Wait...Christmas is ACTUALLY about Joy?

A few years back, I was asked to speak about joy at a women’s Christmas dinner at our old church. I talked a lot about a very un-joyous experience I had at work that shook me to my core, set me straight about what was important in my life, and what direction I wanted to go in. (Spoiler alert, if you haven’t read it yet – I realized money, title, and career pride wasn’t going to bring me everlasting joy. I’ll leave a link at the bottom to read more about that.)

Here’s me speaking. The funniest part about this picture, for me, is that I thought there were only going to be about 30 women attending this dinner. I learned the moment I walked in that it was more like 130 women! Surprise to me!

Though I knew my career story would resonate with women in at the dinner, I felt required to talk about joy in God terms. It was a church after all. The only thing was, I had NO idea what God thought about joy. Did the Bible even talk about joy? I was raised on church doctrine, not the Bible, so I didn’t know the answer.

So I did what every good Millennial would do. I Googled it…well, the “Bible version” of Googling. I opened the Bible app on my phone (yes, there’s an app for everything!) and I just typed in “joy” to see what would pop up.

And DUUUHHH – the baby Jesus Christmas story pops ups! (I felt really dumb that I couldn’t think of that on my own.) Yes, even if you’re not a Bible-reading church-goer, you know that story! The one that Linus quotes in Charlie Brown, Christmas! - except, Linus reads a little fancier version of the Bible than I read, so my version read like this:

“That night there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared among them, and the radiance of the Lord’s glory surrounded them. They were terrified, but the angel reassured them. ‘Don’t be afraid!’ he said. ‘I bring you good news that will bring you great JOY to all people. The Savior – yes, the Messiah, the Lord – has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David!” (Luke 2:8-11 NLT, emphasis added)

If you’ve only ever read this passage at face-value, no worries. Let me break it down or you might miss the good parts…

So what you have is a group of shepherds. Luke, the guy who wrote this story about 2,000 years ago didn’t tell us how many. But they’re a group of guys that, at the end of the day, corralled all the sheep they oversaw into an area so they could rest for the night. Keep in mind, sheep actually have really bad instincts, so the shepherds’ job was to walk around all day and make sure the sheep could find water and grazing area. They likely got their flock in order and then sat down for a much-needed break. It would have been pitch black (no streetlights in the fields of Bethlehem), so I wonder if they lit a fire too.

Let’s pause. Maybe you’ve never been a shepherd, but you can relate to the end-of-the-day exhausted feeling. Maybe you work in an office and you and your coworkers shuffle to the break room around 5pm. Or maybe you’re a teacher and you converge in the teachers’ lounge as soon as the last bell rings. Or, heck, maybe you’re a mom or dad at home and you’ve given up on the day, turned on the TV for your kids, and hidden yourself in your locked bedroom. We’ve all been there – no judgement. Whichever way you look at it, it’s the end of the day and you’re tired.

Then all the sudden, the story says an angel appears out of nowhere. And not just any angel, a “radiant” angel. Now “radiant” doesn’t mean “glowing” like an 8-month pregnant woman glows. This “radiant” means a literal shininess. This angel was physically emitting light from his body! Have you ever seen a person emit light from their body? I haven’t!

And then comes my favorite part - “They were terrified”. HA! Yeah, I would be too! I’m exhausted from the end of the day, sitting in my breakroom or teachers’ lounge and now, out of nowhere, there’s a glowing person in front of me! (Side note, it also makes me laugh because there are other places in the Bible that say people are terrified by angels. Like, at what point do you think the angels stop to think Hmmm…is there a more subtle way we could make an entrance? But I digress…)

So we have a shiny angel and a group of tired and terrified sheepherders. And the angel basically says “Oops, sorry. Don’t be afraid!” And then he says this:

“I bring you good news that will bring great JOY to all people. The Savior – yes, the Messiah, the Lord –” (he’s really hammering in the synonyms to make sure they get this) “has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David!”

This is exciting for so many reasons! First, yes, he’s talking about Jesus, whose arrival the folks in the area have been awaiting for literal centuries. Second, the political landscape of the time is really rough (i.e. Rome’s a force to be reckoned with), so everyone needs some good news. And lastly, these shepherds are the very first people to hear about Jesus being born. Have you ever felt like the “low man on the totem pole” or said “ugh, I’m always the last to know everything!”? That’s how the shepherds felt in this time.

But the angel came to them FIRST.

And they heard the good news FIRST.

I hope their chests got a little bigger that night.

Okay, so the angel told the shepherds that Jesus was born, but let’s rewind, because we skipped over my favorite part (next to the terrifying angel).

“I bring you good news that will bring great JOY to all people.”

There’s my joy! I love joy. What’s cool about that sentence is that the angel chose to use the word joy. He could have replaced “joy” with “salvation” (fancy church word for ‘being saved’), “redemption” (fancy church word for ‘forgiveness’), or just plain “love”. If you know the whole Jesus story, you know that any one of those words would have been accurate statements too.

But he chose joy.

Wow.

Joy.

If you look up the original Greek translation of the word joy, (sorry if I just burst your bubble, but the Bible has been translated to English for your convenience) it is “chara”, which means a calm internal delight.

Hmm…”a calm internal delight”. That doesn’t sound like Christmas morning at my house. There’s surely delight, but no calmness about two kids waking you up at 4:45am running through the house screaming “SANTA CAME!!!!!”

That’s actually happiness. Happiness is, more or less, a momentary state we enter given the situation we’re in. For example, I’m happy when I sit on a sunny beach with a cold drink in my hand. That’s a situation I’m in. It’s not really a deep internal feeling that will last after I leave the beach. Same thing when my kids get a Happy Meal. They are happy for as long as they’re eating it and for the six-and-a-half minutes they play with the toy that will never be touched again. It a Happy Meal. Not a Joy Meal.

Neither of those is a calm internal delight that will last.

Generally speaking, we are very good at happy and much worse at joy. We can’t buy joy. We can’t wrap it and give it to anyone. You can’t even steal it from someone if they truly have it.

But that was the good news of the evening. The FIRST thing anyone ever heard about Jesus when he was born that first Christmas was…joy. For EVERYONE. A free gift to the world.

From me to you, Merry Christmas. And if you celebrate Hanukkah, Happy Hanukkah. And if you celebrate Kwanzaa, or winter solstice, or a holiday I haven’t learned of yet, I hope you have a great one. And I wish you much JOY.

Joy for All,

Erica

If you missed my previous post about joy, check it out here – Choosing Joy. And if you don’t want miss my blog in the new year, make sure to subscribe below or follow me on Facebook / Instagram.