The Circle of Joy
“Celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing floor and your winepress. Be joyful at your Festival—you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns. For seven days celebrate the Festival to the Lord your God at the place the Lord will choose. For the Lord your God will bless you in all your harvest and in all the work of your hands, and your joy will be complete.” –Deuteronomy 16:13–15
I would not characterize myself as a particularly joyful person. Sensitive? Definitely. Alarmist? Maybe. Joyful? Meh. In my everyday life, my thoughts can easily tend to despair—at our treatment of one another, at the state of our environment, at my culpability in all of it. And yet I have recently heard voices whispering that despair incapacitates. It is devoid of healing. It is one sided. An empowering response, one of reciprocity, is that of joy. Joy opens me to both receiving and giving healing. Joy enables me to receive beauty and goodness and acknowledges that I bear a responsibility for the use and preservation of these gifts. Joy teaches me to acknowledge a Giver.
In our text today from Deuteronomy we see an interesting relationship unfolding between God, the Hebrew people, and the land. Old Testament scholarship explains how three main festivals formed the structure of the Hebrew calendar and helped mark each of the three seasons (rainy, spring and summer) that the Hebrews experienced. Passover signaled the transition from the rainy season to spring when the barley harvest was ready. The Feast of Weeks marked the transition from spring to summer when the wheat harvest was at hand. Finally, the Feast of Tabernacles signaled the end of summer when fruits were ripe. Each of these festivals required the Hebrews to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in order to worship before God in the temple.
When God chose to synchronize the religious festivals with the seasons it was a demonstration of the reality that the people’s relationship with God was directly mirrored by their relationship with the land. When they were listening to God, they would treat the land well, and there would be abundant harvests (Deut. 28:11–14). When they ignored God that neglect would show up in abuse of the land, resulting in a lack of harvest produce (Deut. 28:15–19, 38–42).
These festivals remind us that the Kingdom of God and the joy of the gospel were never meant to pertain to humans only. It is an all encompassing redemption that is offered by our God—plentiful enough to spill over onto everything it touches. When we take joy in our relationship with God it is certainly reflected in our treatment of people but astonishingly also in our treatment of the land. We are delighted to discover that the land responds to our care with abundance, which increases our joy. We then take the fruit of the land and offer it to God in joy, reinforcing our relationship to both. And so the cycle continues in one great circle of joy.
Invitation to Reflection:
Where do you notice yourself experiencing joy as you consider the created world around you?
How do you find yourself wanting to respond to God as you savor that joy?
How do you find yourself wanting to respond (differently) to the created world as you experience that joy?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melissa Mettler joined Novo in 2018 and serves with the OpenAir team to offer spiritual direction and other accompaniment resources to people in ministry. She lives in Oregon in the western United States with her husband David (also a member of OpenAir) and their two children.
