The Gigantic Secret

These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. JOHN 15:11

Orthodoxy ends with joy. Its last pages are among the most beautiful Chesterton ever wrote, and they contain the sentence by which, more than any other, he is remembered. He had spent the book showing that Christianity was true and sane. He closed it by showing that it was glad.

The small publicity and the gigantic secret

The pagan world, Chesterton said, had been joyful in small things and sad in great ones. The ancient Greek could enjoy the wine and the dance and the sunlight, but when he looked at the ultimate questions — death, fate, the meaning of the whole — he saw only darkness and doom. His joy was on the surface; his grief was at the root. Christianity reversed this. The Christian may weep over many small things in this world, for it is fallen and full of sorrow, but at the root of everything he knows that all is well, that God is good, that death is defeated and that love will have the last word. The Christian’s grief is on the surface; his joy is at the root.

Chesterton put it in the famous sentence from the chapter called Authority and the Adventurer: “Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.”

As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things. 2 CORINTHIANS 6:10

Joy as the heart of the universe

He believed that this was not merely a feeling, but a fact about the world. Joy, not sorrow, is the deepest thing in reality, because God Himself is joyful. Sorrow is real, but it is a parenthesis. The story of the world is a comedy, in the old sense of a story with a happy ending, and the believer may laugh at the end of it because he knows how it ends.

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. PSALM 30:5

The mirth of Christ

And then, in the very last paragraph of the book, Chesterton turned to the Gospels. He noticed that the Christ of the Gospels is a figure of enormous emotion. He weeps; He is angry; He is moved with compassion; He speaks with a fierceness that terrified the religious leaders of His day. He did not hide His tears or His wrath. But there was something, Chesterton suggested, that He did hide — something that He kept to Himself when He went up a mountain alone to pray. “There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth,” he wrote, “and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”

It is a daring thought, and Chesterton offered it as a fancy, not a doctrine. But it rests on something real. The Gospels speak of Christ’s joy, and the epistles speak of a joy set before Him that carried Him through the cross itself.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. HEBREWS 12:2

In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth. LUKE 10:21

Joy and holiness

Chesterton never thought that joy was a substitute for holiness, or that the Christian should be cheerful in a shallow, bouncing way. He knew sorrow; he had nearly lost his mind, his health and his brother. His joy was not the absence of pain but the deep conviction underneath it. And it was, he thought, one of the great evidences of the faith. A religion that was false would have to make its followers either grim or giddy. Christianity made them glad.

Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice. PHILIPPIANS 4:4

Weighing it

This is Chesterton at his best and most biblical. The New Testament is a book of joy, and the believer’s joy is a fruit of the Spirit and a command of God. Much modern Christianity, earnest and anxious, needs to hear it.

One caution is worth adding. Chesterton’s fancy about the hidden mirth of Christ is beautiful and reverent, but it is a fancy, and he said so. Scripture tells us that Christ was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and that His joy was a joy that passed through the cross. The Christian’s joy is not a temperament but a gift; it flows not from a cheerful disposition but from the finished work of the Saviour. Chesterton’s own exuberance was a natural gift as well as a grace, and believers of a quieter temperament should not think themselves less joyful because they laugh less loudly. The joy of the Lord is their strength too.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. ISAIAH 53:3

The joy of the Lord is your strength. NEHEMIAH 8:10

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Is your joy on the surface and your grief at the root, or the other way round? What would it take to reverse it?

2. Read Philippians, the epistle of joy, in one sitting, and note every mention of rejoicing.

3. Read Hebrews 12:1–3 and consider the joy that was set before Christ.

4. Think of a sorrow you are carrying. Bring it to God, and ask Him to show you the joy beneath it.

5. Read the closing pages of Orthodoxy, the chapter called Authority and the Adventurer, in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You were a man of sorrows, and You endured the cross for the joy that was set before You.

Thank You that sorrow is not the deepest thing in the world, and that joy will have the last word.

Where my grief has gone down to the root, plant Your joy beneath it. Where my joy has been shallow, make it deep.

Let my life be a witness to the gigantic secret, that in You all is well, and all shall be well for ever. Amen.