Thoughts on Happiness 3: The Wrong Diagnosis

“This is stagefright. I had it once during Lady Windermere’s Fan. The only cure is to go on stage and not be frightened.”

Up the Women S2 E6, ‘Panto’ (2015)

Apparently they get doctors to wear white coats and stethoscopes because it makes people feel trusting towards them, regardless of whether said white coats and stethoscopes are actually helping them do their job or anything.

Remember the ‘historical paramedics’ sketches that formed a memorable component of Horrible Histories’ excellent third series?¹ In these, some unfortunate modern-day person, having called an ambulance for an ill or injured acquaintance, is promptly greeted by versions of Mat Baynton and Jim Howick hailing from some bygone era, who are keen to employ their self-proclaimed medical expertise in aid of the invalid, but then again, equally keen to make themselves scarce as soon as the real paramedics show up. It’s a fun and fast-paced reworking of the earlier ‘Historical Hospital’ sketch series,² and manages to stand out as a highlight of the programme among some very stiff competition.

The significant feature of the ‘historical paramedics’ sketches insofar as concerns this post, nonetheless, is this: because the writers like to cram in as many entertaining historical cures as they plausibly can into the two or three minutes of the sketch’s duration – everything from swallowing live buttered spiders as a remedy for generic ‘sickness’, to wrapping a sweaty sock around the neck to deal with a cold – the historical paramedics often attempt to treat many more ailments than their reluctant patients are actually suffering from. They mistake a birthmark for a boil or wart; they yell in a lady’s ear only to conclude from her recoiling that she is suffering from earache; and they waste some while debating the exact nature of a supposed stab wound that turns out to be nothing more than the stain of a dropped strawberry-flavoured ice lolly.³ The historical paramedics’ cures all, of course, sound ridiculous to modern ears – that’s the heart of the comedy here – but on top of that, they sometimes exercise one of those ridiculous cures on a patient who isn’t even suffering from the affliction it’s intended to treat.

It’s one thing to be wrong about the cure. To be wrong about the diagnosis, however, is to make double the mistake: the chances of you picking the right cure for your condition when you haven’t even correctly identified what that condition is are doubtless very small indeed.

So yes, I’m swinging back round to medical analogies for the final post of this little series on happiness. Call last week’s a digression and this an expansion of the first, if you like. In that one I made the point that Jesus didn’t do what he did on our behalf in order that we might have a happier life, but rather in order that we might have life, full stop. Now I’d like to have a closer look at what some of the implications might be if we get that wrong.

I was once with a non-Christian friend at a church event whose dominant theme was stress. The teaching component consisted of a clip from an instalment of J John’s ‘Just 10’ series on the Ten Commandments, namely the one pertaining to the prohibition of work on Shabbat.⁴ At one point J John launches into a series of idioms describing the stressed-out situation that can be relieved by the rest found in Jesus:

“Do you feel like you’re ready to throw in the towel? Do you feel like you’re at the end of your tether? Do you feel like you’re a bundle of nerves? Do you feel like you’re falling apart? Are you at your wit’s end? Do you feel like resigning from the human race?”

 

Apparently the expression ‘throw in the towel’ comes from the practice of throwing a towel into a boxing ring to indicate that a contestant forfeits the match.

Before the clip was shown, we had been given a sheet of paper on which was printed a slightly adapted version of this list of idioms with some of the key words blanked out, as a little guessing game kind of thing. My friend frowned over ‘I’m a bundle of [blank]’ before eventually hazarding, “bundle of fun?”

The cure J John was advocating was to find rest in Jesus. All well and good. But the diagnosis that came out of the clip we saw (I don’t attempt here to deliver a verdict on the whole half-hour sermon) was being a bundle of nerves and so forth. And I don’t at all mean to say that Jesus doesn’t offer relief from the pressures and burdens of the world – come to him all who are weary and heavy laden, for he is gentle and humble, his yoke easy and his burden light⁵ – but that’s not the core of the reason we need him. Or do only those feeling stressed and deprived of rest – upset and deprived of happiness – need Jesus? In which case, what about those who don’t identify with that diagnosis? What about those who would describe themselves more as a bundle of fun than a bundle of nerves?

