Sorrow and Joy Necessary to Each Other

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

I alluded last Sunday to the Epistle which we have read this morning. I said that if St. Paul bade the Philippians rejoice at all times, whilst they were dwelling upon this earth, he could not mean to tell the Corinthians that they were the most miserable of all people while they dwelt upon this same earth, and that their only comfort was the hope that they should one day escape from it. But in examining what the passage which had conveyed this impression to some readers did actually mean, it became evident that St. Paul had causes enough for sorrow,—causes enough for saying that if his hopes were limited to the few years which he should spend here, he should be thoroughly wretched. He looked upon the earth as a beautiful earth, rich with tokens of God’s love. He looked upon Man as a glorious being, redeemed by the Son of God, united to Him. He looked upon his own calling, as a herald of good news to men, with thankfulness and exultation. But because the earth bore such signs of a gracious Creator in all its order and comeliness, he could not be content that it should bear also such marks of the Destroyer. The Son of Man had united men to Himself, and revealed to them a Father; he could not be content that they should be living as a set of outcasts and orphans. Because his own message was one of such vast and comprehensive blessings,—blessings to unfold themselves through ages out of ages,—he would not have its purpose and fulfilment contracted to the little span of this life and of our experience.

I should wish to follow this same train of thought to-day. I can easily conceive that there are many who will accept the passage which has been read to us out of the Epistle to the Philippians as suitable for Christmas-time,—as indicating a kind of festal temper which we should make an effort to cultivate, even when nature looks most wintry, whilst we think of the Nativity of Christ, and connect with that all the old memories of the season. “And yet,” they will say, “the effort is an unnatural one; it cannot be sustained for long. An Apostle might contrive to banish from his mind the outward calamities, the inward perplexities, which are harassing us every instant. It is a very saintly, a very desirable frame of mind, no doubt. As such we may admire it at a distance. We may now and then strive to realize it. But the stretched bow will spring back to its ordinary state. Causes of grief are lying very close to us. We may lull it, but we cannot keep it long out of sight. We may turn to pageants to make us forget our funerals, but the hearse will always claim some of the pageantry for itself.”

These complaints are reasonable. And the preacher must not find fault with the capriciousness of his hearers, if they remind him of these truths when he repeats in their ears the command to rejoice; and if they tell him again that they cannot always be conversing with what is dismal, when he speaks of the shadow of death which is cast over all the works of nature and of man. No doubt such various and opposite objections indicate an inward restlessness. But it is a restlessness which we must have experienced in ourselves, the cause of which we ought well to understand. And we are not acting in the spirit of the Apostles, if we do not recognize the justice of each demand which the discontented spirit makes, if we do not confess that it has a right to sorrow as well as to joy, that it can as little dispense with one as with the other. St. Paul knew this to be the case. If he bade the Philippians rejoice, it was not that he did not understand the multiplied motives they had for sorrow, or that he wished them to be false with themselves and to smother their sorrow. He did not practise that fraud with himself. The text declares that he knew at least as much of one state of mind as the other; only that he found the secret of harmonizing them. He was sorrowing, yet alway rejoicing.

I. It is a paradox; we all feel that it is. Yet those experiences to which I have just alluded, show that we all discern a truth under the paradox; that we all want to find a way of so mingling sorrow and joy together, that neither shall contradict or even weaken the other. We want this secret. Whoever will put us in possession of it, whoever will enable us to turn it to account in the practice of life, will be the greatest of all benefactors to us. You see a number of persons hugging a sorrow, feeding upon 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 in her impulses than she was. You perceive that such indulgence is morbid and dangerous, that it leads to a neglect of action, ultimately to selfishness. But you take, in general, very feeble and unsatisfactory methods of curing what you are sure is a disease. You try, as you say, to dissipate the patient’s mind, to present other objects which may cause the object on which it dwells to be forgotten. Often you succeed. The grief which is unnatural, merely fostered for self-indulgence or cultivated for the sake of propriety, yields to the discipline which for such a sentiment may have been suitable enough. But something is destroyed by these methods which should have been preserved,—something which was not artificial but inward, not of man’s planting but of God’s. The waters of Lethe are not those which purge the spirit. They take away much that is best and strongest in it; they leave weeds and mud behind. Depend upon it, sorrow, whatever outward occasions have produced it, has that in it which we need, and cannot afford to part with. The toad, ugly and venomous, carries a jewel which may be worth more to us than all the diamonds of earth. He is a thief and an enemy who would take it from us.

