Joy
Joy is gladness of the whole soul, arising from the possession, recovery, or hope of a good that is loved. Its most arresting scriptural appearance comes during the Savior’s ministry among the Nephites, when He told the multitude, “now behold, my joy is full,” and then wept, took their little children “one by one,” blessed them, and wept again (3 Nephi 17:20-21). Fulness of joy and tears arrive together in the same Person. The Hebrew Bible most often uses simchah, frequently paired with sason, “exultation,” while the New Testament’s chara shares its root with charis, “grace,” a kinship suggesting that joy is the felt reception of a gift. Common usage treats joy as an intense pleasure. Scripture binds it to persons and to their redemption.
As Exceeding as Was My Pain
Since John W. Welch’s studies of the late 1960s, Alma’s account of his conversion to his son Helaman has been recognized as an elaborate chiasmus whose turning point is the name of Jesus Christ. Alma lay “for the space of three days and three nights” unable to speak or move, recalling both Jonah in the belly of the fish and the Savior in the tomb. When his mind “caught hold” upon his father’s prophecy of the Redeemer, the torment ended: “oh, what joy, and what marvelous light I did behold; yea, my soul was filled with joy as exceeding as was my pain!” He added that “there can be nothing so exquisite and sweet as was my joy” (Alma 36:20-21).
Alma’s joy had an object. His next words describe a vision in which he saw, “even as our father Lehi saw, God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels,” repeating nearly word for word the vision with which the Book of Mormon opens. Joy carried Alma into the company of his father and toward the presence of God, and his soul “did long to be there.” King Benjamin’s people passed through the same sequence. After viewing themselves as “less than the dust of the earth,” they cried for mercy, and they “were filled with joy, having received a remission of their sins, and having peace of conscience” (Mosiah 4:3). In both accounts joy attends the restoration of a broken relationship with God.
The Woman in Travail
On the night of His betrayal the Savior compared His grieving disciples to a woman in labor: “A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.” He applied the figure to His death and resurrection: “ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you” (John 16:21-22). The mother’s joy has its cause outside herself, in a new person who now exists, and her anguish belongs to the same process that brought that person into the world.
The figure carries a typological weight that John’s Gospel develops. The sorrow of childbirth entered the human story in Eden, and the Savior’s own passion ends in a garden, where Mary Magdalene, weeping at the empty tomb, mistakes the risen Lord for the gardener before her sorrow is turned to joy. Latter-day Saints, whose scriptures teach that the Fall opened the way to posterity and redemption, have found in this pattern an account of mortality itself, a labor whose sorrow is real and whose issue is the birth of persons into a larger life. Joy in this pattern remains bound to persons, both the one who is born and the One who rises.
Joy in Heaven
Luke’s parables of the lost locate joy in heaven and attach it to recovery. The shepherd who finds his lost sheep “layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing,” and calls his friends and neighbors to rejoice with him, and the Savior draws the lesson: “joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). Divine joy, on this account, is particular. It attends the return of one identifiable soul, and it is shared, since neither the shepherd nor the woman with the lost coin rejoices alone. The God of these parables is moved by events in the lives of His children, and He invites others into His gladness.
A revelation of June 1829 makes that joy the reward of missionary labor. Reminding Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer that “the worth of souls is great in the sight of God,” the Lord declared, “how great is his joy in the soul that repenteth!” and promised that whoever labored all his days to bring “save it be one soul” would find great joy “with him in the kingdom of my Father” (D&C 18:13, 15). The promised joy is shared between the laborer and the soul he brought. The Nephite scene with which this entry began enacts the same truth, for the Savior’s full joy issued at once in tears and in the blessing of each child in turn.
Engineering Gladness
Isaiah foresaw a day when “the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 35:10). The philosopher David Pearce proposes a secular version of that promise, calling for biotechnology to abolish suffering in all sentient life and replace it with “gradients of bliss.” Brain stimulation discloses the risk. At Tulane from the 1950s into the 1970s, the psychiatrist Robert Heath implanted electrodes in the septal region of patients’ brains, and some, given a button, stimulated themselves compulsively, in experiments now remembered as an ethical scandal. Pleasure delivered in this manner has no object, rejoicing over no recovered sheep and no child born into the world.
Medicine has meanwhile begun to heal the circuitry of sorrow. In 2021 researchers in San Francisco reported that a device implanted in the brain of a woman with severe depression, detecting a neural signature of her illness and answering it with brief pulses, relieved what years of medication and electroconvulsive therapy had not. Latter-day Saints may welcome such relief as part of the healing Isaiah foresaw. The joy of scripture lays a further charge on a people who gain such power over their moods. It requires them to keep gladness fastened to persons, to rejoice over the one who returns and mourn with those who mourn, and to seek the fulness of joy the Savior knew among the Nephite children, where gladness and tears were shared.