The stress thing is only one angle: far too often, I think, and in far too many ways, we as Christians like to try to tell the rest of the world how they feel. You’re stressed, we tell them, and you’re dissatisfied, and you feel this emptiness, this hole in your life, and you fear death, and you harbour regrets, and you worry that life is meaningless, and you’re not, at the end of the day, happy. And granted, for many people, one or more of these kinds of assertions is likely to be true – but others might turn around and say that they feel quite happy enough, thank you very much, and so whatever cure we’re offering, they don’t need it. They don’t suffer from the affliction we’re offering to treat. We’re about as much use to them as the historical paramedics are to their poor misdiagnosed patients.

Maybe we’re just afraid of the fire-and-brimstone stuff. Maybe we don’t like the idea of telling people that the reason they need Jesus is because without him they’re going to hell. And there’s absolutely grounds to try to be sensitive and gentle and winsome when we’re sharing the gospel, rather than just stating the facts of it in whichever rough-and-ready fashion takes our fancy.⁶ Still, if we end up taking that principle to an extreme where we obscure the diagnosis of the human condition, we may very well end up doing more harm than good. The diagnosis of the human condition being, of course, that before we trust in Jesus’ resurrection, we are, in spiritual terms, nothing less than dead. (And I don’t even have to quote Ephesians to prove it.)⁷

“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but if the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’” – Genesis 2:16-17

“The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.’ … Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live for ever – ’

therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.” – Genesis 2:12, 22-23

“For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” – 1 Corinthians 15:21-22

If the given diagnosis is anything less than spiritual death, then Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection make about as much sense for a cure as do buttered spiders or a sweaty sock. We do the unbelieving world a disservice, and our God a dishonour, when we imply that the diagnosis that warrants the cure of the cross is stressed-out-ness, or dissatisfaction, or unhappiness of whatever variety. And we shoot ourselves cleanly in the foot as far as our own proclamation of the gospel goes as well. Jesus came, as per John 10:10, that we might have life;⁸ anything less than that is not really the gospel. Granted, people might still think the cure sounds ridiculous if we explain the diagnosis rightly, but if we don’t do the latter, we make double the mistake, and leave a very small chance of anyone accepting the cure.

On which note, much as I know I tend as a rule to address my blog posts as if to fellow-believers, allow me to transgress that norm for a moment: if on the off-chance you’re reading this as someone who doesn’t know and love the Lord Jesus, then please know that, whatever I or anyone else may have implied in the past, the reason Christians think you need Jesus isn’t because you need to be happier. The reason Christians think you need Jesus is because you need to be alive – in a way that goes beyond the three score years and ten of earthly existence that you’ll manage to snag if you’re lucky (a mere blink of an eye in terms of eternity) – and because he’s the only one who can give you life.

The diagnosis is death. The cure is resurrection. Jesus has shown that it works. Come to him all you who are feeling weary and heavy laden – and come to him also all you who aren’t feeling particularly either. Come to him whether you’re a bundle of nerves or a bundle of fun. Come to him and rise from death – because without him, through our common ancestor Adam, all are dead. It’s one diagnosis and one cure for all, folks: come to Jesus.

Footnotes

¹ If not, here’s one to give you a flavour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZIMRVpKLFg. There was also one in Series 2, incidentally, as I learned here, https://horriblehistoriestv.wordpress.com/historical-paramedics/, but the majority were in Series 3.

² Featured in Series 1 and 2, and once in Series 3: https://horriblehistoriestv.wordpress.com/historical-hospital/.

³ I highly recommend Mary Berry’s no-churn ice-cream recipe, https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/no-churn_ice_cream_72012, though you’re better off freezing the finished product for two days than two hours.

