Committed Contradictions: Part 1

as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich, as having nothing yet possessing all things. 2 Corinthians 6:10 NASB

Sorrowful/rejoicing – Has your life become a reflection of the life of Paul? Do you know both sides of the coin of committed contradictions?

In the last few weeks, God has been pressing me. My fellowship with Job has not graduated from chapter 37 to chapter 38. Just in case you have forgotten, chapter 38 is God’s answer to Job’s plea. From chapter 38 to the end of Job, God takes charge. I want to be ready to hear His answer, but I still feel stuck in the middle of the story.

One of the participants in a study of Romans made a comment that pushed me a little closer to chapter 38. He said, “Our problem is that we don’t get to see our heavenly bank accounts. The only way we get a glimpse of what we’re building is in groups like this. We see people changing. We see lives being reborn. That’s money in the bank from God’s perspective. But we don’t see it except in other people. We think we don’t have much, but God sees something we don’t.”

Paul captured the same thought when he wrote to the Corinthian church.

How can you be sorrowful but always rejoicing, poor but rich, possess everything but have nothing? Answering these questions reveals the dual foundation of our understanding of the world. One pillar of that foundation stands on the Greek concept of control and success. The other pillar stands on the Hebrew view of obedience and wisdom.

Let’s start with Paul’s first contradiction: sorrowful but always rejoicing.

The Greeks believed that the opposite of sorrow was pleasure. We have carried that idea into our world with the word hedonism. The ancient Greek word did not have the connotation of unrestrained physical indulgence that we associate with contemporary hedonism. Hedone is a Greek word for pleasure, but it included the pleasure of what is good, the pleasure of virtue and reason. Hedone covers all kinds of pleasure, from sensuality to ethical self-control. Notice that the Greek culture believed that this wide umbrella called pleasure was the opposite of sorrow. Life without grief, troubles and turmoil was the life of pleasant harmony, laudable virtues and highest self-control. Many of our contemporary culture’s heroes and heroines speak this Greek philosophy of life. They point us in the direction of a world governed by reasonable men and women, built on high values, measured by education, enlightenment and peaceful coexistence.

Sorrow in Greek is lupe. The see-saw of life throws us into constant swings between lupe and hedone, but even though we all strive for pleasure rather than pain and sorrow, life without the valley of suffering could lose its meaning. In order to know pleasure, we must endure pain. This is why hedone is not restricted to sensual indulgence. True pleasure is the antithesis of all painful endurance including the sorrow of misunderstanding and deception, the agony of the mind and the emotions.

Today we stand with one pillar of our cultural experience firmly planted on this Greek foundation. We chase the dream of life without pain and suffering. We pursue hedone, not merely as sensual experience but in the beauty of the arts, the excellence of a trained mind and the achievement of human goals. We know sorrow because we are subject to see-saw human experience. But we almost universally hope to win the lottery and enjoy the “good life”—the life free from the very struggle that makes pleasure so desirable.

The celebrity culture is a testimony to the ultimate inadequacy of this Greek way of thinking. How many times have we seen the same scene played out in the lives of our modern day icons of pleasure? The ones who have everything run into the wall of meaninglessness. Without sorrow and struggle, their lives become an endless and fruitless pursuit of one more encounter with hedone. They discover what Solomon knew centuries ago. Desire remains unsatisfied no matter how large the appetite. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. In the end, “man goes to his eternal home while mourners go about the street” (Ecclesiastes 12:5).

We live in a world that seeks a Greek solution. We call it the “balanced life.” Balance is supposed to provide us control of this see-saw world so that we aren’t affected by the wild swings of suffering. That’s why the Greeks feared emotions. They knew, just as we do, that all emotions push us off the playing field of rational control. Love is no better than heartache when it comes to upsetting reason, although most of us would rather be driven crazy with love than with broken hearts. The fundamental operational commitment of balanced-life thinking is the assumption that reason reins supreme and that control is a rational exercise. So we tell people to get their heads straight or stop listening to their emotions or think before they act. We’re confused. If we really looked at the evidence, we would discover why the Greeks were afraid. Emotions are passive. That doesn’t mean that they sit around in the corner waiting for something to do. It means that we are not the active agents in emotional dramas. They happen to us, not through us. That’s why they are so frightening. They are alien invaders that somehow reside in our best intentions. They have a will of their own and the ability to attack our carefully controlled lives at a whim. In the Greek world, no one is safe from the fate of emotional upheaval. Twenty-five centuries later, neither are we.

Eventually the Greeks settled on the Stoic answer. It is still with us today. If emotions are the real culprits of life, then we can protect ourselves from emotions by disconnecting from feelings. This may require austerity. After all, attachment to things is an open door for impending disappointment. This may also require isolation and insulation. Don’t get too close to anyone. Heartache is right around the corner. We have a common wisdom saying about getting burned twice. In the end, the stoic existence is a neutered world. Freedom from pain comes at the price of denial of pleasure.

The apostles also use the word lupe for sorrow. But they do not see hedone as the opposite of sorrow. The apostolic writings reflect the other pillar of our cultural heritage—the Hebrew/Jewish side. In the writings of the apostles, the opposite of sorrow is not pleasure. It is rejoicing.

