratt Browning caught the same idea, and chanted it in thia high strain: “Thy love shall chant its own beatitudes, After its own life working. A child’s kiss, Set on thy sighing lips, shall make thee glad; A poor man served by thee, shall make thee rich; A sick man helped by thee, shall make thee strong; Thou shalt be served thyself in every sense, Of service which thou renderest.” But who ever served as Jesus did? And if to dry the mourners’ tears, feed the hungry, heal the sick, and befriend the forlorn can bring joy to any life, then the Son of Man must have known that joy. I know that He was not always appreciated. “He came to His own and His own received Him not.” It is true that in some places “He could pot do many mighty works because of their unbeliefs.” Nevertheless, the joy of visible success was not entirely withheld, and His mission was a beautiful success, even in the days of His flesh. He laid 1 the foundation of a .Spiritual Empire that will yet fill the world from rim to rim. His words were seeds that are ripening to harvests of peace and righteousness. He kindled hopes which have saved men from despair. He has lifted burdens from the hearts of the sorrowful. He has given us “sweeter manners and purer laws.” He has saved and renewed men and women who were social pests, and made them sane and saintly.

THE TRUE WAY OF LIFE. Do you that One who has done all this was a stranger to joy? I said that we need to recover the note of apostolic joy; let me add that the way to do it is to follow Him who “went about doing good.” The stagnant pool never, sings; the flowing river does. Charles Dickens is not credited with deep spiritual insight. Yet he saw, clear as noon day, some things the theologians have missed, and this among the vest, that i service is the secret of joy. Tn David I Copperfield he takes us with Mas’r Davy to old Pegotty'.s cottage at Yarmouth, and shows us Mrs. Gummidge, self-cen-tred, self-absorbed, and selfish to the last degree. Then comes the staggering sorrow that almost broke the heart of the simple fisher folk, and, under the influence of the awful experience, a new and infinitely lovelier Mrs. Gummidge sprang to being. Listen as Mas’r Davy tells the

story: “What a change in Mrs. Gummidge in a little time! She was another woman! She was so devoted, she had such a quick perception o-f what it would be well to say and what it would be well to leave unsaid; she was so forgetful of herself and so regardful of the sorrow about her that I held her in a sort of veneration. As to deploring her misfortunes, she appeared to have entirely lost the recollection of ever having any. I could not mediate enough upon the lesson that I had read in Mrs. Gummidge and the new experience she unfolded to me.” I will not spoil that passage with a comment. THE JOY OF SAVIOURHOOD.

The third element in Jesus’ joy was Saviourhood. In the Bodleian Library. Oxford, there is a picture of an artist painted by himself. In Saint Luke’s gospel there is a picture of Jesus drawn by His own hand. A shepherd has lost his sheep. It has wandered from the flock, and the shepherd goes in search of it. He roams the mountain and the moor. He peers into the rocky ravine. He descends intn the valley where the wiki beast has its lair. He trudges high and low. far and wide, gazing with strained vision till he finths his sheep, tangled in prickly bush, or broken on some hard boulder. “And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders rejoicing.” The joy of saving the lost ! That is the joy of Jesus which He wants all his disciples to share. But can they share such joy? They can if they share the toil and the hazard, not else. So. then, these are the elements of Jesus Christ’s joy—the joy of assured bonship, the joy of service, the joy of seeking and saving the lost, and these experiences we may know, and if in these ways we follow the King of Grief and Tears, though His sceptre be a reed, and His crown a twisted bramble, we shall enter into the joy of our Lord. “Take joy home And make a place in thy great heart for her, And give her time to grow, and cherish her; Then will she come and oft will sing to thee When t)v>u art working in the furrows; aye Or weeding in the sacred hour of dawn. It is a comely fashion to be glad, Joy is the grace we say to God.”