Good Tidings of Great Joy

A sacrament meeting talk I gave this year

“Fear not,” says the angel to the shepherds, in the familiar words of Christmas Eve: “for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.”¹ Put another way, grace has broken into the world.

“Fear not,” begins the angelic message. Rather, we are called to have faith—to be open to the word of God. “In the face of [Christmas],” writes the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, “we bravely open our hearts so that it may also happen to us and through us.”² This offer of grace in some sense constitutes us as human beings—to be human is to be confronted by the sometimes disconcerting and disorienting love of God. We can run from this, or we can take the risk of faith. In refusing to close ourselves off from love and from life, we emulate a passible God, who is likewise open to us, and we emulate Christ, who came to experience life fully. And the message of Christmas is that ultimately, we have nothing to fear: God’s goodness and love can be trusted.

The angel brings us tidings of great joy. To believe in joy is to live in hope. It might be described as living with an awareness of grace in the world, taking seriously Mormon’s observation that all good things come from God.³ Says the poet Mary Oliver: “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. . . . whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”⁴

But how do we find joy when things can get so very bleak? Denise Levertov writes, in a poem about the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich:

“She lived in dark times, as we do:
war, and the Black Death, hunger, strife,
torture, massacre. She knew
all of this, she felt it
sorrowfully, mournfully,
shaken as men shake
a cloth in the wind
But Julian, Julian—I turn to you:
you clung to joy though tears and sweat
rolled down your face like the blood
you watched pour down in beads uncountable
as rain from the eaves;
clung like an acrobat, by your teeth, fiercely,
to a cobweb-thin high-wire, your certainty
of infinite mercy, witnessed
with your own eyes, with outward sight
in your small room, with inward sight
in your untrammeled spirit—
knowledge we long to share:
Love was his meaning.”⁵

Though I often struggle with the concept of joy, I keep coming back to that language: she clung to joy, fiercely—and this is tied to her certainty of infinite mercy. It is the love of God, we learn from Nephi, that is the most joyous to the soul.⁶

These tidings of great joy are unto all people. No one is exempt: we cannot draw lines of exclusion. If fearing not is connected to faith, and tidings of great joy are linked to hope, then the fact that these tidings are to all people is tied to charity. Grace transforms the way we see others: as we experience love, we love others in turn, realizing that to be human is to be infinitely precious in the sight of God. When we see ourselves as sisters and brothers, we find ourselves called to resist injustice. The understanding that all are alike unto God is a basis for creating communities that are welcoming to all. This too is part of the message of Christmas.

We sometimes conceptualize grace as a kind of reservoir of redemption from which we can draw. While it is important to keep in mind the vastness of Christ’s mercy, it is also worth remembering the particularity of his love, the way in which it plays out uniquely in each individual life. I am convinced that God profoundly values each one of these personal relationships: in his eyes each one of us is irreplaceable. And because each relationship is unique, it is not possible to know all the facets of God on our own: as individuals, as communities, even as faith traditions. This means that we come to know God better as we come to know each other.

The good tidings of great joy are this: a Savior, Christ the Lord, has come into the world. God does not remain at a distance. Christ comes both to atone for our sin, and to be with us in our mortal experience. The divine enters into the mundane, the sacred into the secular—so that there is no more secular. The world is graced.

“I am persuaded,” says Paul, that [nothing] “can keep us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.”⁷ This includes even, and especially, sin. In one of my favorite passages, Julian, the medieval mystic mentioned earlier, writes of her visionary experience: “God brought to my mind that I would sin. And there developed in me a quiet fear. And to this our Lord answered: ‘I keep you secure.’”⁸ “Our Lord keeps us most preciously,” she explains, “when it seems to us that we are forsaken and cast out by our sin because we have deserved it.”⁹ I love that image of a God who, far from rejecting us when we feel we most deserve it, holds us all the more closely. This is a Christ who is truly with us.

Writes Rahner, “When we say, “It is Christmas,” we mean that God has spoken into the world his last, his deepest, his most beautiful word in the incarnate Word . . . And this word means: I love you, you, the world and human beings.”¹⁰ In my own life, though my faith is not always the strongest and I often give into fear, I am continually surprised at the persistence and generosity of God’s love. It is something that I hope we can all encounter, at Christmas, and always.

1. Luke 2:10-11 [↩]
2. “Christmas: Ever Since I Became Your Brother” in Karl Rahner, The Great Church Year -The Best of Karl Rahner’s Homilies, Sermons, and Meditations (New York: Crossroad, 1993) [↩]
3. Moroni 7:12-13 [↩]
4. “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.” Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Beacon Press, 2010) [↩]
5. Denise Levertov, “The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342-1416,” Breathing the Water (New Directions, 1987) [↩]
6. 1 Nephi 11:23 [↩]
7. Romans 8:38-9 [↩]
8. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, 2011 edition by Simon Parke, chapter 37 [↩]
9. Julian, chapter 39 [↩]
10. Rahner, “Christmas: Ever Since I Became Your Brother” [↩]