Joy and Sorrow

“Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.” — John xi. 38.

The moment which this verse describes was doubtless one of the saddest in the life of Jesus. His friend was dead, and the Master stood in the midst of the overwhelming sorrow which his death had brought. There was the pain of bereavement in His own heart; there was pitiful sympathy with the poor sisters; and there was also the clear sight of the sadness of human life. It was impossible that the Son of Man should stand in the close presence of this one sorrow, and not feel all the great sea of sorrows, of which this was a single wave, beating upon His heart out of all the lands and all the ages! He saw the great cloud of misery overshadowing the world; He heard the great chorus of lamentation going up from the human heart; all this was in the deep groan which we can hear to-day, as millions have heard it before us, which burst from His lips as He went among the weeping family to the tomb of Lazarus of Bethany.

Is human life a joyous or a gloomy thing? This is the question to which the picture of the Son of

Man in His sorrow may naturally lead our thoughts. Strange enough it is that, after all these generations and centuries of human living, men should still ask themselves that question and differ from themselves and from each other about its answer. It is a very pathetic sign of what a confused, entangled thing the world’s life is, that men cannot decide whether it is a melancholy or a splendid thing to live, and that he whose judgment runs either way shows at once his eagerness to believe, and his doubt whether his belief is right, by the way in which he denounces and almost hates the man who judges differently from himself. The man who praises life detests the man who darkens life with blame; and the man who blames life despises him who praises it. There is no battle like the battle of the optimists and pessimists. Surely it must be a mysterious thing on whose essential quality men who are always so intimately dealing with it cannot decide. Surely there must be some deeper method of answering the question than that which depends on the whim of the moment or the temperament of the man who gives the answer. Let us see whether we can make any progress towards an answer in our study of to-day.

Our time is remarkable, among many other things, for the frequency and the urgency with which the question whether human life is intrinsically joyous or sorrowful is being asked. That question has always rested on the heart of man; it has always broken from his life, but we think never as to-day. So much of the first boyish, unquestioning simplicity of life is lost, so complicated and self-conscious and self-watchful has the human heart become, that it is not possible to say to this full-grown human being as you might once have said to humanity in its childhood, “It is not right to ask the question. Do your duty and ask nothing about happiness.” The question of happiness, if not our own happiness, yet our brother-man’s, reaches everywhere. It infects even the idea of duty. It must be answered. It is getting its answer, wisely or unwisely, in every heart. Therefore it is good for us to study.

You will see from the text which I have chosen how I would approach the question. It is through the consciousness of Christ. It certainly will be much to us if we can know how the world looked to Him, whether the color of life was dark or bright to those clear deep eyes which looked on it so humanly and so divinely. Who would not give anything to ask Him if we could find Him on our streets? For all men who have seen Him have felt sure that, looking into Him, they looked into the very consciousness of God, which is the final fact of things. The sum of all the world’s complicated doctrines concerning Christ is this — that in Him man finds both himself and the God to whom he belongs, and so is able to read that truth which exists in the essential relation of the human life to the divine. Therefore it is that he who can learn how life appears to Christ will learn how it appears to God, and how it really is, behind all its appearances, to man.

It is good for us to verify and to correct our own judgments by those of other men, of larger, wiser men, and, wherever we can get glimpses of it, by the judgment of that universal humanity which is wiser than the wisest of the human beings whom it includes. Not even that judgment, when we have found it, can violently dispossess our own and take its place; but it may — if we are broadminded and true, it must — enrich our judgment into its likeness, fulfil us with itself. This is what it does for me when I see Christ’s thought, which is both human and divine. His thought does not kill my thought and set itself into its place. It changes my thought into itself. It turns out what is false in my thought and develops what is true; and so I come to think like Christ because other thought becomes impossible. So let us seek Christ’s thought about the happiness and the unhappiness of human life. As soon as we ask the question there comes up to our memory, out of the Gospels which tell His story, two classes of His acts and words. One class is full of the sense of the joy of living. It begins with the wonder of a chorus of angels welcoming His birth. It goes on with the picture of a healthy, happy boyhood, of the first keen appetite for knowledge, of brave, enthusiastic young friendships, of the chance and desire to do good, of sympathetic intercourse with nature, of rapt intercourse with God, of great visions into the future, and at last of a complete triumph over death, — all of these blossoming out into rich words of joyousness, of trust, of hope. No man can read these pages of the life of Jesus and not know that life was joyful and beautiful to

