What is the source of joy? Where does joy come from? And why is joy an important theme in the Bible?
The answer to these important questions is, ultimately, God.
In both the Old and New Testament, joy is said to be true of God. Elsewhere in the Bible, it is also said to be a characteristic of God’s people. In Psalm 43, a book that Christians and Jews sometimes call ‘‘the Prayer Book of the Bible’’, the writer refers to God as ‘‘my exceeding joy’’.
We live in bewildering and difficult times and I have found myself meditating on that turn of phrase, ‘‘God my exceeding joy’’.
I’ve also asked myself what characterises the person who considers God to be their ‘‘exceeding joy’’.
The answer, I suggest: the person who is able to confess God as their ‘‘exceeding joy’’ is the person who prays.
Prayer is a simple and yet complex business. Prayer takes many forms.
One of the most common forms of prayer involves asking God for God’s blessing. For example, before I start work on my current book project or teach a class, I take up a prayer of St Thomas Aquinas (1223-74).
St Thomas is the leading theologian of the Middle Ages, and one of the most formidable thinkers in the Christian theological tradition. As a scholar and teacher of the Christian faith, he lived a life of voluntary poverty and prayer.
Interestingly, there is a residential college at the University of Otago named after him, Aquinas College, founded by the Dominican Order, the same order to which Aquinas belonged.
I have a collection of St Thomas’s prayers on my desk. One of his most eloquent and meaningful prayers is his prayer for God’s blessing.
This prayer has helped me (and many others) in my pilgrimage towards ‘‘God my exceeding joy’’.
What’s striking about this prayer is its focus on the attributes of God. St Thomas praises God’s ‘‘compassion’’, ‘‘tenderness’’, ‘‘kindness’’, ‘‘mercy’’, ‘‘goodness’’, ‘‘forbearance’’, ‘‘humility’’, ‘‘patience’’, ‘‘eternity’’ and ‘‘truth’’.
In the midst of his prayer of praise, St Thomas writes ‘‘what can I proclaim, my God, about your ineffable generosity?’’.
Prayer is a means by which what is true of God — ‘‘exceeding joy’’ — becomes true of us. The Psalms (the Prayer Book of the Bible) declare goodness, beauty and truth are found in God.
The Psalms also make clear that God longs to share with us this goodness, beauty, truth and joy.
If joy is indeed true of God, and if joy is what God desires to share with the world God so loves, then joy isn’t some kind of sentimental feeling or cheap optimism.
Christians and Jews believe joy belongs to God, and Christians believe this joy has come to the world in the Jew, Jesus, fulfilling the promises God made to his people, the Jews.
Joy characterises the season of Easter, one of the key seasons in the Christian calendar. The good news at the heart of the Easter season is that death and all that distorts, corrupts and devastates life in God’s good creation has been destroyed through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This news is so good that I can only receive it through prayer and praise. You could say that I try to live into it by prayer.
Through prayer, I become the kind of person who is more rather than less joyful, more rather than less able to say ‘‘God my exceeding joy’’.
St Thomas concludes his prayer for God’s blessing with thanks to God for ‘‘temporal goods’’, ‘‘eternal good’’, ‘‘the beauty of creation’’ and ‘‘the mercy of redemption’’.
He writes ‘‘for all these I am incapable of sufficient praise’’.
I too am ‘‘incapable’’. All of us, if we are honest with ourselves, are ‘‘incapable’’.
This, however, should not lead us to despair. Over time, the practice of prayer slowly develops our capabilities.
By calling out to God who is ‘‘exceeding joy’’, we can offer adequate praise to the One who is the source and sustainer of all that is good, beautiful and true.
- Christopher Holmes is professor of systematic theology, University of Otago.
