Joy Will Prevail
A few weeks ago, my husband and I went to see a play based on C.S. Lewis's (very trippy and often confusing but still profound) book, The Great Divorce. The script and the acting brought truths to light in a way I can easily miss while reading the book.
At one point, I had to pull out my phone to type out this line so I could hold onto it and ruminate over it a little longer:
“Either joy prevails or misery infects it.”
I've been turning that phrase over in my mind for the last week, and I looked up the full quote in Lewis's book. Here, the narrator's guide is leading the narrator around the outskirts of a sort of celestial space and explaining the meaning of what they're seeing. The guide says:
“Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.”
There's so much to dig into there, and so much in the context of the book that's worth reading. But here's the simple truth I want us to hold onto: Joy will prevail.
If misery had the ability to win out in the end, what true joy would we be able to have? Every baby laugh, every sunset, every early morning walk, every meal with loved ones would be tainted by the fear of infection. And sometimes that's how we live, isn't it?
We lean over our child's crib and watch their sweet face sleeping, reveling in the beauty of that tiny person–only to panic a minute later about how something horrible could happen to them. We laugh with friends only to feel the grief minutes later over how someone we loved is no longer there to laugh with us. Here and now, our joy is always mixed with sorrow.
For the realistic and cynical among us, joy can feel naive and vulnerable. Why allow yourself to revel in joy when an inevitable misery lurks around the corner? If that was the whole story, “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19).
But the resurrection, the victory of joy over the darkest misery, shows us that what's actually inevitable for followers of Jesus is not that our joy will be forever infected but that joy will prevail.
Because of that truth, every moment of joy we feel now doesn't have to be tainted by fear. Rather, it can be savored all the more. We can hold onto joy knowing it's a foretaste of what's to come. Every joy we have now will one day be blown up a hundred-fold, displayed in full color, made all the more real and lasting and solid than we can imagine. And misery won't be able to mess with it one little bit. As the guide says in The Great Divorce,
“And yet all loneliness angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all.”
Or as Paul put it, “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17).
Amen and amen.
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Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.