Him. And at the same time, while anybody reads this life, he is all the time aware that it is not all. There are dark passages along with the bright ones everywhere. The songs of the angels at His birth are lost almost immediately in the cries of the childmartyrs who are murdered out of hate of Him. Then come the persecutions and the misconceptions and the awful scenes of sorrow, and the perpetual appeals of wretchedness for help. Then comes the betrayal by those whom He had trusted and the weakness of those whom He would fain make strong. There is the blow and blank of death. There is the sin which makes life worse than death. All of these pressed in upon a sensitiveness surpassing in exquisiteness what any other being ever carried. At the very outset, at the very first sight this is clear — that neither side of our human life had hid itself from Jesus. Each side of it had pled its cause before Him. Its joy had said, “Behold, how good it is to live.” Its pain had cried, “Behold, how life is horrible!” Evidently the judgment which this Jesus makes must be made with the sound of both of these voices, and must include the truth which each of them tells. He cannot be ignorant of either. He cannot judge life as a pampered weakling who knows only its luxury, nor as an embittered savage who has known nothing but its pain. They will both be there. His judgment of life will be large enough to hold them both.

But then we come at once to something else. This Christ, the more we think concerning Him, impresses us with a sublime unity of nature. Whatever various elements combine in Him cannot exist in conflict. They must be in some deeper harmony with one another. It cannot be that any being can permanently live with two ideas, inconsistent with each other, ruling in succession, first one and then the other holding possession of the life. It cannot be that now the thought of life as misery and now the thought of life as happiness should rule — one holding the other, its rival, under foot. Both must be always true. Only one must be permanently master, and the other must be always subject. Which shall be which? Shall life be wretchedness, with strange, unaccountable, tantalizing, exasperating flashes of happiness flung here and there upon its darkness, making its great stretches only more dark? Or shall life be one great deep stream of joy, ever and anon darkening and ensnarling itself in suffering, but always unsnarling and brightening itself again, and always keeping its great course unturned, its great song unsilenced, below every hindrance or discord which may disturb its bosom?

Which of these two — for one or other it must be — which of these two is Christ’s idea of human life? Can there be any doubt? Consider the very names He loves to bear. He is Jesus. He is the Saviour. He is Christ, the anointed one. His work is a redemption. What do those words mean? Do they not of necessity involve the truth that in behind and up above and down below all life there is one great unchanged purpose of good, that every evil is a departure from that purpose, that out of the soul of that purpose He has come, that to restore all life to that purpose is the hope and unchangeable intention of His soul? These are the first necessary meanings of Jesus. They are not merely the truths He teaches but the truths He is. It is in virtue of their being true that He is here at all. What then? The soul which carries in itself these truths has but ne view of life possible for it. For it the good was before the evil, and will be after it, and is beneath it all the time. And therefore joy and the certainty that life means joy, — joy darkened and puzzled a thousand times, but never extinguished, joy always present as the fundamental consciousness of life, — is the only possible condition for that soul. And that soul supremely was the soul of Christ.

This is what Christ must have been by the necessary conditions of His being. And this is what He actually was. It is impossible to read His story with clear eyes and carry away any other picture. All His sorrow gets its intensity from the interruption which it makes to His joy. All His disappointment is dark by the shadow which is cast by His inextinguishable hope. His hate of evil is deep in proportion as His love of good is high. He expects man to be happy and never recovers from the horror of the fact that man is sad.

