“Rejoice always!”
“Rejoice always” says Paul. Not just on Sundays, or weddings, or when we feel things are going well. Paul has a tendency to say what he means. “Rejoice always” is not “Rejoice when you feel up for it”.
Isaiah rejoices because “the Lord God will make justice and praise spring up before all the nations”. And, perhaps most dramatically, Mary also rejoices – our Responsorial Psalm today is not actually a psalm, but that extraordinary prophesy from Mary after she gets news of her baby – “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; … He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation.” In the moments after her life is turned upside down by the knowledge that she is going to become an unmarried mother, an unimaginable shame in her time and society, she praises God in the same way as one of her great predecessors does.
We very likely feel that it is absurd, even crazy, to rejoice in a time like the one we are going through. How can we possibly rejoice when we are overwhelmed with death, division, a sense of powerlessness, frustration, and maybe anger. How could Mary rejoice, how could Isaiah rejoice, how could Paul rejoice, how can people dying in hospital, in civil wars, in the time of plague, rejoice? How? How can we rejoice in such times?
Rejoice always.
Our rejoicing is not born from our feelings. Our feelings change, our circumstances change, our lives and all lives change. “Rejoice always” cannot be based on any of that. The always can only be based on a God who is always, for ever.
Because He shows himself to us, we gain the power to see that there is something beyond the frustration, the fear, the anger, even the death. Our rejoicing is not a response to or expression of our feelings, or if it is, that’s a bonus – it’s an act of will, it’s an acknowledgement that we can see, albeit through a dark glass, that our God is there always, that whatever circumstances we and our world find ourselves in, that “He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation.”
And that fear is not a fear to frighten us away, it is a fear of wonder, a fear that draws us forward, a fear that asks us to rediscover our joy, to reimagine our joy, to renew our joy. In that relationship there is only joy, not from anything we do, but because God takes joy in us, always. So we can rejoice always.