Sorrow and Joy Necessary to Each Other

“As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing.”—2 Corinthians vi. 10.

The passage: “As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians vi. 10).

Last Sunday I spoke of this morning’s Epistle. I said that if St. Paul told the Philippians to rejoice at all times while living on this earth, he cannot have meant to tell the Corinthians that they were the most miserable of people while living on the same earth, with their only comfort the hope of escaping it. Looking at what the passage that gave some readers that impression really meant, it became clear that Paul had causes enough for sorrow. If his hopes had been limited to his few years here, he would have been thoroughly wretched. He saw the earth as beautiful, rich with tokens of God’s love. He saw Man as a glorious being, redeemed by the Son of God and united to Him. He looked on his own calling as a herald of good news with thankfulness and exultation. But because the earth showed such signs of a gracious Creator, he could not be content that it should also bear the marks of the Destroyer. The Son of Man had united men to Himself and revealed a Father to them, so Paul could not be content that they should live as outcasts and orphans. And because his message promised blessings that would unfold through ages upon ages, he would not shrink its purpose and fulfilment to the span of this life and our experience of it.

I want to follow the same train of thought today. Many, I can easily imagine, will accept the passage from Philippians as suited to Christmas-time, a festal temper we should try to cultivate even when nature looks wintry, as we think of the Nativity and the old memories of the season. “And yet,” they will say, “the effort is unnatural and cannot be kept up. An Apostle might manage to banish the outward calamities and inward perplexities that harass us every moment. It is a saintly and desirable frame of mind, which we may admire from a distance and now and then try to reach. But the stretched bow springs back. Causes of grief lie very close to us. We may lull grief, but we cannot keep it long out of sight. We may turn to pageants to forget our funerals, but the hearse will always claim some of the pageantry for itself.”

These complaints are reasonable. A preacher must not blame his hearers for fickleness if they remind him of these truths when he repeats the command to rejoice, or if they say they cannot always dwell on what is dismal when he speaks of the shadow of death over all the works of nature and of man. Such opposite objections do show an inward restlessness. But we must have felt that restlessness ourselves, and we ought to understand its cause. We are not acting in the spirit of the Apostles if we fail to recognize the justice of each demand the discontented spirit makes, if we do not admit that it has a right to sorrow as well as to joy and can no more do without one than the other. St. Paul knew this. When he told the Philippians to rejoice, it was not because he failed to see their many motives for sorrow, or because he wanted them to be false with themselves and smother it. He did not practise that fraud on himself. The text says he knew at least as much of one state of mind as of the other, and had found the secret of harmonizing them: sorrowing, yet always rejoicing.

I. It is a paradox, and we all feel it is. Yet the experiences I have just described show that we all sense a truth beneath it, and that we all want a way of mingling sorrow and joy so that neither contradicts or weakens the other. Whoever gives us that secret, and helps us use it in practice, will be the greatest of benefactors. You see people hugging a sorrow and feeding on it. The wild cry of Constance, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child,” has been the cry of many a mother less ungovernable than she. You see that such indulgence is morbid and dangerous, leading to neglect of action and finally to selfishness. But the cures you usually try are feeble. You try to dissipate the patient’s mind, offering other objects so that the one it dwells on is forgotten. Often you succeed. A grief that is unnatural, kept up for self-indulgence or for propriety’s sake, yields to that discipline. But something is destroyed that should have been kept, something inward, not man’s planting but God’s. The waters of Lethe do not purge the spirit. They take away much of what is best and strongest in it and leave weeds and mud behind. Depend on it, sorrow, whatever outward occasion produced it, has something in it that we need and cannot afford to lose. The toad, ugly and venomous, carries a jewel worth more than all earth’s diamonds, and whoever takes it from us is a thief and an enemy.

I repeat, brethren, this holds whatever the occasion or instrument of the sorrow: loss of property, of reputation, of a friend. Do not say to yourself, or to your neighbour, “This is a poor, mean thing to grieve about.” He will grieve, and you will grieve, on some plea or other, whatever you say. It is better to be honest. It is poor business to play tricks on ourselves and then produce a moral to justify them. The loss may well be a calamity. The grief for it is a gift, which like every gift you can turn into a curse, or draw from it the divinest blessing. An illustrious historian of our time said he could see in eminent men of various periods an impoverishment and decay of heart and intellect that dated from a crisis when they had wilfully thrown off some great sorrow which might have given them consistency and depth. The question is whether we shall nurse sorrow as our own, a warrant for disgust and misanthropy, or accept it as a message from above, an Angel of the Covenant, meant to teach us more of our relation to other men and to God.

