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Contemporary culture is obsessed with happiness, and a very subjective concept of happiness at that.
This understanding of happiness focuses on an individual’s tastes and preferences that make them feel happy at a given time, but what makes some people happy might be horrific and immoral. There are people who take pleasure in every manner of depraved behavior. So, we either need to jettison the language of happiness as a goal in life, or recapture a better understanding of what true happiness is.
In the ancient Greek world, the word “happy” signified a community’s judgment on the quality of another person’s life: if a man had a good wife, many children, property, good health and other temporal goods, people would say, “That’s a happy man. He is fortunate. The gods have smiled on him.”
However, the man might have personally been miserable in his own heart.
On the other hand, a man who lacked a job, a wife, a family would be called “unhappy,” regardless of his mental state. In older English usage “happy” also use to have this emphasis. It wasn’t always such a flexible, subjective word. It comes from the old word “hap,” which as a verb means “to happen,” but as a noun means fortune or chance. So, if you were happy, it was because good fortune had happened to you. In other words, the older concept of happiness was closer to what we might call fortunate: having lots of objective day to day, earthly goods. But,the Greeks also recognized how transient temporal happiness can be, how quickly fortunes can be changed.
In Luke 11:27-28, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!” She was right, but that wasn’t the whole story. Mary was surely happy because of her remarkable Son, and she was surely blessed by God to have carried God the Son in her womb and nursed Him at her breast, but Jesus pushes past this temporal happiness and good fortune and on to the highest blessedness. He says, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.”
First and foremost, this describes Jesus. While He was like the rest of us in having flesh and blood, being fully human — He wasn’t a sinner. He was always happy to hear God’s Word and keep it perfectly. Jesus heard and learned all of God’s Word down to the letter, and put it into practice, for all of us, to fulfill all righteousness. And, He gladly heard and kept His Father’s Word when He said, “My Son, go up to Calvary and suffer for the sins of all people.”
At the cross, we can see a remarkable contrast between temporal happiness and eternal blessedness. Mary, like any mother, wanted happiness, good health and peace for her Son. And surely at the cross she was unhappy, grieved to see her beloved Child in agony. But while she may have been terribly unhappy, it was through Christ’s Passion that Mary and all the nations of the earth would receive eternal happiness. For in His life Jesus had actively fulfilled God’s Law in the place of all sinners, and in His death He was satisfying the curse that God had decreed as punishment for sin: death, condemnation, and eternal unhappiness in hell.
For you, Jesus did and suffered all these things in order to keep God’s Word perfectly, in order to earn for you eternal blessing and salvation in the forgiveness of all your sins and the bestowal of His perfect righteousness.
Hebrews 12 says, “Oh come, let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of God.”
Now you are objectively blessed by God when you hear these Words of God and keep them through faith: in your Baptism, God has combined His Word with the water to bless you with adoption as God’s beloved child and has put you in the happy situation of living under His grace, mercy and peace.
In Christ Jesus, no matter whether you are temporally happy or sad, delighted or depressed, you are objectively blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ, so eternal happiness is God’s will for you. And on the Last Day, Jesus will say to you: “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world,” Matthew 25:34.
In the meantime, “Blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.” Happy are those who find their life in Jesus! Amen.
