Signposts

What is the difference between joy and happiness?

I have pondered this question half my life. And a clear definition always slips my grasp.

A close friend asked me to clarify this recently, and off I went into the same meditation.

What, indeed, is the difference?

The word “happiness” isn’t used in Scripture, but the word “joy” appears often in the New Testament.

And in the strangest juxtapositions, as in “Consider it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds.”

By definition, you cannot be happy when you are suffering.

How then can you be joyful?

Here is an unscientific, halting, unacademic, non-expert definition.

Joy is the foretaste of God, a preview of the full renewal of the world, of the consummation of all things in Christ.

Occasionally, it bursts out in the present as indicated in the verse, “This is my commandment, that you love one another, that your joy be made full.”

Jesus gave this commandment to his followers because they were to manifest that love which is a breaking into the present of the total fulfillment which God has yet to complete in Christ.

Christians are to be the advance guard, if you will, of the full-blown kingdom of God come to earth.

Joy is the signpost which reads, “It is coming. In fact, it’s already happening.”

This, I think, is something that happiness doesn’t possess. Happiness is purely temporal. Here one minute, gone the next.

There is, of course,  a deeper way to define happiness that takes it beyond mere happenstance, and that is to tie it to the ethical nature of humankind.

Victor Frankl wisely said that if you pursue happiness directly, it will constantly evade you. But if you pursue a life of meaning first, without caring particularly about being upbeat, then happiness often arrives as a byproduct.

Think of the deep satisfaction of raising children, which involves all kinds of situations that aren’t happy in the least, but which, for those who love their children, are mostly transformed into a deep sense of satisfaction.

Even at its best, however, happiness is yet again still not joy.

Joy is greater, it is higher, it is stronger and it is quicker.

Joy is a momentary glimpse of the glory of God to come. Joy is anticipatory.

Here is a crucial difference: Joy is fully cognizant of all the suffering, fallenness and sadness of the world.

There are many references in the NT to idea that if you do not suffer with Christ, you cannot rejoice when he comes again.

The difference between joy and happiness is like the difference between putting everything you have into a race and merely jogging it.

It is like the difference between savoring a truly amazing wine and gulping down a mediocre one.

It is like the difference between yearning to see your beloved face-to-face and being satisfied with e-mailing them.

Joy is hard won. Hard purchased. Joy leaves you aching for more. It is filled with longing, yearning, reaching.

It is connected with refusing to be consoled with halfway pleasures, momentary stimulation, conditional comforts.

It brazenly dares to look for the renewal of the world, the arrival of a time when there will be no suffering, pain, evil or death.

Joy is an alien concept, I think, to those who have become “well adjusted.”

It is possible, as the Message bible says, to trade the “glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand.”

It is possible, and even tempting, to be satisfied with something less than joy, because joy challenges evil and spits it its face.

Christians stake their joy on some brazen claims.

As St. Paul said, if life as it presently exists is the end of the game, if Christ simply perished on a Roman cross, then Christians, with their joyful expectations of goodness thoroughly triumphant, are to be treated like the delusional lunatics they are.

When I think of happiness, I think of that soothing feeling you get after a good meal, a great glass of wine and good company.

It’s good, but it’s not good enough. The stomach will perish, and food along with it.

There are higher things, Paul said.

And as Jesus said to Martha, “Only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

If you can understand what Jesus is saying here, I think you are on the path to joy.

Which is to say that you are on the path to fulfillment and completion.