I repeat it, brethren, this is so, whatever be the occasion or instrument of producing the sorrow; loss of property, loss of reputation, loss of a friend. Do not say to yourself, “This is a poor, mean occasion for a man to grieve about.” Do not say that to your neighbour. He will grieve, you will grieve, on some plea or another, whatever you say to yourself or to him. It is better to be honest. It is a poor thing to play tricks with ourselves, and then put forth a moral to justify the tricks. The loss may be and is a calamity. The grief for it is a gift which you may turn, like all other gifts, into a curse; out of which you may extract the divinest blessing. An illustrious historian of our time said that he could discover in eminent men, of various periods, an impoverishment and decay of heart and intellect dating from a crisis of their lives, when they had wilfully thrown off some great sorrow which might have given them consistency and depth. The question is, whether we shall merely nurse sorrow as if it were our own, as if it were a warrant for disgust and misanthropy, or accept it as a message from above, an Angel of the Covenant, something which is to teach us more of our relations to other men and of our relation to God.

It is in this sense, I conceive, that St. Paul was always sorrowing. There is not a trace in any of his Epistles of morbidness. He is always in action. He is thinking for others, feeling for others. He does not stop for an instant in his work to dwell upon the Christians he has persecuted, upon his share in Stephen’s death. He goes right onwards. In one most important sense he “forgets the things that are behind.” He determines that they shall not impede him; that they shall not 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 has been coloured and shaped by his own previous experiences; the whole past is stamped and burnt into his discourse, because that comes directly from his heart. He is the beaten, the flayed man, who alone, according to the poet, is really educated. What he has suffered in himself, enables him to look with straight eyes upon the sufferings of the world in which he is dwelling. With straight eyes, I say,—not with cold hard eyes; not with the eyes of a man who regards suffering as an inevitable, hopeless curse. He regards it as a sign of derangement in that which is essentially and divinely good; therefore it makes him mourn. He regards it as one of the instruments for removing that which is deranged; therefore it cannot make him despair. St. Paul learnt to sorrow for himself when he learnt to hope for himself. He knew the anguish of conscience before; he knew anger with the world before; but he did not know sorrow till he had a revelation of One who cared for him, mourned for him, died for him. There then arose upon him the vision of a Man of Sorrows; then he saw in His sorrow the full, perfect image of the Father from whom He came. And now he could desire nothing better for himself than an ever-increasing share of that sorrow. To enter into it was to enter into the mind of Jesus Christ; yea, to enter into the Nature of God Himself. And therefore all that was firmest and all that was tenderest in St. Paul came from his perpetual sorrow. His firmness; for he could not take any form of suffering as if it were something strange or unnatural. He had communed with it in its first principle; he had seen it embodied and concentrated in the Passion of Christ. He was nerved for what should be appointed for him, nerved by the very sense of his inability to bear anything except in Christ’s strength. He could not grudge suffering to those whom he cared for most; it was a sign and pledge of their adoption. But again, this was the secret of his tenderness. No kind of suffering stood aloof from him. It was his own; it was his Master’s. He was to bear it with Him and for the Church. It was his vocation, his privilege. He would not cheat himself of it by considering what was the occasion of the sorrow. If it was the sin of the man who had incurred it, that was a reason for more sorrow and more sympathy. He might not indeed deprive the sinner of the correction which he needed; he might not refuse to inflict the correction himself. But he could judge no man. All the seeds of sin lay in him, ready to start forth. He had known a deeper sin in himself. To feel for it and sorrow for it was to sorrow for the sin of the world, for that which Christ had come to take away.

II. Now a man who is always sorrowing in this way, must have been also always rejoicing. Here is the interpretation of St. Paul’s great paradox. He did not put it forth to startle us; it was the most natural expression of what he felt and knew. There must be an under pressure equal to the upper pressure. Such a weight of sorrow could only have been sustained by a joy that was commensurate with it. We are always confessing this truth in one way or another. The most frivolous person says, “I have had much trial of late; I must have more than ordinary pleasure and amusement that I may endure it.” We often denounce such language, or the actions that correspond to it, as heartless; but there is a meaning in it, though an inverted one. The joy which we seek for to quench sorrow, is on the whole a poor flimsy joy; not the joy which man is entitled to claim, not a joy which penetrates far below the surface. “That joy which in our embers is something that doth live,” that joy which lies at the very root of our being, which is as necessary for human life as moisture is for vegetable life——that joy which the frosts of the world are seeking to kill, and which would perish utterly in every human being if Heaven did not watch over it,—that joy does not seek to escape from sorrow, but which encounters it and finds its own strength in enduring it.

