We hear it in carols, see it on billboards, and Mariah Carey is probably singing it somewhere. But for many, it rings hollow, disconnected from the pain and struggles of real life. Especially at this time of year—when empty seats at the table remind us of who’s missing. It’s easy to feel the gap between the ideal of joy and the reality of sorrow.
But here’s the thing: when Luke writes of “good news of great joy” (Lk. 2:10), it isn’t disconnection from reality, it’s connection with it, challenging this cultural idea that happiness is tied to circumstance.
Let me explain it this way. If you can only be happy or joyful when life is going well, then joyfulness and sorrow must be mutually exclusive, right? You can’t have one with the other. I know someone who attended the funeral of a classmate who took their own life. And let me tell you, few things are more gut-wrenching. Yet, in that moment, the entire ceremony seemed designed to distract the mourners from mourning because there wasn’t any Gospel to work through the grief—no message of hope.
By the way, that’s what most self-help books will tell you to do: when sorrow comes, distract it. Suppress it. Be a Buddhist and deny it. Be a Stoic and detach from it. Be a Muslim and accept it as fate. Or else drug it, surgically excise it, euthanise it—do anything but live with it, because without the Gospel sorrow will eat up whatever joy you think you might have.
That’s joy misunderstood.
But what of this Christian joy? It’s an interruption. It breaks into the messy of life with the birth of a Saviour / Christ / Lord (Lk. 2:11)—God who meets us in our humanity.
The angelic announcement of Jesus’ birth is a bold statement that Christian joy can coexist with life’s sorrows. It isn’t naive, it sees the mess, but it knows God isn’t finished yet. And when that baby, Jesus, grew up, He explained this better than anyone else.
In John 15, Jesus says to His disciples: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). And when Jesus says that, it gets your attention because He says it in the context of suffering. He’s telling His disciples they’re going to be persecuted, they’re going to have sorrow, sadness, badness: “In the world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33). “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18).
So, what’s going on here? Either Jesus is raving mad, or perhaps He’s reframing our cultural idea of Joy.
Turn the page, and you’ll see it’s the latter.
In John 16, Jesus gives this powerful illustration of a woman in labour. He says: “When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for Joy that a human being has been born into the world” (John 16:21).
Now, I’ve been in the room for the birth of both of my children. I’ve seen it firsthand. I haven’t experienced it—but I’ve seen it. Let me just say, women I salute you… What Jesus is saying here is that a woman in labour goes through incredible pain, unimaginable agony, and then the baby is born. And that messy little bundle of life is placed on Mumma’s chest.
Is the pain gone? No.
Is the mess gone? No.
Jesus never says that when the baby is born the pain stops, the mess is magically cleaned. Look closely. What He says is this: when a mother takes hold of her baby, when she beholds this blessing of new life, she is in such a state of wide-eyed wonder, such elation of joy, that the very real pain becomes secondary.
The pain is still there, but:
This joy is primary
This joy tells her it was worth the pain
This joy overcomes the sorrow
That’s how Christian joy connects, that’s how it works, that’s why it’s gospel (good news). Joy is not the absence of sorrow but the presence of a Savior who overcomes it.