⁴ The newest version of this sermon series was filmed at the out-of-town megachurch in my very own home city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SerTk8VO-H0. The bit I reference is a couple of minutes from the end of the video.

⁵ This is the passage J John references in the bit of his talk immediately preceding the list of idioms, and it’s from the end of Matthew 11: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+11&version=ESVUK.

⁶ “Do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behaviour in Christ may be put to shame.” So said the apostle Peter on the subject: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Peter+3&version=ESVUK.

⁷ Here’s Genesis 2, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+2&version=ESVUK, so you can just click across one page to the right for the following chapter; and here’s 1 Corinthians 15: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+15&version=ESVUK.

⁸ This was the key Bible reference in my post two weeks ago. See also what a dear friend of mine has to say on the subject: https://www.exeterecu.com/#!Life-to-the-Full-Life-at-all/b4dab/56a9432f0cf22a80b02beb2a. Seriously worth reading.

Thoughts on Happiness 2: The Necessity of Sadness

“A slimy grey hand with six fingers and a thumb slipped round the open edge of the door and beckoned to her.

The hand gave Tina a wrong-feeling. Her heart started to beat faster and she got a kind of runny sensation down her arms and legs. She’d never felt it before. But she knew it was wrong, so she tapped a general all-purpose relaxing code into her popper pack and felt better straight away.

The hand beckoned again and Tina walked closer to the door.

It snatched her by the shoulder and pulled her inside.

Tina had a really bad wrong-feeling about this. She couldn’t see much inside the Grey Door, as it was very dark, and then the owner of the hand bit into her side and she got a very, very wrong pain-feeling.

She had enough strength to reach for her popper pack, which sent a soothing balm into her head, and the pain-feeling evaporated. She guessed she was about to be terminated and wondered why. But it seemed pointless to concern herself with this, so she let the question go.

‘I’m fine,’ said Tina. ‘Everything’s fine.’ …

Then the owner of the hand held her steady, opened its huge mouth and bit her head off.”

Gareth Roberts, Only Human (2005)

 

She looks sad, but just so you know for sure, she’s been painted in lovely shades of metaphorical blue.

There are all sorts of bits of fiction I could have written this post about. I could have written about Disney Pixar’s Inside Out, and Joy’s eventual realisation that her colleague Sadness had an important role to play in Riley’s experience as much as she did herself.¹ I could have written about Cartoon Saloon’s Song of the Sea, and Maka the owl-witch’s railing against sadness with such fervour that she would rather turn her loved ones (and herself) to unfeeling stone than watch them endure it.² I could have written about the second episode of the latest series of Doctor Who, ‘Smile’, in which a band of robots charged with facilitating and measuring the happiness of the humans who built them decide that the easiest way to remove the threat of sadness is to swiftly dispatch anyone who starts feeling anything less than perfectly content and grind down the skeleton for fertiliser.³

Wait – are you saying you could have written about Doctor Who, but you’re actually going to write about something else? Dear me, Anne, what on earth has happened to you? Are you feeling all right?

Not so fast – I didn’t say I wasn’t going to write about Doctor Who. It’s merely a matter of transferring our attentions from the aforementioned Twelfth Doctor episode ‘Smile’ to a novel featuring the Ninth Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack, written by Gareth Roberts and entitled Only Human.⁴ In this story, our intrepid time-travelling heroes encounter a society of humans who have phased out negative emotions altogether. Have a scan of the following extract:

… a man called Jacob was tucking into his breakfast of cauliflower cheese. He realised he wasn’t enjoying it very much, so he reached for the small, brightly coloured metal pack attached to his breast and tapped in a five-digit combination on its small keyboard without looking. Then the breakfast of cauliflower cheese became incredibly tasty, one of the best meals he’d ever had. But then, most of his meals tasted like the best meal he’d ever had. So he punched another five-digit combination into the metal pack and then the cauliflower cheese tasted like nothing he’d ever tasted before, in a strange but very pleasant way.