In this sense, I take it, St. Paul was always sorrowing. There is no trace of morbidness in his Epistles. He is always in action, thinking and feeling for others. He does not stop his work for an instant to dwell on the Christians he persecuted or his share in Stephen’s death. In one most important sense he “forgets the things that are behind”: he will not let them impede him or tempt him to think of himself when he should be thinking of Christ, the deliverer from Self. But in another sense nothing is forgotten. Every word he speaks is coloured and shaped by his past experience, which is stamped and burnt into his discourse because it comes straight from his heart. He is the beaten, flayed man who, according to the poet, alone is really educated. What he has suffered himself lets him look with straight eyes at the sufferings of the world. I say straight eyes, not cold hard ones, not the eyes of a man who sees suffering as an inevitable, hopeless curse. He sees it as a sign of derangement in what is essentially and divinely good, and so it makes him mourn. He sees it as one of the instruments for removing that derangement, and so it cannot make him despair. Paul learnt to sorrow for himself when he learnt to hope for himself. He had known the anguish of conscience and anger with the world, but he did not know sorrow until he had a revelation of One who cared for him, mourned for him, died for him. Then the vision of a Man of Sorrows rose before him, and in that sorrow he saw the full, perfect image of the Father from whom He came. Now he could desire nothing better for himself than a growing share of that sorrow, because to enter it was to enter the mind of Jesus Christ and the Nature of God Himself. So all that was firmest and all that was tenderest in Paul came from his perpetual sorrow. His firmness: he could not treat any suffering as strange or unnatural, having met it in its first principle, embodied and concentrated in Christ’s Passion. He was braced for whatever was appointed him by his very sense that he could bear nothing except in Christ’s strength. He could not grudge suffering to those he cared for most, since it was a sign and pledge of their adoption. And this was also the secret of his tenderness. No kind of suffering stood aloof from him. It was his own and his Master’s, to be borne with Him and for the Church, his vocation and privilege. He would not cheat himself of it by asking what caused the sorrow. If it was the sin of the sufferer, that was reason for more sorrow and sympathy. He might not withhold the correction the sinner needed, or refuse to inflict it himself. But he could judge no man. All the seeds of sin lay in him, ready to start up, and he had known a deeper sin in himself. To feel and sorrow for sin was to sorrow for the sin of the world, which Christ had come to take away.

II. A man who is always sorrowing in this way must also have been always rejoicing. That is the interpretation of St. Paul’s paradox. He did not put it forth to startle us; it was the natural expression of what he felt and knew. There must be an under-pressure equal to the upper pressure. A weight of sorrow like this could be borne only by a joy as great. We confess this in one way or another all the time. The most frivolous person says, “I have had much trouble lately; I must have more than ordinary pleasure and amusement to endure it.” We often denounce such language, and the actions that go with it, as heartless, but there is a meaning in it, though an inverted one. The joy we seek in order to quench sorrow is a poor, flimsy joy, not the one man is entitled to claim, and it does not reach below the surface. The joy “which in our embers is something that doth live” lies at the very root of our being, as necessary to human life as moisture to plants. The frosts of the world seek to kill it, and it would perish in every human being if Heaven did not watch over it. That joy does not try to escape sorrow. It meets sorrow and finds its strength in enduring it.

St. Paul saw an infinite sorrow in the world, which originates in man but with which all nature sympathizes and which it echoes back ten thousand times. But he also saw an infinite joy, likewise in us rather than in nature, yet one to which the trees, flowers, streams and hills will respond if it is in us. He found in the Son of Man the climax of all human sorrow. In the darkness over the land from the sixth to the ninth hour he saw Nature’s witness that for that moment her light, like Man’s, had been quenched. In the same Son of Man and Son of God he owned the source and climax of all human joy: the divine Word, without whom “not anything was made that was made,” in whom was life, and from whom came the life by which all creatures were quickened and gladdened. He recalled the work of the Sorrower on earth: every act took some leprosy, palsy, fever or blindness from the children of men, or some death-anguish from mothers and sisters, and every word showed what mysteries of the divine Kingdom lay hidden in sowing seed, in the husbandman’s work, in common food, in the marriage feast. He could not but believe that there was another cup besides the one the Father gave Him and which He drained to the dregs. The water He spoke of at Jacob’s well, to be in men a well springing up to everlasting life, and the water to which He called all who thirsted at the Feast of Tabernacles, was surely a divine Joy. Only the Spirit of God could awaken it, but the spirit of man was created to receive and pour it out.

