Interpreting Scripture by WRIGHT N. T.;

Author:WRIGHT, N. T.; [Wright N. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 6167854
Publisher: SPCK

11

Joy: Some New Testament Perspectives and Questions

Like (I suspect) many scholars, I hadn’t thought much about what ‘joy’ might actually mean until I was put on the spot. The invitation came from Professor Miroslav Volf of Yale University, who with a team of scholars and assistants was launching an innovative project on the subject by getting small groups together for intensive discussions. One does not readily turn down the chance of three days in Tübingen, in lovely summer weather, engaged in detailed study alongside colleagues such as Jürgen Moltmann, Michael Fishbane and Miroslav Volf himself. I learned a lot. The present paper is an edited and expanded version of the one I gave on that occasion.

[39] Every year in the church’s calendar we read the story of Jesus’ ascension in Acts 1. But we also remind ourselves of the much shorter version of the same story that Luke has placed at the end of his gospel (24.50–53). There we find a phrase that has always puzzled me. Jesus, says Luke, was separated from his disciples and carried up into heaven; whereupon they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem ‘with great joy’. This seems, to put it mildly, counter-intuitive. Why would they be so joyful if Jesus has been taken from them? Ought they not to be sorrowful? Might not his departure signal the start of danger, of fear, of the loss of a sense of direction? What is this ‘joy’ that they now have? What is the reason for it – either in the original [40] historical setting, or in Luke’s vision, as he writes these books a few decades later?

This problem, to be sure, is noticed in the New Testament itself. The fourth gospel anticipates it in the so-called ‘farewell discourses’, when Jesus explains that he is going away, and that this will cause his followers great sadness – but that the sadness will be replaced with joy. ‘In the same way, you have sorrow now. But I shall see you again, and your hearts will celebrate, and nobody will take your joy away from you’ (John 16.22). This finds an obvious echo in the resurrection narrative, when Jesus appears in the upper room, and ‘the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord’ (20.20). And yet in John’s gospel, as well as in Luke, the obvious sense of joy at seeing Jesus alive again after his crucifixion does not seem to get to the heart of the ‘joy’ of which Jesus speaks in the discourses. He speaks of ‘this world’s ruler’ who is ‘coming’, and who is to be ‘thrown out’ (12.31; 14.30), and in that light tells his followers that, though they will have trouble in the world, they are to cheer up, because ‘I have defeated the world’ (16.33). The joy that the disciples have at Jesus’ resurrection, and at the prospect of his ascension (14.28), is therefore not simply the human delight at discovering a dead friend and master to be alive again. John is pointing his readers to a deeper meaning, having to do with the world itself.

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