The world has always felt this character in Christ. It has said, “How could He feel so?” but it has never been able to doubt or to deny that He did feel so. One effort it has made to reconcile His sense that life was good with its own misgivings and belief that life was bad and sad. It has imputed to Him some notion of election. It has tried to make out that it was to some small select privileged minority of human kind that He promised such special blessings as made it worth while for them to live; while to the great majority He left life a weary waste of woe, only touched here and there with mocking and delusive images of happiness. Men have imagined such things of Jesus, but their imaginings have always failed to hold. They have fallen away from Him, and left Him, what by the necessity of His nature, He must be, — the life, the praise, declaring that life is good, and protesting with all His soul against the misery and evil which have invaded and infected and disguised its goodness.

But there is more than this. This would seem almost to depict Jesus as changing constantly; now mourning over the world’s evil, now triumphing in the world’s good; and only reassured by the unchanging certainty that the good was before the evil and should be after it, that God was stronger than the devil. This were mere dualism, dividing the world between two masters, one stronger than the other, but each certainly sole ruler of his special kingdom. More intimate in the experience of Jesus is the connection of the sorrow and the joy. More perfect is the unity of His experience. Not merely in the same life but in the same thought, in the same deed the two, the joy and sadness, are united. After such union they have always been struggling in the minds of all serious men. Some men have tried to believe that, after all, the good and evil were but one, that in their essence was no difference. “Evil is imperfect good, good in the making,” they have tried to say. But against that teaching the human conscience always has rebelled. And Jesus, whose conscience always was as clear as crystal, never believed or taught like that. Two things, however, He did teach regarding the connection of the evil and the good. One was, that they took shape from the same universal circumstances of human life, and so that the same identical causes produced sorrow and joy. It was the same perpetual relationship of man with man, the same persistent free will which belonged to the first idea of humanity, the same physical na ture with its passions and desires, which gave occa» sion alike to the sublimest heroism and to the basest self-indulgence, to the purest of human pleasure and the most exquisite of human pain. The other truth was that evil, though really evil, may be turned in its results to good. By discipline, by the revelation which it brings, pain may become the seed of joy, and even sin become the door to holiness. These are profound parts of the life and teaching of the Lord which every Christian deeply knows. By them these two discordant portions of the world are brought together. They must not be confounded with any base and blundering ideas of men that good and evil are not intrinsically different, but only seem different in the thought of men, or that evil may be done for the sake of good results. There is nothing of these ideas in Jesus; but the two truths which I just tried to state, and which are always in His mind, make joy and sorrow always parts of the one same world, and keep them always in relation to each other, while they never lose the inalienable kingship of good and the great right of joy to rule the world.

It is the constant presence of these two ideas, I think, in Jesus which makes the freedom and directness and simphcity of all His dealing with mankind. He sees a man bad and unhappy. He knows full well how large a part of that man’s wickedness and sorrow is bound up with the circumstances in which the man is living. He will set the reforming power of His Gospel at work to change those circumstances. Perhaps He will bid the man himself change them immediately, as when He commanded the rich young man to go and sell his property and give it all away. But He knows these two things: first, that the same eternal causes and circumstances which are making that man bad and unhappy may, if he treat them rightly, make him good and happy; second, that out of the very heart of evil, by the power of a new life in the man’s heart, rich good may come. It is evident that to anyone who is in the power of these two truths, circumstances cannot be of the first importance. It is good that they should be altered and improved, but the new life must not wait for their improvement. The man is everything. Here is the directness and simplicity of Jesus. Here is the clearness and power with which He strikes directly at the wicked nature and the unhappy soul, and says, “Be holy, in spite of every temptation; be happy in spite of every disappointment; and so, in time, about the new heart the new life certainly shall grow.”

