JOIN THEM IN THEIR JOY

By: American Decency Staff

As Christians who take the Bible’s teaching on heaven and hell seriously, we are often faced with the tension between the mundane joys of life and the reality of the eternal stakes. During certain seasons of my life this tension has been paralyzing. How could I attend a college football game knowing that thousands of my fellow fans were lost and perishing? How could I enjoy the simple joys of picnics and Frisbee when many of those passing by were accursed and cut off from Christ? How can I experience and enjoy the normal delights of human life when we’re all perched on a ledge with the New Jerusalem on one side and the burning fields of Gehenna on the other, and millions traveling the broad way that leads to destruction?

I thought about these questions recently as I was reading The Brothers Karamazov with my students. After the death of the beloved elder Zosima, Alyosha Karamazov is torn between the sanctified life of the monastery and his concern for his debauched father and unbelieving brothers. In the midst of his wrestling, Alyosha has a strange experience, an encounter with the grace of the God that marks him for the rest of his life. While meditating on Christ’s first miracle at Cana of Galilee, Alyosha is stunned afresh by Jesus’s surprising way of fulfilling his mission: 

Christ visited [men’s joy] when he worked his first miracle, he helped men’s joy . . . He who loves men, loves their joy . . . [He did not come down] just for his great and awful deed [the cross], but his heart was also open to the simple, artless merrymaking of some uncouth but guileless beings, who lovingly invited him to their poor marriage feast.

Alyosha’s epiphany cut through the tension I feel between the simple joys and the eternal stakes. It revealed how much I need a bigger heart, one that’s big enough both to preach the great and awful deed, and to be open to simple and artless merrymaking. I need a heart deeply convinced that life is deadly serious, and therefore refuses to take myself so seriously. I need a heart that deeply delights in watching the game with friends, and does so precisely because we’re standing on hell’s overlook.

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