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.