We don’t have too much trouble with the Greek view. Pleasure and pain seem so logically opposed that we hardly think about this. Sorrow and harmony feel like opposites.   But how can rejoicing release us from this emotional roller coaster tyranny?   What possible reason can there be for rejoicing in the midst of suffering?

There are answers here but not the ones we might expect. First, notice that the biblical focus is not on escaping sorrow. The focus is on how we respond to sorrow, not how we avoid it. The Bible does not embrace the Greek worldview that emotions like sorrow are destructive attacks on the goal of a balanced life. The Bible does not endorse the myth of balance. In fact, Yeshua tells us that if we are his followers, we can expect trouble. We will live in a world that hates us and seeks to harm us. There is no avoiding it. Yeshua does not offer a way of blissful repose, a spiritual prosperity investment scheme or a life of protection from consequences. The goal of serving God is not balance. It is alignment. If you seek alignment with God, you will be at odds with the world. That entails conflict. Paul reminds us that being a friend to the world means that you are an enemy of God. There is no middle ground here. The reason that followers of Yeshua have sorrow is that alignment with God means living according to an ethic alien to this place and time.

It is worthwhile to ask ourselves if we are really ready to act upon this fact. If our motivation is to find a comfortable fit between who we want to be and the world that we live in, we need to do some serious reassessment. There is a lot more at stake than morality when Paul exhorts us to avoid the patterns of this world. Alignment is going to demand sacrifice and hardship. That’s the background to our opening verse: “as sorrowful yet always rejoicing”. When Yeshua says that His followers need to count the cost, he is not speaking metaphorically. The cost of discipleship is high. The price is walking directly into the path of suffering, not because we seek pain but because alignment with God means pain is unavoidable. If you thought that being a follower meant freedom from consequences, then you did not understand the call. You did not understand the cross. You did not understand what God intended for those who are asked to redeem a broken world.

There are two reactions in the Biblical perspective. The first is passive. Alignment with God causes us to be grieved, to be sorrowful.   Our efforts at alignment bring about consequences. We do not actively seek grief and sorrow. The Greeks were right: it happens to us. But the Greeks thought that such emotions were dangerous disturbances to balance. The follower of Yeshua sees that these are not emotional interruptions; they are the consequences of living for God in an alien environment. Sorrow and grief come as a result of the disparity between the world God wants and the world as it is, and we, His representatives, become the intersections of these two worlds. As long as we are aliens here, these worlds will collide around us. But that collision is not the dungeon of emotional tyranny. It is the evidence that God is at work, dismantling the old and replacing it with the new. The work is painful but entirely necessary.

As a result of this change in perspective, we are not simply the passive victims of sorrow and grief. We are called to active response. This is the other side of the movement. The world in its struggle against God’s intentions brings about sorrow. That conflict plays its hand in our lives. And we respond by rejoicing!

We are not the actors when the conflict between God’s way and the way of the world produces sorrow. We are the audience. It often brings us to tears as we see lives torn apart in this cosmic battle. But at that point, the stage changes. We are called to leave the seat in the audience and step onto the stage. God’s answer to the terror of worlds in collision is—rejoice! How can this be? How can the terrible trauma of life lead us to joy? It cannot! Unless there is a God Who is directing all things toward His purposes!

Imagine the differences in worldview. The Greek post-modern view is a world filled with unpredictability and risk. Emotional trauma only exposes our carefully constructed mythology. We are faced with the frightening reality that we are helpless victims of forces beyond any human control. The Hebrew worldview begins from a completely different observation. God, the same God Who created all that is, is in charge. The universe is not a random pinball bouncing in some cosmic machine. It moves with intentional purpose. Much more importantly, the God Who is Creator has invited me to participate in His purposes. And since He is utterly trustworthy, I can trust my life to His direction. When I encounter the events that cause horror and fear in those who live in a God-absent world, I still feel the pain, sorrow and grief. But because I know Who God is, I can rejoice. I am not a helpless victim. I can be an active agent proclaiming God’s sovereignty to a world in deconstruction. In fact, Paul suggests that as a follower of Yeshua I am required to actively rejoice. Rejoicing takes the form of a command, not an optional psychology. Rejoicing is a deliberate choice to align myself with God’s perspective in spite of the circumstances. Rejoicing does not whitewash or minimize or ignore the sorrow. Quite the opposite. Because rejoicing calls me to act as God would act, I am called to embrace sorrow and grief just as God does. I am called to walk in the shadow of the cross, to accept the brokenness of this world as reality now but not as the defining character of reality later. I am to enter into sorrow and grief, not run from it, because God is in the midst of sorrow and grief, redeeming the world for Himself.

The Greek world – fear of emotional imbalance. The Greek answer – hide, run, protect, ignore, pretend. The Greek result – God absent and full of fear.

The Hebrew world – aligned with the God Who is. The Hebrew answer – engaged, confronting, informed, honest, available. The Hebrew result – God filled and full of confidant trust.

Your life can only be moving in one of these two directions. They stand as polar opposites, allowing no compromise position. When life jolts you with the reasonably expected unreasonable exposure, which way do you move?

Topical Index: hedone, pleasure, lupe, sorrow, 1 Corinthians 6:10