He heard his wife, Lene, enter the living room of their married quarters. She gave a little sigh as she pulled her chair up to the breakfast bar and poured herself some cauliflower cheese juice.

“What’s the matter, darling?” asked Jacob.

She didn’t say anything, just stared into space with an expression he didn’t recognise.

“Lene?”

“You know I took that diagnostic test yesterday?” said Lene casually. “The result’s just come through from Chantal, on my phone.” She still had her phone in her hand. She flipped it open and stared at the little screen.

Jacob felt a pang of wrong-feeling about her expression. He found he wanted to know – desperately wanted to know – what the result was. That felt uncomfortable. “What is it?”

“Incipient renal collapse,” said Lene.

Jacob felt the wrong-feeling swell inside him. “How long have you got?” he asked.

“Three weeks at the outside,” said Lene. “It’s no surprise, I guess. I am 387 and no one can live for ever.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a proper, fine smile.

Jacob didn’t know quite how to feel.

“Where’s my popper pack?” asked Lene. “I put it down somewhere last night…”

Jacob found her pack under a cushion on their settee and quickly handed it over. Lene took it and pressed its soft, adhesive pad to her chest.

“Right, quickly…” said Jacob. He opened the kitchen drawer and fished out the instruction booklet. He scanned through it, searching the index. “Bad news, bad news … page 43.” He turned to it. “Ah. Here we go. ‘News of your impending termination … Combo 490/32’.”

“490/32,” Lene repeated, tapping the numbers into her pack. Immediately the wrong smile and the strange expression disappeared.

“And I’ll need ‘News of partner’s impending termination’,” said Jacob, searching for it among the lines of crabbed text. “‘Combo 490/37’.”

He tapped the code into his pack and the wrong-feelings disappeared. He smiled at Lene and took her hand.

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” he said.

“Can’t be helped,” Lene smiled back.

 

Frankly, I’m not a great fan of cauliflower at the best of times, so I hate to think what it would be like as a juice.

Now, there are a lot of pretty messed-up things that happen in Doctor Who stories of numerous formats, but this scene – the reader’s first introduction to the popper-pack society of Only Human – has always stuck in my head as a particularly disconcerting one. (Obviously the one from which I took my opening quotation is also a strong contender, but it comes later on in the novel when we’re already used to the idea of people responding to any and all negative emotions by thumbing a code into their popper packs and acting as if everything’s fine.) That the tone of the scene’s narration is so utterly mild and harmless only compounds the unpleasantness. The very idea that one could fail to be distressed by news of a so obviously distressing nature is extremely unsettling. I find myself beset by all sorts of so-called ‘wrong-feelings’ at the notion of so blithely making light of a situation that clearly warrants some pretty major so-called ‘wrong-feelings’. Although in fact, let’s rephrase my earlier sentence: Jacob and Lene don’t fail to be distressed; they refuse to.

Why so? Because their society deems happiness the ultimate good, and any feeling opposed to it therefore counts as a fault to be corrected. My own society, I posit, is similar to some extent. One’s own personal happiness is definitely considered a worthy and important goal to be pursuing, and that naturally leads to some understanding of unhappiness as a fault to be corrected. If the point of life is to be happy, it follows that happiness is success and sadness is failure. Commendably, there has been some movement to challenge this principle recently; Inside Out would seem as good an example as any of a piece of media whose moral is that it’s OK to be sad sometimes.

Nonetheless, I’d like to push further than that. It’s not just that it would be OK for Jacob and Lene to be sad that Lene has less than three weeks to live – that if they happen to be feeling sad about it, that is to accepted as a valid response. On the contrary, it strikes the reader as frankly wrong that they aren’t sad. That’s the whole wrongness of the scene, in fact. They ought to be sad. It is not acceptable – not right –  for them to smilingly shrug the whole thing off as ‘can’t be helped’. It doesn’t do justice to the severity of what’s happening. So-called ‘wrong-feelings’ aren’t really wrong at all; in this scenario, the only right feelings to have are ‘wrong-feelings’.