Every hour Jesus walked among men He gave them some foretaste of this joy, some token that He came to make them its heirs. But there was one special hour when we are told He rejoiced in His own Spirit, and He gave its cause and subject in these words: “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight. All things are delivered to me of my Father. And no man knoweth who the Son is but the Father, and who the Father is but the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal Him.” I think I read in this record the secret of Paul’s continual joy amid his continual sorrow. Like his Lord he mourned the efforts of the wise and prudent to shut out the light of Heaven, building Babel systems of policy, philosophy and theology, and making men mistake their own unjust and cruel mandates for divine decrees. Like his Lord he rejoiced that the babes of the earth, fishermen and tent-makers, were allowed to show the will of Him who governs all, and to declare that He was no tyrant, as they had imagined, but a Father seeking to bring His children back to the Home they had wandered from. Like his Lord he found perfect comfort in tracing the discomfiture of the proud and the exaltation of the lowly to that Will which is only good and designs only good. And he saw that this Will is the Will of a Father commanding and of a Son submitting, and that in their perfect harmony lies the harmony of the universe. To know the Son through the Father’s revelation, and the Father through the Son’s, with the Spirit who proceeds from both as witness of their eternal unity, is to see where sorrow and joy meet again in the ocean from which they first came.

For us too, brethren, they are different streams, and we need to drink at each; by plunging into one we may learn how near it is to the other. So at this coming Christmas-time let none of us refuse the draughts of sorrow that memories of other years bring. Let us not steel our hearts against faces and forms the eye can no longer see, as if that were a duty to the season or compliance with the Apostle’s precept. Rather let us welcome them, accept their visits thankfully, and be glad to detain them. Do they bring not only the sense of smiles that can never again brighten the circle, but the thought of blessings abused, hard words spoken, and acts that can never be recalled? Cherish that form of sorrow too, and let it mingle with the other. The waters of Lethe will not change its nature, but the blood of Christ will. Out of the hard remorse that is the world’s or the devil’s gift will come the hearty, genial repentance that is God’s. We shall not receive the forgetfulness that is a curse, but the forgiveness that is the divinest of blessings. It will issue from the throne of the Father of all and descend on all through Him who was born of the Virgin and made sin for us. Those we grieve for, each in the voice we knew of old, softened but not changed, will repeat the message. They beckon us to the sorrow that hope fosters and from which hope springs. They bid us mourn that we have so little believed the song of the angels and done so little to give glory to God on earth, spread peace, and establish goodwill among men. They say that even now this may become our work, and that if it does, we shall sorrow with Christ’s sorrow and so enter into Christ’s joy.

For Christmas now, as of old, tells us we are to be always rejoicing. Nothing in the past, present or future, no aspect of our own life or the world’s, is to hinder obedience to that command. It is a command, not the gratification of an instinct, the observance of a tradition, or the putting on of a face that is glad today because it was glad of old. Year after year, Christmas Day declares that God reveals to the babes of the earth, to serfs, prodigals and outcasts, what is hidden from the wise and prudent: the length and breadth of His compassion and His nearness to the sons of men. It declares that we are not to go into heaven or hell to seek Him; that He seeks us, comes and dwells among us, and claims fellowship with our weakness, sorrow and death. Even so, Father, it says, for so it has seemed good in Thy sight. Thou hast been pleased to reveal Thy Son to us in the lowliness of our flesh, so that Thy Son may reveal Thee to us in the glory of Thy Spirit. We could not have known the Son if Thou hadst not shown Him to us in this wonderful birth, nor Thee if He had not shown Thee to us in His life, death, resurrection and ascension, and in the gift of the Comforter. Since it has so pleased Thee, we pray Thee to give us strength to rejoice in Him when our sorrow for others and our shame for ourselves are greatest. We pray Thee, by sorrow and by joy, to soften and subdue us until we are changed into the likeness of the Child born in Bethlehem. We pray Thee to keep us in the faith that it is that Child, and no other, who shall rule the nations and make all subject to His kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy.