Surprised by Joy

That passage from the book of Ecclesiates is extraordinary. It captures a mood with which just about all of us can identify.

‘Futility, utter futility, says the Speaker, everything is futile… All things are wearisome. What has happened will happen again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun… It is all futility and a chasing of the wind...’

The Speaker is bored - bored, bored, bored. There is nothing new. Everything is wearisome - boring. He is cynical and weary, fed up and utterly without joy or hope. Just bored. More bored than a ten year old in the summer holidays. More bored than a delayed train traveller without a newspaper. Bored, bored, bored. I remember once, when I was a student, that this passage was read in chapel. And at the end of the reading, the reader said, as he usually did, ‘This is the word of the Lord’. But it plainly isn’t the word of the Lord - or at least this is not God speaking. Because whatever we believe about God we cannot believe that God is bored or weary with the world God has made. And neither does it seem possible to believe that in God’s world it could be true that all is boring and empty and without meaning. Karl Barth, the great German theologian, once told preachers that there was no excuse ever for being boring in the pulpit - his words of course haunt me! - because the Gospel we proclaim is the life giving joyful message of God’s love and redemption. To make that somehow boring is the chief of sins. But may it not be so for all Christians, that it is, if not a sin, then at least a tragedy, to become so empty and cynical that we can agree with the Speaker in Ecclesiates? To be bored is to forget the Gospel. To find joy again and even sorrow too - is to find God once more.

In the passage set for today in Mark’s Gospel, the people of Nazareth have been listening to a preacher in the synagogue. They expected him to be rather pedestrian, not very erudite or interesting - because he was only the son of the local carpenter, one of five brothers and countless sisters they knew very well. They settled down for a snooze in whatever the synagogue offered instead of pews. But they were proved wrong and everyone was talking about it for weeks. This was the best preacher they had ever heard in their lives before. And they were amazed. But, despite their amazement, they turned against him, because he was only a local lad and they didn’t like those who got above themselves. And then Mark records that Jesus was ‘taken aback’ by their want of faith. It seems odd at first to read that Jesus was ‘taken aback’, odd to think that anything surprised him. We may not have the kind of belief that would expect Jesus to know everything in advance about everything, but we might have expected that Jesus would be so full of wisdom and understanding that nothing would ever really surprise him. We might expect him to say, with a kind of world-weariness, ‘well, it doesn’t surprise me’, ‘what do you expect?’, or even, ‘there’s nothing new under the sun.’ But he wasn’t like that. According to Mark, Jesus was ‘taken aback’. He too was astonished. It seems strange to think of any of the Jesuses we have seen on film being astonished. They usually sail through everything, even crucifixion, unruffled. But Mark tells us that Jesus - like all the others of the human race who are truly alive - could be astonished. He was astonished at unbelief where he found it - incredulous that people could rubbish an exciting preacher because his accent wasn’t right or his education thin, or his address not smart enough. And we can surely imagine that he was astonished at other times too - joyfully surprised to meet his friends unexpectedly, happy at the birth of a baby or the news of a marriage, bowled over by the beauty of a sunset, delighted when people did respond to his teaching and turn to God. To be capable of being surprised, taken aback or astonished is a huge sign that you are a human being. And Jesus was thoroughly and complete human - just as he was also divine. The boredom and cynicism of the speaker in Ecclesiastes is a sign of a rotten and decayed humanity. It comes to all of us sometimes - when we are depressed, grieving, suffering - but to live always like that, with the absolute conviction that nothing could ever be new or exciting, that everything is pointless and meaningless, is not to live as a human being at all. It is already to be on the road to death. To live as God made us to live is to believe that there is always the possibility of something new, to live always open to being astonished and surprised, to live with the hope that even death itself cannot render life meaningless or ended.

Several years ago, the Jesuit writer Gerard Hughes published a book called God of Surprises. He wrote honestly about how he had become bored with the Christian faith - its words and teachings so familiar that they meant nothing much at all. But then he wrote,

‘God is the God of surprises who, in the darkness and tears of things, breaks down our false images and securities… Through this painful in-breaking of the God of surprises, truths of Christian faith with which I was familiarly bored, or doubted, began to take on new meaning.’

It may be that you have shared that experience of feeling bored with the faith you hold. It doesn’t excite you any more. You have ceased to read your Bible regularly. A service seems like an hour to be got through as you have always done, but does not really move you. Even Christmas and Easter seem like stories told too often. If ever we feel like this, we can only pray that the God of surprises will return once more to astonish us with the truth of God’s love and joy.

But it may be also that, like the Speaker in Eccelsiastes, you are not simply bored with God, but bored with life. You have lost the sense of wonder and surprise that makes a human being. If Gerard Hughes is right then ‘Wonder is the beginning of wisdom’. And to be emptied of wonder is not only to be devoid of wisdom it is also to be emptied of life. It is part of life to feel like this sometimes - an inevitable and painful part of life. But we all need those who will guide us back to joy and wonder, even from the deepest pain, if we are to find life again. We have all, at some time, known what it is when life seems to go dead and what once caused us pleasure and delight now leaves us unmoved, so that we live in a state of listlessness and apathy. We have all known days like that. But it is a sign of our humanity that we are capable of being surprised again - surprised even by joy - or even just taken aback - as Jesus was that day in Nazareth. Someone once said that God ‘is a beckoning word’. God calls us out of ourselves and beyond ourselves - God is the God of surprises, always creating something new. That’s why a church that is boring or a person who is utterly cynical - cannot be a sign of God’s presence in the world. God is the tremendous and fascinating mystery at the heart of all things - and far from boringly futile - God and the world God has made are endlessly fascinating and amazing.

C.S.Lewis wrote an account of his conversion to Christianity - the story of how the most dejected and reluctant of men became a Christian. He called his account simply Surprised by Joy. Joy being not simply happiness or pleasure, but that longing, that restlessness for eternity - which will never let us settle for the banal and the commonplace, but leaves us searching and yearning for … for God. One writer has said this of joy,

‘Happiness turns up more or less where you’d expect it to - a good marriage, a rewarding job, a pleasant vacation. Joy, on the other hand, is as notoriously unpredictable as the one who bequeathes it.’

To be truly human is to be open to the unpredictable, to be prepared to be taken aback, to be surprised by joy. The cynic expects nothing but emptiness and futility. The naïve fool expects happiness. The saint is prepared to be surprised by joy - or indeed prepared to be surprised by whatever God brings. The bored writer of Ecclesiastes speaks to an experience we many of us share at some point during our lives. As one person puts it,

‘Ecclesiastes speaks to people in tough binds, people with vendettas, a bone to pick, no dog to kick, the sour-grapers, the hurt, those who’ve never shucked off their adolescent angst.’

And that’s true. But we all of us have to get through the tough binds one day and discover that life is not futile after all. And if we are given grace to do that, that might come as just the kind of surprise we had learnt not to expect.

There’s a children’s story called Not Now Bernard. A small boy tells his busy parents that there is a monster in the garden. They respond wearily, ‘not now Bernard’. He tells them that the monster has come into his bedroom. ‘Not now Bernard’. He tells them that the monster is trying to eat him. ‘Not now Bernard’. And then there is only a monstrous belch to be heard - as the monster has eaten him up. And at last, but too late, the parents look round to give Bernard some attention. Adults learn too easily the expectation that life will have neither monsters nor angels - that it will simply be dull. We learn to say wearily, ‘Not now God’ - as we fold the latest pile of washing, file the latest report, or tumble into bed at the end of another busy or another dull day. We rarely rise to meet the day, asking what new thing will happen, what new song we shall sing for joy or for sorrow. And yet, and yet - the Bible and the faith we hold calls us to hope that God will surprise us - that the death and despair we expect will be transformed into new life. The psalmist exhorts us each day to ‘sing a new song to the Lord’. I ask you, this week, to hope to be taken aback - to have at least one new thought, voice one new prayer, read a passage from the Bible that you have not really looked at before. Feel what you must feel, rejoice or be sorrowful, weep or laugh, but resist the temptation to be bored or cynical or weary of God. Let God astonish you with God’s love and joy, for then you will know that it is not ‘futility and chasing after the wind’ - but that human life may be filled with beauty and holiness and joy. May it be so for you and for all God’s people. Amen.