St. Paul perceived an infinite sorrow in the world, a sorrow originating in man, but which all nature sympathizes with and sends back in ten thousand echoes. But he perceived an infinite joy, which also is in us, not in nature, but to which, if it is in us, the trees and flowers and streams and hills will all respond. And as he found in the Son of Man the climax of all human sorrow,—as he saw in the darkness which covered the land from the sixth to the ninth hour Nature’s witness that for that moment her light as well as the light of Man had been quenched,—so he owned in that same Son of Man and Son of God 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 the life had come by which all creatures were quickened and gladdened. As he recollected what the work of the Sorrower on earth had been,—how every act He had done was to take away some leprosy, or palsy, or fever, or blindness from the children of man, some death-anguish from mothers or sisters,—how every word had revealed what mysteries of the divine Kingdom lay hid in the sowing of seeds, in the work of the husbandman, in the common food, in the marriage feast,—it was not possible but that he should believe that there was another cup besides that which His Father had given Him, and which He drained to the dregs. That water of which He spake of as at Jacob’s well, which should be in men a well of water springing up to everlasting life——that water of which at the Feast of Tabernacles He called all that thirsted to come and drink,—that surely was a divine Joy, such as only the Spirit of God could awaken, but which the spirit of man was created to receive and to pour forth.

Every hour that Jesus was walking among men, He was giving them some foretaste of this joy, some token that He came to make them inheritors of it. But there was a special hour in which we are told He rejoiced in His own Spirit. And it was thus He expressed the cause and subject of that rejoicing. “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 wonderful record the secret of St. Paul’s continual joy in the midst of his continual sorrow. He, like his Lord, mourned over the efforts which the wise and prudent made to shut out the light of Heaven, building Babel systems of policy, of philosophy, of theology,—causing men to mistake their unjust and cruel mandates for the Divine decrees. He, like his Lord, rejoiced that the babes of the earth,—fishermen and tent-makers,—had been permitted to show forth the will of Him who governs all, to declare that He was not the tyrant which they had conceived Him, but a Father who sought to bring back His children to the Home from which they had wandered. He, too, like his Lord, could find the most perfect comfort in referring this discomfiture of the proud, this exaltation of the lowly, to that Will which is only good, and designs only good. And he, too, could perceive that that Will was the Will of a Father commanding, the Will of a Son submitting,—that in their perfect harmony consists the harmony of the universe; that to know the Son by the revelation of the Father, and the Father by the revelation of the Son, the Spirit who proceedeth from both being the witness of their eternal unity, is to discern where sorrow and joy meet again in the ocean from which they first issued.

And for us, too, brethren, they are different streams, at each of which we have need to drink; by plunging in one of which we may learn how near it is to the other. Now at this coming Christmastime let none of us refuse the draughts of sorrow which the recollections of other years may bring with them. Let us not steel our hearts,—as if that were a duty to the season, a compliance with the Apostolical precept,—against the intrusion of faces and forms that the eye can gaze on no more. Oh! rather let us welcome them; let us thankfully accept their visits; let us rejoice to detain them. Do they bring with them not merely the sense of smiles that cannot lighten the circle again, but the thought of blessings abused, of hard words spoken, of acts done that can never be recalled? Oh, cherish that form of sorrow too! 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 which is the world’s or the devil’s gift will come the hearty, genial repentance which is God’s. We shall not receive the forgetfulness which is a curse, but the forgiveness which is the divinest of blessings. It will issue from the throne of the Father of all, it will descend upon all through Him who was born of the Virgin, and who was 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 which hope fosters, out of which hope springs. They bid us mourn that we have so little believed the song of the angels, that we have done so little to give glory to God on the earth, to spread peace on earth, to establish goodwill among men. They say that even now that may become our work, and that if it is our work we shall sorrow with Christ’s sorrow, and so enter into Christ’s joy.

For Christmas now, as of old, tells us that we are to be always rejoicing. Nothing in the past, nothing in the present, nothing in the future,—no aspects of our own life, no aspects of the world’s life—are to hinder the obedience to that command. For it is obedience to a command; not the gratification of an instinct; not the observance of a tradition; not the assumption of a countenance which is glad to-day because it was glad of yore. Christmas Day, year after year, declares that God would reveal to the babes of the earth—to serfs and prodigals and outcasts—that which is hidden from the wise and prudent—the length and breadth of His own compassion, His nearness to the sons of men. Christmas Day declares that we are not to go into heaven or hell to seek Him; that He seeks us, that He comes and dwells among us; that He claims fellowship with our weakness, our sorrow, our death. Even so, Father, it says, for so it has seemed good in Thy sight. So hast Thou been pleased to reveal Thy Son to us in the lowliness of our flesh, 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 manifested Him to us in this wonderful birth. We could not have known Thee if He had not manifested Thee to us in His life, His death, His resurrection, His ascension; in the gift of the Comforter. But 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 is the greatest. We pray Thee, by sorrow and by joy, to soften and subdue us, till we have been changed into the likeness of that Child that was 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; Who shall make all subject to His kingdom of righteousness, and peace, and joy.