Article November 2, 2015 Issue

The reason for our joy

Jürgen Kurt Stark

The Old Testament prophets aren’t usually thought of as joyous because of the stern warnings they often had to deliver when faced with the Israelites’ repeated disobedience of God’s commands. Yet even in the darkest of moments, these men and women of spiritual insight caught wonderful, joyous glimpses of God’s saving power, His eternal Christ. Their prophetic insights would later be fully manifested in the New Testament, in the life of Christ Jesus, who gave humanity glorious evidence of Immanuel, or “God with us” (Matthew 1:23)—an eternal truth that embraces each one of “us” today. With the coming of Christ, the Son of God—announced by the angels as “good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people” (Luke 2:10)—unenlightened concepts of God gave way to the understanding of God as Love, and of man as one with Him.

“I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), Jesus said referring to his true selfhood, the Christ. His joy was anchored in his unity with God, which he manifested throughout his whole life. He prayed that his joy would find its fulfillment in his disciples, too. “Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are. … these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves” (John 17:11, 13). His healing works were the result of realizing man’s oneness with the Father—an understanding nurtured through his constant communion with divine Mind—and he unselfishly shared his joy of life in God with all who would accept his teachings, thereby making us the beneficiaries of the divine Truth he knew.

Jesus, the great Exemplar, proclaimed a gospel of joy—the joy of putting off a mistaken mortal mentality, expressed as a material identity, for man’s true selfhood as the spiritual likeness of God. Jesus understood what Paul would later write: that joy was a “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22), an attribute of God expressed in and by spiritual man, and which unites us with the divine Mind.

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