It isn’t just that it’s OK to be sad. It’s that there are some situations in which it’s not OK not to be sad.

Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub on which it rested to the threshold of the house. And he called to the man clothed in linen, who had the writing case at his waist. And the Lord said to him, “Pass through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.” And to the others he said in my hearing, “Pass through the city after him, and strike. Your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity. Kill old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women, but touch no one on whom is the mark.” – Ezekiel 9:3-7

Here the mark of protection against the coming punishment is given to those who are sad about all the terrible evil things that are being done in the city.⁵ Such terrible evil things warrant sadness, and not to experience it when confronted by them is to be morally deficient. More accurately, it’s to insult the God who has in his perfection decreed that such things ought not to be done. It’s to fail to grasp the severity of disobeying him, just as Lene failed to grasp the severity of her impending death. Or, again, let’s rephrase that: it’s to refuse to grasp the severity of disobeying him. One cannot claim to worship God, to strive to walk in his ways and align with his values, and then turn round and offer a blithe ‘can’t-be-helped’ shrug of the shoulders in the face of rampant wrongdoing. That is not what someone who belongs to God looks like.

After all, adelphoi, to walk in God’s ways and align with his values is what we’re trying to do – to care about the things he cares about – and so if God is saddened by wrongdoing (which he most certainly is), then so should we be. We should be saddened by whatever saddens him. I was particularly struck by this when reading the oracle against Moab in Isaiah 15-16 earlier this week:⁶

Therefore I weep with the weeping of Jazer for the vine of Sibmah; I drench you with my tears, O Heshbon and Elealeh; for over your summer fruit and your harvest the shout has ceased. And joy and gladness are taken away from the fruitful field, and in the vineyards no songs are sung, no cheers are raised; no treader treads out wine in the presses; I have put an end to the shouting. Therefore my inner parts moan like a lyre for Moab, and my inmost self for Kir-hareseth. – Isaiah 16:9-11

 

This is a harp, not a lyre: you can tell because the strings go directly into the body of the instrument, without passing over a bridge. But it’s hard to find a stock photo of a lyre.

The authorial voice here – which I think we have to take to be God rather than Isaiah, because the latter can hardly claim to have single-handedly put an end to the shouts of joy concomitant with harvest-time in Moab – is deeply, deeply sad about the judgement wrought against Moab. He weeps and mourns right down to the centre of his being – and no less so because he was the one who wrought the judgement.

I think in evangelical circles we can sometimes be so keen to defend the doctrine that God is perfectly just in punishing guilty human beings that we don’t give ourselves any proper room to be sad about the fact that he does so. To be distressed by the notion of people facing divine judgement sounds to us like the first step towards denying that a loving God could really enact such judgement⁷ – and yet, from Isaiah 16, that shouldn’t be the case at all. Isaiah expects us to hold these two strands together: God brings just disaster on Moab for her sins even as his inner parts moan like a lyre for her sake. It’s not our job to execute divine judgement, but if we’re striving to walk in God’s ways and align with his values, it seems very clear that we ought to be profoundly sad about its being executed even as we acknowledge and praise God’s perfect justice in executing it. And much as that doesn’t seem at all a straightforward thing to do, it nevertheless strikes me as a more satisfactory course of action than denying either one principle or the other.

Last week I argued that I don’t need Jesus to be happy.⁸ It now emerges that in some situations he actually calls me to be sad. Not in all situations, I hasten to add; there’s room for happiness too: rejoice in the Lord always and that. Still, to learn to be saddened by what God is saddened by is to reflect his image more fully. It’s part of my sanctification. I’m not to buy into the myth that happiness is success and sadness is failure – that ‘wrong-feelings’ are faults to be corrected. Rather, I’m to try to grasp the true severity of the situations I encounter and respond in a genuinely appropriate manner. And I’m to do that, furthermore, all the while knowing that those who mourn now are blessed, because they shall comforted, when one day God wipes the tears from all eyes.⁹ That is a reality, indeed, that I am to acknowledge with just as much earnestness as I am to acknowledge those situations which demand sadness as their appropriate response.