Is it not clear enough what influence the perpetual holding of these two truths must have had upon the way in which the misery of human life pressed on the soul of Christ. They saved Him from despair. They let Him feel the whole weight of the world’s suffering and yet be filled with hope. This is what seems to many people to be so hard as to be quite impossible; it seems to be almost an insult to the world to be hopeful of it. It seems to be a sign of imperfect, insufficient sympathy to be able to expect the ultimate breaking away of the clouds and breaking forth of the sun. We have all known sick people whose feelings were hurt if you ventured to tell them that some day they would get well. It was a sign that you did not know or care how sick they were. And so men say, “Ah, if you felt the misery of life as I do, if these cries were in your ears which ring in mine, if these sights haunted your eyes which I never can shut out, if your heart were as tender and exposed as mine is, you could not sing your cheery song of hope, or dream that life ever could be cleared to sunshine.” I do not know! I think it probably is quite impossible to make any comparison of the way in which the world’s sorrow weighs on any two human souls. The difference is too much one of kind as well as of degree. But this must always be most significant — that He who past all doubt felt the world’s pain and bore its burden on His soul most heavily, was at the same time supremely full of hope. It was because these truths were always present to His soul: First, that the causes which make evil may make good; and, second, that out of evil good may come.

Remember a single instance of His hopefulness. Think of poor Mary of Magdala. Men called her hopeless and abandoned. Who had abandoned her? They who had not depth or faith enough to hope. She came to Jesus, and He saw two things concerning her, — that the same passion with which she had sinned might have been in her the power of triumphant and enthusiastic goodness; and that she might be all the stronger for her weakness, all the purer because of her past impurity. In the power of these two truths His soul was filled with hope which passed over into her soul and saved her. And at the Cross and by the tomb and in the resurrectiongarden, she was nearest to the Saviour and first in the privilege of the new life.

This, then, at least is clear about the power which the world’s life had on Jesus — that the pain and the happiness, both of which it certainly brought, were very closely mingled with each other. Let shallower souls live in perpetual attenuation of joy and sorrow. To Jesus there was no joy which had not in it the power of sorrow; there was no sorrow which had not at its heart a beating possibility of joy. I think there can have been nothing which He did, and nothing which He saw, in which both were not present. A child was born and the splendor of the sunrise filled Christ’s heart, and at the same time the perils of the perilous hours of a human existence must have made His eyes run down with tears. Did He rejoice in man’s power of free-willed independence? He must at the same instant have shuddered when He remembered the power of wickedness which it involved. Did He see a group of men gathered together on the street, or a family assembled in their home? The beauty of the social instinct warmed Him and threw its light around Him, and the pains of partings and the mischiefs of evil influence threw their darkness on His sunshine like a cloud. He saw men working, and the exaltation and the drudgery of labor both took possession of His thought. He saw men die, and, with one single throb of His heart, the fulfilment of the vanished life in the higher world which it had entered and the awful dreariness and desolation which its vanishing had left behind it in the broken home, — the two together, not separate but as one single emotion, compact of triumph and pity, richened his ever-richening human life. He came at last to die Himself, and who shall separate as they blend with each other in His soul upon the Cross, His sorrow for the world’s sin which needs redemption and His thankfulness for the privilege of redeeming it? There is nothing which can more reveal Christ to us in His completeness than this mysterious and intimate mingling of joy and pain with one another in His every act and experience of life.

Do we not know something of it in ourselves, dear friends? In every deepest moment of our life have not joy and sorrow met in closest and most bewildering union? When your friend died, what a strange vision of the immortal world, shot through with the shafts of desolation and bereavement and the unnaturalness of dying! When you saw heroic poverty making character shine in the hard struggle with contempt and need, could you separate your pity from your thankfulness? Was there ever a great success of your life which did not make you sad and sober? Was there ever a great disappointment of your life which, even while you felt its weight pressing upon you, did not begin to turn that weight to wings and inspire you with the sense of a new freedom? Has the home ever been broken by sickness, that some new light has not come in through the chinks? It is not mere consolation of pain by pleasure, nor paying off of pleasure with pain, nor rhythmic beat and necessary ordered succession of the two to one another; it is the mystery of a life disordered and yet full of healthy action, in which each act must feel the full condition of the life of which it is a part; where no gladness can be wholly glad nor any sadness wholly sad because, though sin is in the world, it is God’s world still.

