We see so many sad, vacant and downcast faces on our city streets nowadays. There are so many families effected by the scourge of unemployment and humiliating poverty. Many men and women live in anxiety and desperation and lose the courage to go on. Numerous young people live with uncertainty and are unable to make plans for their future. Some people even speak of a betrayed generation. In situations like these it is hard to speak about joy. It becomes a real challenge. However, human beings cannot live without joy and hope and without a future. Hope is like oxygen for us. Without hope we would suffocate. Therefore there is an urgent need to rediscover the reasons for the hope that Jesus brought to the world by being born in Bethlehem. It is a hope that does not disappoint. It is greater and more powerful than the huge challenges and difficulties present in today’s world. We must also rediscover the reasons for Christian joy. It is not an optional extra, but is an essential component in the life of each of Christ’s disciples. The psalmist assures us of the God “who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry... the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous...” (Ps 146:6-8). The prophet Isaiah says: “Say to those who have an anxious heart, ‘Be strong; fear not!... He will come and save you’” (Is 35:4). Saint Paul in the New Testament asks us to “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice...” (Phil 4:4). Pope Francis never tires of saying: “Do not allow your hope to be taken from you!” He warns us: “Do not be men and women of sadness. A Christian can never be sad!”.
Joy should be a distinctive trait of Christians in the world. In fact, it should form part of our very identity. Pope Francis opens his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium with these significant words: “The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness. With Christ joy is constantly born anew” (no. 1). We ask ourselves: are our lives really like that? Friedrich Nietzsche, an atheist and philosopher, claimed that we Christians are not very credible because our faces are often sad and do not convey that we are actually redeemed.
Today’s culture instigates us to spasmodically seek pleasure and gratification that costs us little. We easily allow ourselves to be deluded by seductive and illusory delusions of happiness that the world offers and imposes in several ways. It is true that there are many opportunities for entertainment nowadays (and the media work hard at this!), but the joy they give is not true joy. It is extremely superficial. It is a kind of mask that hides the emptiness, anxiety and deep loss that we often experience. It is a sort of drug that numbs our souls and prevents us from addressing the essential issues of life.
Christian joy is completely different from the joy that the world gives us. Saint Paul explained the difference when he said: “Rejoice in the Lord always!”. The words “the Lord” are fundamentally important. This is the secret of Christian joy. Christian joy comes from an encounter with a living Person, with Jesus Christ. If we live with Christ and follow him in our lives, if we trust in him completely, even in the dark valley of tears and pain, we do not fear and do not lose true joy. We can paraphrase Pope Francis’ words and say today: let us not allow our joy to be taken from us.
According to Pope Francis, Christian joy also has a very important ecclesial significance. Today we speak often about new evangelisation. The Pope sees joy as being an indispensable component in the evangelising mission of the Church in today’s world. Indeed, he wants joy to be a distinctive feature in this new stage of evangelisation that has been launched by his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.
In order to evangelise the world, it is therefore urgently necessary to rediscover the dimension of joy in Christian life, because, as the Pope tells us: “There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter [...] but surely we all have to let the joy of faith slowly revive as a quiet yet firm trust, even amid the greatest distress” (Evangelii Gaudium, no. 6). This leads to a very concrete description by the Holy Father: “an evangeliser must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral! Let us recover and deepen our enthusiasm, that ‘delightful and comforting joy of evangelizing, even when it is in tears that we must sow… And may the world of our time, which is searching, sometimes with anguish, sometimes with hope, be enabled to receive the good news not from evangelisers who are dejected, discouraged, impatient or anxious, but from ministers of the Gospel whose lives glow with fervour, who have first received the joy of Christ’” (ibid. no. 10). This is the way that Pope Francis has asked the whole Church to take. This is the dynamic of “missionary conversion” of which we all have need. The Pope says again: “Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of the joy of evangelisation!” (ibid. no. 83).
