students of jesus

When the Preacher, who confined himself to matters under the sun, intoned, “with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief,” he forever linked the idea that serious people were sad because disillusionment is the only choice of the enlightened. Camus, Satre, Voltaire (anyone from France, really) and most great thinkers have fallen in line with the fallen king of Israel. The wisdom of the wise is to expect disappointment, anticipate disaster, and gainsay anyone who prefers sunrise to sunset.

The worldly-wise require a dreary realism for club membership. The doorman greets the cynic, but keeps the hopeful behind the velvet rope. Happy people are hopeless, they say: hopelessly idealistic and hopelessly romantic.

In fact, the exact opposite is true: happy people are the hope-filled, the joy saturated, the ones so full of the Spirit he oozes out of them. The surprising testimony of the scripture, and the Lord of the scripture, is that history has a destination of unspeakable joy.

Even when we look cold-hard at the suffering of a desperate world, we can see the text of God super-imposed on the landscape, written with a feather-touch: “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” This week I invite you to meditate with me on the fruit of the Spirit, those nine attributes I can never seem to remember in order: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Discover again with me that “serious” is not a fruit of the Spirit.

The shipwrecked and beaten apostle reminds us, “against such things there is no law.” They cannot be legislated into existence, nor regulated out. They can only be lived into. They can only be discovered as the natural outgrowth of a life lived in concert with the Great Creator, the Feast-throwing Father, the one who invites us, “enter into the joy of your Master.”