Peace and the Practice of Joy

Scripture — Philippians 4:4-7 (NRSV)

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Devotion

In the opening chapter of The Return of the King, the final volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, we come to one of the darkest moments of the tale when all the plans of the heroes seem to have gone astray. The Fellowship is in shambles, torn asunder with at least one member dead, and more bad news has now come to Gandalf. The hobbit Pippin and the wizard Gandalf stand by a window looking at fields that will soon be besieged by a vast enemy army. Tolkien’s narrator describes the scene from the perspective of Pippin, who is gazing at Gandalf. “Yet in the wizard’s face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow; though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy: a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth.” Circumstances are certainly dire with little reason for happiness. And yet, though Gandalf has good cause for grief and fear, he nonetheless has within him a deep well of joy that doesn’t deny his circumstances, yet transcends them.

A week ago, my devotion for the second week of Advent came from Philippians 1:3-11. Although that lectionary reading didn’t explicitly mention peace, I suggested that it provides important pointers that can help us experience peace. Today we sit in the middle of the third week of Advent whose theme is joy. Our passage is from late in the same letter from Paul to the church at Philippi. Though Philippians 4:4-7 does not use joy as a noun, it does use the verb rejoice—a word that is etymologically related to joy in both the Greek of Paul’s letter and in our English translation. One central meaning of the word rejoice is to be joyful—that is: to have joy. The passage also could have fit into last week’s Advent theme, as it contains one of the most famous and oft-quoted passages about peace in the entire Bible. There is a suggestion here of an important relationship between joy and peace.

A first observation is that the verb rejoice is used in the imperative sense: it is stated as a command; Paul is instructing his readers to be joyful. This tells us that joy is not merely a feeling that we have no control over, but rather something we can choose to practice. It would be foolish for Paul to exhort his readers to be joyful if their joy was something they had no control over. Although letters can be read multiple times by their recipients—and this letter almost certainly was!—Paul self-consciously repeats the command, drawing attention to that repetition: “I will say it again!”, a rhetorical device more common in speech than in writing.

Paul follows with a second, third, and fourth command in quick succession: 2. Let your gentleness be evident to all; 3. Do not be anxious about anything; and 4. in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Paul then makes a promise which seems to be conditional on obedience to these commands: if you want to experience a supernatural peace that comes only from God, do these four things and God will give you peace, and it will guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus. In a Life for Leaders devotion for May 13, 2022, I wrote about the relationship between gentleness and peace suggested by this passage. And in a May 14, 2022 devotion, I wrote about thankfulness and joy and their relationship to peace—how practicing joy is one of the most important steps toward experiencing peace. But how do we practice joy? To answer that I want to suggest something about the nature of joy.

Some philosophical traditions have spoken of humans as beings of body, mind, and spirit (or soul). We even have words that describe the experiences of each of these. When our body feels good, we often call that good feeling pleasure. For me, it can be produced by a hot bath on a cool day, a cool breeze on a hot day, good dark chocolate, or some rich and creamy ice cream. Pain is the antithesis of pleasure. When our mind is in a good state, we call it happiness. Though pleasure may help us feel happy, happiness is a very different thing. Being with my family makes me happy, as does gazing at beautiful scenery, neither of which brings me any physical pleasure. Indeed, some of my happy moments are at the end of a long and tiring hike to a beautiful place, when my body is stiff and sore and not at all in a pleasurable state.

Joy, in contrast to either bodily pleasure or happiness, is a state of our spirit. When our spirit is in a good state, we call it joy. And just as it is possible to be happy even when our bodies do not feel pleasure, so it is also possible to experience joy even when our circumstances are not happy—which is precisely what J.R.R. Tolkien models through Gandalf in the scene from The Lord of the Rings. Thus Paul can instruct Christians to rejoice without the command being a taunt.

Since joy is a spiritual state, the deepest joy comes from the life of the spirit and especially from our relationship with God: from the Holy Spirit’s dwelling in us and from our listening to and following the Spirit’s leading. There are many aspects to how we practice joy, but I will suggest two. The first answer, of course, is to dwell in the Holy Spirit and let the Spirit bear in our lives the fruit of joy (Gal 5:22-23). Of course, this is a long-term practice to increase our experience of joy, and opening ourselves to the Spirit’s work involves Christian community, regular and intentional time in fellowship with God, and various spiritual practices. Is there something we can do in the short term to experience joy? Again I think the answer is yes. Part of what we must do is turn our thoughts on God and dwell on his love, character, and goodness. (Bringing our prayers to God is the fourth of Paul’s imperatives in this passage!) But I think we can do more, and it may sound trite. We can choose joy just as we can choose in our actions to love somebody even when we don’t feel loving at the moment. We can rejoice with our words, praising God for his goodness. This does not negate sadness, nor does it remove the importance of lament; it simply acknowledges that amid all the pain and loss and suffering of the world, and all the bad news, God is still with us, and his plans are good. Simply to state that fact is an act of rejoicing.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Resolving Conflict (Philippians 4:2–9).