The world has had its centuries of sorrow and its centuries of joy. There have been ages in which history has gone burdened with the awfulness of living and the weight of sin. Then there have been other ages which have tried to forget all that and know nothing in the world but light and music. The trouble is that the two kinds of ages have kept aloof from one another. Their spirits would not mingle. The light-hearted Renaissance came only when the frightened Middle Ages were creeping off into the darkness. It was not till the gloom of Puritanism disappeared that the revel of the Restoration seized upon English life. Some day an age must come in which the seriousness of living and the joy of living must blend with one another and make something richer than either can be by itself. In the best character of our own century it sometimes seems as if we could feel its coming. When it has come the world may be less gloomily despairing and less wildly gay than it has sometimes been, but it will be a healthier, wholesomer world to live in. It is the poet’s dream of the future:

“Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age

More fortunate, alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,

And gay without frivolity. Sons of the world, oh, speed those years!

But while we wait allow our tears.”

In the Bible, the Old Testament has clear-cut, sharply distinguishable pictures of misery and joy. The wretched is apt to be all wretchedness and the delightsome all delight. But in the New Testament there is in every scene the subtle meeting of joy and pain, which makes it the true book of life. Who can tell whether the parable of the prodigal son is more full of sadness or of gladness? Men have called the Old Testament optimistic and the New Testament pessimistic. But each is too great for those partial names. And the New Testament as the great book of God and man holds together in its clear transparency the deep sorrow and the deeper joy of the life which man lives in his own weakness always unfolded in the strength and love of God. And the heart of the New Testament is the soul of Christ.

And now what shall we say? Have we at all done what we wanted to do, and seen at all how this strange puzzle of a world looked to the eyes of Jesus, and what impression it fixed upon His soul? I think, in some degree, we have. I think I can look into His eyes and see how He regards it. Never are those eyes shut for a moment on its darkest tragedies. The wrongs and sorrows and perplexities, the cruel taunts of the oppressors, the deep sighing of the prisoners, mingle with every moment’s music. He escapes no suffering by refusing to see and hear. He gains no complacence by indifference. At every moment He is conscious of the evil and the sad. But at every moment also He is conscious also of immortality and God. Therefore in all that mingled life, hope and joy are supreme. Despair is impossible. It is a world worth living for, worth dying for! And the life goes on its way, not thundering a chorus of light-hearted triumph which would have seemed to mock men’s hearts, but singing low and strong a strain of hope and certain faith which has given courage to souls less clear-sighted and more ready to despair.

I said at the beginning that what we found Jesus to be we must ourselves become, not simply because He was it, but because the sight of it in Him became to us both revelation and power, showing us that it was the only thing for us to be content with being, and helping us to be it. Shall not the image of the divine soul of Christ responding to the world full of sorrow, open some deeper and healthier possibilities and hopes in us? What shall they be? Let me try to tell you as I bring my sermon to its end.

First, we will never shut our eyes or ears. We will not say that all is right when we know that very much is very wrong. Better almost despair than wilful self-indulgent blindness. Better to be overwhelmed than to stand on the firm shore with unwet feet, with our backs to the great sea of misery and sin which rolls and welters in its helplessness.

But. second, we will never let the two sides of life be separated from each other. Riches and poverty, failure and success, sorrow and joy, evil and good, shall be parts of one life and feel one another’s presence. So shall all happiness be kept earnest with pity, and all unhappiness be kept patient and brave with hope.

For, third, it shall be in a world which is always God’s world that the two stand in the presence of each other. The evil shall not have an equal chance with the good. Mercy and immortality — a divine power and a long abundant time — shall keep the good and the happy always in the place of advantage, always really master of the field.

To him who thus looks at the world and its distresses, what a chance of growing character and what an impulse of undiscouraged work are always abundantly supplied.

O my friends, you must not be careless and you must not despair. Your hearts must grow as Christ’s did, but your steps must not turn back from the grave on which the stone is laid. For God is omnipotent and man is immortal! Therefore be patient and work! The end shall certainly be joy, not sorrow. The stone shall roll away and the dead come forth. Alas for him who in this world of sorrow dares to be a trifler! Alas for him who in this world of God ceases to hope! The end shall certainly be peace. God help us all to hasten that great end by patient, faithful, cheerful service!