Footnotes

¹ Here’s a fun multiple-rejig of the film by Editing Is Everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4GlQ3ciV1M. ‘Disaster Movie’ is my personal favourite.

² It’s my favourite film and you should totally watch it if you’re into ridiculously beautiful animation. Here’s a music video/trailer to whet your appetite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7enRvwFUTes.

³ Quick little trailer to remind you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2hc4UA8pf8.

⁴ You can now get it with a snazzy new cover: http://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Gareth-Roberts/Doctor-Who-Only-Human--50th-Anniversary-Edition/14525409.

⁵ Here’s the whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel+9&version=ESVUK.

⁶ You can have a skim of Chapter 15 (it’s mostly place names, to be honest) and then click the right-hand arrow for a look at the following one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+15&version=ESVUK.

⁷ Not a very sensible argument, as illustrated here by the ever-excellent Adam4d, http://adam4d.com/good-loving-judge/, but I can nonetheless see why people advocate it.

⁸ Box on the right. But you already knew that.

⁹ In this final paragraph I allude to Philippians 4:4, Matthew 5:4, and Revelation 21:4.

Thoughts on Happiness 1: I Just Need it to Live

Mallory:           You don’t need this to be happy.

Matt:                I agree. I just need it to live.

Studio C, ‘Diabetes Intervention’ (2014)

Much as it would be a stupendously difficult task to identify my favourite sketch of all those that the relentlessly amusing Studio C have generously lavished on their YouTube audience in recent years, I suspect that were I to sit down and seriously attempt said task, there would end up being included somewhere in my top twenty a particular gem entitled ‘Diabetes Intervention’.¹ Herein we witness an encounter between diabetic protagonist Matt and his well-meaning but ill-informed friends, who, having discovered his case of syringes and insulin shots, undertake to hold an intervention in order to tackle Matt’s perceived dangerous substance abuse.

 

Insulin refills. Dangerous indeed.

Matt attempts to explain his condition and the necessity of its treatment, but of course for the sake of the comedy it is required of his friends that they completely misconstrue him. After Matt’s initial statement that he has diabetes, Jason responds in a firm but caring manner, “Matt, we can’t have a serious conversation if you’re just going to make up words.” A little later, Mallory assures him, “We’re going to help you get through this, Matt. You can beat this.”

Matt, unsurprisingly, isn’t convinced: “Well, currently there’s no cure.”

Mallory, seemingly close to tears, replies, “I know it feels that way right now, but you don’t need this to be happy.”

Matt nods. “I agree. I just need it to live.”

At this point, Natalie jumps into the conversation: “No, no, there’s other ways to feel alive, there’s natural highs, here, have this giant Pixy Stik.”² She attempts to hand Matt an object that I understand from Wikipedia consists of a long tube filled with something akin to fizzy sherbet. (Because all that sugar is really going to help.)

Proceedings continue along similar lines for another hilarious couple of minutes, with Matt’s friends persistently completely missing the point. As they understand it, he only wants the insulin because he enjoys it. He can’t make them understand that whether he enjoys it is really neither here nor there: rather, the critical thing is that if he continues to be deprived of it, he’s literally going to die. The reason Matt needs insulin isn’t to make him happy. It isn’t to make him feel alive. It’s to enable him to actually live.

And I wonder, you know, whether I’m not sometimes exactly as idiotic about the gospel as poor Matt’s well-intentioned friends are about insulin. Allow me to unpack that.

