The fact that John Wesley linked holiness to happiness in several of his sermons makes me glad and it presents a challenge. I’m glad, for example, that holiness and happiness are not opposed to one another, or mutually exclusive; it’s not that we get to be either holy or happy.
Several years ago, I taught a course on holiness and asked several of my students to respond to a prompt, which was written as if it were a message to them from an imagined person in a church where they might eventually serve as a pastor.
The message asked for guidance as the imagined person contemplated a difficult situation in their marriage. “Doesn’t God want me to be happy?” the person asked.
I was surprised by how many students responded with something like, “God doesn’t want you to be happy; God wants you to be holy.” It gave us an opportunity to talk about the relationship between the two, and for me to remind them that holiness and happiness are not at odds with one other.
The challenge for me, though, comes not only as I work with students and parishioners who long for happiness, but also as I have wrestled through my own seasons of darkness when happiness felt a long way off. These nagging questions surface: If I’m not happy, does that mean I’m not holy? Is there something wrong with me spiritually if I can’t be happy?
Let’s sketch the picture I have in mind behind this question. It’s the image of smiling, happy people for whom struggle and darkness seem far away. Somehow, I think our idea of holiness has come to be linked to an image like that one. So if I’m struggling, or happiness seems a long way off, is there any hope of holiness for me?
This depends, of course, on what we mean by ‘happiness.’ Maybe the kind of happiness that is deeply linked to holiness isn’t just about wearing a smile like a ‘nothing’s wrong here’ badge. Maybe it’s the kind that Jesus described in his Sermon on the Mount as he declared that people who mourn and are poor are actually blessed. Although we don’t see it a lot, the Greek word there can sometimes come into English as happy. But how can that be?
The kind of blessed happiness that Jesus offers us doesn’t arrive because nothing is wrong in life; it arrives through intimacy with God.
Those who mourn, for example, aren’t happy because they skip or erase their grief, but because they have met God in the midst of their sorrow. It’s the same kind of thing that I think was going on as Jesus knelt in the garden before his arrest and crucifixion (Matthew 26:39). We don’t typically associate the kind of anguish he exhibited in that prayer with happiness, and yet, in his ‘Nevertheless’ phrasing, we catch a glimpse of his intimacy with the Father.
Our theology of holiness has a lot to offer as we understand happiness, but perhaps none more profound than this: happiness isn’t in floating above the difficulty, but in meeting the holy God intimately in it.
