Welcome to the last Sunday of Advent!

In the Bible the number seven represents completion. If you take a minute to gloss over Leviticus 23, you’ll notice that there are seven feasts. Remember from yesterday that the feasts are prophetic exercises meant to be dress rehearsals for the work of the coming Messiah.

Read:

Celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing floor and your winepress. Be joyful at your festival—you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns. For seven days celebrate the festival to the Lord your God at the place the Lord will choose. For the Lord your God will bless you in all your harvest and in all the work of your hands, and your joy will be complete.
-Deuteronomy 16:13-15 (NIV)

The feast calendar is completed not with Yom Kippur, the most solemn of the feasts, but with the Feast of Tabernacles, the most joyous! The placement of this feast tells us that joy, not sorrow, is the completed state of the one with whom God dwells.

That’s upside down to our experience, isn’t it? Humans usually experience the most joy at the beginning of a thing rather than at its end. After all, delivery rooms are typically more joyful than funeral homes. But, as is his way, God’s kingdom is upside down. Night precedes dawn. Planting precedes harvest. Death precedes resurrection. Mourning precedes joy.

It is undeniable that many among us are in the depths of sorrow this Advent season. There seems to be pain and heaviness on every side, and it seems like in many cases it would be easier to give up than to wake up tomorrow and live the misery all over again. It’s easy to identify with Solomon in times like this: “What do I get in exchange for the misery of this life? More misery.”

Read:

Truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice. You will become sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain because her time has come. But when she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers the suffering because of the joy that a person has been born into the world. So you also have sorrow now. But I will see you again. Your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy from you.
“In that day you will not ask me anything. Truly I tell you, anything you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. Until now you have asked for nothing in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.
-John 16:20-24
As the Father has loved me, I have also loved you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commands you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.
-John 15:9-11

Jesus had a different vantage point. All the things that are unbearable to us He likened to the labor of a pregnant woman and the birth of her baby. If you’ve ever had a ring-side seat to this, you know that labor is painful. With my first baby, I remember lying in bed at night fearing the labor, anxious about the pain, wondering what to expect, unsure whether I would be able to deliver a baby, nervous that I’d mess it up, fearful that I wasn’t up to the task. The minute she was born and in my arms, though, something crazy happened. I didn’t really remember the pain of whole process. In fact, after the first delivery, I never worried about labor again, because I had tasted the joy of holding a fresh person in my arms.

And here it is, full circle.

If shalom is wholeness, it is impossible to have shalom without completed joy.

Peace and joy aren’t exclusive. You cannot have one without the other (along with all the other ingredients of the fruit of the Spirit).

What then, must we receive to have completed joy? What does it take to erase the memory of the suffering of labor? Simple.

A baby.

THE baby.

Pray: Jesus, the truth is, some days I don’t feel as if my joy is complete. Even when I remain in you and you remain in me, I confess that the sorrow of the world feels like the lasting reality rather than the joy that is mine because of your nearness. Certainly that is because I have a poor understanding of joy. Is not the farmer who sows the seed watering it with his tears commended when he returns in joy having gathered his precious harvest? Yes, Lord! Tears of sorrow germinate the seed of joy! Amen!