A little while ago a Thought occurred to me (it does sometimes happen). This Thought arrived decked in a particular sort of packaging, namely the sort that makes one fairly sure that its contents consist entirely or at least mostly of heretical nonsense and gospel-contradicting lies, but of course I had to open it and bring those contents out into the light to be scrutinised, or else they’d get up to something unpleasant and insidious spreading out from whichever dark corner of my mind I left them in. The Thought, I found, went something like this: I don’t need Jesus to be happy. My life is really rather enjoyable all by itself, actually, and indeed, were I to stop bothering with this whole Christianity business, it would still be so. I love my work and my hobbies and my friends; it would be possible for me to have a really nice time based on purely worldly resources; I don’t need Jesus to be happy.

At this point my brain basically yelped in horror at the notion that it had produced such a monstrosity and promptly began attempting to beat the Thought down into whimpering submission. Of course I need Jesus to be happy. None of it would mean anything without him, none of it would matter; I would have no assurance, no ultimate hope; what would existence be, however superficially enjoyable, without the magnificent knowledge that God who creates and sustains and rules over all things has such love for me that he would give up his Son to the full extent of the agonies I deserve, in order that I might have life?

But that’s the thing: all that was in order that I might have life. Not in order that I might be happy. Granted, any real and sustainable enjoyment of the latter is perhaps conditional on the former – supposing Matt did decide to ditch his insulin habit and embrace the joys of Pixy Stix, he might have been happy, but it certainly wouldn’t have been for very long – but all that really serves to demonstrate is that the latter is not in any way the main point. A chunk of scripture that I’ve noticed gets chucked around a lot in evangelistic contexts is the second half of John 10:10, which the NIV renders: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”³ Emphasising the ‘life to the full’ idea is presumably a way of countering the presupposition that Christianity restricts freedom or disapproves of fun, and I can see the point of doing that to some extent. Still, I worry that if one emphasises ‘life to the full’ excessively, the offer becomes one of greater enjoyment of life, which is, of course, not what Jesus was talking about at all. The whole point is that without Jesus we don’t have any life whatsoever; Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesus that before they began to trust Jesus they were categorically dead.⁴ Jesus came that those who follow him might have life. ‘To the full’ is merely a bonus, and it doesn’t even refer to the kind of super-positive lifestyle that we would tend to associate with the phrase.⁵ On the contrary, Jesus elsewhere told his followers to expect to be hated and maltreated by others, and on top of that downright commanded them to be prepared to die in his service.⁶

The Thought had proved resilient. I stopped trying to beat it into silence and instead took a closer look at it. Maybe there was a sense in which it was true. Indeed, maybe for many of my brothers and sisters across the world and throughout the church age, there was an even more significant sense in which it was true. Following Jesus has cost, and continues to cost, some people pretty much every source of earthly happiness they have: work and prosperity and friends and family and freedom and health and even sometimes life – though only the temporary life we experience in the world, of course. No hardship can touch the true, spiritual, everlasting life which Jesus came to give us, and which we will one day enjoy with him in a state of altogether superlative happiness. So in that ultimate sense, yes, of course I need Jesus in order to be happy – but only because in primary place I need him in order to live. In another, more immediate sense, my Thought was entirely right. I could in all probability have an above-averagely-enjoyable life without bothering with any of this Christianity business; having an above-averagely-enjoyable life was never the point of any of this Christianity business, any more than the point of Matt’s insulin shots in ‘Diabetes Intervention’ was to give him the same kind of emotional rush he might obtain as easily from fizzy sherbet. The point of it, as per John 10:10, is so that I might have life, and that’s something I can’t get anywhere else.

I don’t need Jesus to be happy. I just need him to live.

Footnotes

¹ Here it is for your delectation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es2f5MsEWmg.

² This is my attempt to spell a singular form of the apparently plural Pixy Stix. Here’s the Wikipedia article I consulted to find out what such a thing actually is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixy_Stix.

³ See for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10&version=NIVUK.

⁴ You won’t have to read far to find it: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+2&version=ESVUK.

⁵ I mean this kind of twaddle: https://personalexcellence.co/blog/101-ways-to-live-your-life-to-the-fullest/.

⁶ Try John 15, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+15&version=ESVUK, and Mark 8, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+8&version=ESVUK, just off the top of my head.