Happiness

Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52

What does the word ‘happiness’ mean to you?

Originally happiness simply meant 'flourishing' - having a good existence, doing well, but very quickly people began to ask questions like, can you be happy if you have no children, or if - when you die - your children don't seem to be flourishing?

Then people began to distinguish between being happy because we lead a comfortable life, being happy because we're successful or powerful, and being happy because we've got ourselves together, we're at peace in our souls. 

Some people are driven by ambition. They can never be happy unless they're successful. Others give up comfort and wealth to pursue a contemplative life. The English thinker John Locke said that happiness means different things to different people.

Another question flows from this. Would we be happier if we simply took life as it comes, or can we make ourselves happier by striving to achieve our own brand of happiness? 

To give an example, we might think that we're always at our happiest when we're on holiday. So we could strive to have as many holidays and short breaks as we can afford. Or we might say that the thing which makes us happiest is simply letting life wash over us, so that we take one day at a time and never worry about what tomorrow will bring. If we see a special offer for a holiday and we can afford it, we might go. But if we can't afford a holiday we’ll enjoy sitting in the garden instead.

The Muslim and Stoic answer to this conundrum is that the universe is governed by a good principle and so the only way to be happy is to go with the grain, or the flow. We can't resist our destiny, we have to embrace it and make the best of it, and that's the only way to be happy. 

But Plato's answer was that the happiest people are those who hit upon the right balance between physical comfort, personal ambition and virtue. In other words, you can't be truly happy if you get to the top of your profession and make a pile of money for yourself, but only at the cost of stabbing other people in the back. And you can't be happy either if - despite being a wonderful person - you're starving and totally unsuccessful. 

His disciple Aristotle said that what we need to cultivate is something he called 'practical wisdom', the skills and experience that will help us strike just the right balance to be happy.

Now, of course, there's another approach to being happy, which we might call pleasure seeking. Is doing things we enjoy the best way to find happiness? 

For example, when I retired some of the advice that we got on the Methodist ministers’ retirement course was to do only those things which we enjoy. Is that good advice for a Methodist minister?

The trouble with pleasure is that the happiness it brings tends to be very short term, and too much pleasure is usually poisonous. Binge drinking may be fun at the time but it brings in its wake the inevitable hangover and the threat of liver disease.

What about desire? Can getting what we desire make us happy?

The English thinker Thomas Hobbes came up with another objection to all of the ways of achieving happiness. He said that human beings are always driven by desire, so we'll never have enough pleasure, or success, or comfort, or peace. We'll always want a little bit more, because that's how we’re made. Even if we found happiness, for instance by finding a perfect marriage partner, we'd still be afraid of losing them. We always have to confront the fact that eventually death will part even the most happy couple.

So is there something to be said for unhappiness?

The Romantics said that being unhappy is what makes us creative and motivates us to try to build a better world. Pure happiness would be sterile and unproductive. If we were truly happy we'd all be doing nothing.

Is it alright to create a society in which most people are fairly happy most of the time even if some people are not?

In the Eighteenth Century Jeremy Bentham came up with the theory that it's morally right to try to try to maximise the total amount of happiness in the world even when, in order to make most people happy, we have to make some people feel unhappy. So it's right to have a speed limit on roads even if that makes some people late for their doctor's appointment or stops them from enjoying the excitement of racing around the city's streets. To this his pupil John Stuart Mill added the idea of a hierarchy of happiness - a happy Socrates is happier than a happy pig in mud. 

What did Jesus have to say about happiness in todays’ Bible reading?

Jesus certainly has something to say here about unhappiness. If we haven’t gone about being happy in the right way we won't come to a happy end. Instead there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

So what is the right way to find happiness in Jesus’ opinion? The first answer is that Jesus prefers the word ‘joy’. But having said that, he tells us happiness can come from unlikely beginnings. Something small and insignificant can give us a great deal of joy, so we should always be open to new possibilities. 

It also means that happiness can come upon us unexpectedly. Knowing this is how happiness works, we need to be like the man who took the insignificant mustard seed but carefully planted it anyway, hoping that it would grow into a huge shrub.

Aunty Molly, the wife of Helen's Uncle Ken, took a tiny cutting from a fuchsia in a garden that they visited. When it started to grow, Uncle Ken took further cuttings and gave them to all his friends and relatives. We’ve had one or two of these cuttings over the years. They look tiny and insignificant at first, but they grow prodigiously. Uncle Ken's fuschia becomes a monster! If we didn't keep pruning each one, it would grow into a tree. And we're always battling to stop that happening. That doesn't sound like a recipe for happiness but Uncle Ken's fuschia is like the Mediterranean version of a mustard seed. From an unpromising beginning you can sometimes get amazing results.

So the Kingdom of Heaven is one of those things that can seem insignificant but holds great promise. We can overlook God's way of doing things, because it strikes us as unlikely to make a difference, but appearances can deceive us. 

I like to use fresh yeast sometimes to make bread. It comes as a little cube wrapped in wax paper, which quickly turns to an unpromising beige sludge at room temperature. But it makes the dough rise. Without it I'd have naan bread, which is fine for some purposes but doesn't make good toast. Jesus says that the Kingdom of heaven has the same power to change situations. It may look unpromising to start with but it contains the promise of great things.

Of course, if this is true then the Kingdom of Heaven has the power to bring great happiness or joy. It's worth giving up all the other routes to happiness in order to possess it. 

It's like the people who bought a licence to go prospecting for dinosaur bones on someone's land. They ended up finding a tyrannosaurus worth more than £37 million at auction. The happiness or joy which can come from finding the Kingdom of God puts the tyrannosaurus in the shade.

And finally Jesus says that happiness is about keeping the best of the old as well as putting it together with the best of the new. The merchant and the treasure hunter had to sell everything they owned in order to possess something far more valuable. But that's not always necessary. We may not have to throw everything out in order to make a fresh start in the Kingdom of Heaven.

‘Have you understood all this?’ Jesus asked. And somewhat optimistically the disciples answered, ‘Yes!’

For more about the ideas in this post see In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, 24 January 2002