How can there be joy in such a world?

One week ago I was in one of the poorest, most violent slums in the Western Hemisphere—Cité Soleil, outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Between shacks of scavenged rubbish, piles of burning trash, and rubble from the 2010 earthquake, thousands of people walked by open sewage gutters—fecal waste flowing onto the dirt streets, mixing into a putrid mud.

It’s odd now, days later, to sit in a clean American restaurant and to jump mentally back to that dense poverty: a land where cholera, hepatitis, typhoid and mosquito-borne disease still kill thousands every year. It makes me wonder about the merriment of the holiday season in America—the joy, the cheer, the lights and tinsel.

In a world with such poverty—a world with school shootings and hostage crises and ISIS beheadings—do the “joy” and “peace” and “merry” of Christmas make any sense? It’s one thing to sing “Silent Night” in a warm church, with children dressed as shepherds and sheep. It’s quite another to sing “Silent Night” in Ferguson or Syria or Cité Soleil.

I was pondering this when the classic carol “Joy to the World” played on my car radio. How can there be joy in such a world? I thought. Then came these lines:

No more let sins and sorrows grow, Nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make his blessings flow Far as the curse is found.

Call them what you will, but sins and sorrows have grown around this globe: continuing to grow in the terror-soaked regions of Nigeria, in the Ebola-stricken villages of West Africa, at the funerals of Australian hostages. Thorns have infested not only our ground, but also, it seems, our human nature.

Modern expressions of Christmas ring hollow against such pain—TV commercials for luxury cars with big red bows on their roofs, packages wrapped and waiting under the tree. But those 300-year-old words from “Joy to the World” still echo this holiday season through our shopping malls and department stores—carrying the ancient heart of the holiday that, for most Americans, remains the most celebrated of the year.

The message of “Joy to the World” is that humanity stands in a place of sorrow—separated from our Creator. That, no matter how much we better ourselves, there will be thorns in our lives: poverty, sorrow, and destruction. But, the “Joy to the World” is the belief—for those who choose it in faith—that the Creator came down among us, that He carried our shame, felt our pain, and now provides passage into a better eternity for “whoever believes in him” (John 3:16).

“Joy to the World” reminded me that Christmas is precisely about pain, brokenness, and poverty. It’s about the areas of the globe where violence, injustice, and hunger seem like bottomless pits. And it’s about those areas within us, as well.

Not long ago, this understanding of Christmas was common cultural memory in North America. We hear echoes of that legacy in every Salvation Army bell ringer, in our hospital fundraisers, and in every push to help the poor and needy.

Isaac Watts, who wrote the lyrics to “Joy to the World,” was an early supporter of Yale College. Of a 1734 donation to Yale, Watts, a minister himself, wrote “with hearty desires of the success of your College in training up men, Christians & ministers for the service of the following age.”

Watts has indeed served us in “the following age.” If we’ll only pause to listen to the words of his well-known Christmas carols. In all our merriment, let us not forget the sorrowful among us. And let us not forget the Savior, who came for us.