Joy Made Full! (04/28/24)
Shortly before He was taken captive by the officers of the chief
priests and Pharisees to be judged and condemned to death, [Jesus] gave beautiful
teachings to His disciples which included the text we have just heard.
His
underlying message, in all that He taught them, was the need for them to abide
by His teachings and to love one another so that His joy could be with them and
make their joy full. This is the message the Lord gives to all of us and is one
that we love to hear as joy and happiness is what we all want in our lives.
And yet as much as we strive for this happiness, it seems, a lot of the
time, to elude us. Instead the stresses and strains of life bear down on us and
we can become absorbed in them. How well these stressful states were expressed
by the
Psalmist who, in prayer, cried out to the Lord saying, "Have mercy on me,
O Lord, for I am in trouble; my eye wastes away with grief, Yes, my soul and my
body! For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing; my strength
fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away" (Psalm 31:9-10). But then, after this lament, he
proclaims his trust in the Lord and says, "But as for me, I trust in You, O Lord; I say, You are my God" (Psalm 31:14) And then he
concludes by urging others to turn to the Lord by saying, "Oh, love the Lord,
all you His saints! For the Lord preserves the faithful, and fully repays the
proud person. Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen
your heart, all you
who hope in the Lord" (Psalm 31:23, 24).
In His Sermon on the Mount Jesus taught the multitudes saying,
"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,
where moth and rust
destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves
treasures in heaven" (Matthew 6: 19, 20). The wonderful truths He delivered in
that sermon were given for mankind to look to heavenly rather than worldly
things. The worldly ones, He says, will not last whereas the heavenly ones will
swell our hearts with love and will become the treasures that will last
forever.
We recall that He went on to say, "For where your treasure is, there your heart
will be also" (Matthew 6:21).
The teaching is clear but only if we understand
what the Lord means by
'treasures in heaven.' …The 'treasures' the Lord is
referring to are joys and delights we come to feel in our lives when we do the
good things the Lord asks us to do. It is His love that brings us these
wonderful joys - these 'heavenly treasures' - if only we will abide by what He
teaches us; when self is removed from the equation of what it means to truly
serve others. From [our theology] we learn that, "heaven and the
joy of heaven first
begin in a person when their regard to self in the uses which they perform dies out" (Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven 5511:2). We are also told that the angels of heaven derive their greatest joy from serving others (Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven 454).
The Lord Himself demonstrated the importance of service to others when He took a basin of water and washed the feet of His disciples and when Peter showed dismay at what He was doing, He said to them, "You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you say well, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to
wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example that you should do as I have done to you" (John 13:13-15). (NCL, Waters 2010)
