Joy Will Not Fail
In early March of 2025, Palestinian-American organizer, refugee, and Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained by ICE at his home in New York City. There was no warrant, only an order from the State Department that called for the revocation of Khalil’s legal status and his deportation from the United States. Khalil was taken not to the nearby ICE facility in New Jersey, where his wife, Abdalla, would begin searching for him, but to a detention facility in Louisiana. He was detained for three months before being released. While he was detained, Khalil missed the birth of his son, a reality he would describe as a profound heartbreak. Khalil was taken from his family and locked away for months, not for having caused harm to anyone else, but for disruptively taking the stance against the violence carried out in Gaza. In July of 2025, Khalil was invited to a comedy show by comedian Ramy Youssef. At the end of the performance, after having laughed and enjoyed himself despite all he had been through, Khalil was invited up on stage. From there he shared a phrase that did not originate from him, but has been shared widely across the internet and beyond: “joy is an act of resistance.”
This is the week of Advent when we talk about joy, in the midst of a season which focuses on joy. In case anyone was in danger of forgetting that this season is all about joy, we have a large reminder off to my left. We go to parties, give and receive gifts, eat way too many cookies, listen to cheerful songs about babies and just how quiet and peaceful newborns are. We’re supposed to feel joy, we’re supposed to feel happy. Our children are home. We get to visit our grandchildren. The semester is finally over, and we have a few weeks to rest. And what better way of encapsulating that sense of joy that comes with the season than Mary’s song of praise. She has found out that she is going to bear a child who is supposed to be a leader of his people, she has just gone and visited her relative, Elizabeth, who is carrying her own child who will be a leader among his people. As the two of them are sharing their excitement, they just can’t contain their joy and suddenly…Mary starts to sing. And of course she starts singing about how cute and quiet babies are, right? No. She sings about how God has brought down the powerful and raised up the lowly. She sings about how God has filled the hungry poor and sent the rich away with nothing. She sings a song not about counting her own blessings, not talking about how grateful she is to have what she needs and to be alive and living in such a great empire. Not about her nuclear family or having some idyllic life. She sings a song about a total reversal of the world she has always known, the world as those in power insist it needs to be. She sings a song about the kingdom of God.
Back in July, there was a piece on NPR’s program Code Switch about this idea of joy as resistance. One of the NPR staff people, Leah Donnella, who self-identifies as a curmudgeon, keeps expressing her skepticism about this idea. She can see how joy can be a means of resistance for people like Mahmoud Khalil, queer folks at Pride events or nightclubs, or immigrants who dance to music from their homelands despite the reality that doing so could turn them into targets for deportation. But surely there must be a line somewhere. Surely not all joy can be considered resistance. Is it resistance to any system of inequality for any of us to find joy in a decadent meal now and then or in a family vacation? Donnella comes across in this interview as little more than a contrarian, which of course I can relate to, but the question that she puts forward is an important one: whose joy is resistance? Our joy is resistance, I would say. Anything we do to not fall into despair, anything we do to remain true to who we are and to what God is calling us. But I think the most profoundly resistant joy is found in people like Mary, the people with their backs against the wall. The deepest joy, that resists the despair that drowns out all other hope, that cuts through the mourning and misery that occupy each moment of each day. Joy that cannot be contained in the lungs of an unwed teenager who has just found out that she is part of the story of salvation that God is telling. The story that sweeps past the wealthy and the powerful, and rests incarnate in the bodies of the poor and the occupied.
Mary’s joy is not simply an attitude that she puts on. For us to truly understand how meaningful her joy is, we have to think about where and when Mary is. She’s a young woman, still unmarried, part of a peripheral people living in a land occupied by one of the most powerful empires the world has seen. She is nobody. Her people have tried and failed to rise up and overthrow the Romans. She would have known city streets and highways adorned with Roman soldiers keeping an eye out for rebels who looked like her. And then there’s her betrothed. Joseph, the worker, who had steady pay but no evidence of titles. They were poor, working class, occupied—nothing. Even so, Mary sings her song of joy, her song of hope. She sings a song of a God at work in the world, whose solidarity lies not with those in power, but with the oppressed. She calls on the psalms of her people, referencing God’s faithfulness in words that would have been passed down from generation to generation. She’s taking part in a culture that was controlled, that was demonized by those in power. She shares this joy with her foremothers, but most importantly, she shares this joy with Elizabeth. Because part of how joy becomes resistance is through sharing it with others. The writer Audre Lorde once said that “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers.” Mary does not keep her joy to herself—she shares it. She builds that bridge between her and her co-conspirator.
To display joy, and to share joy with another, especially as a part of an occupied people, is to resist hopelessness. It’s to resist despair. The sharing of our joy becomes a magnifier of God’s promised reign, of the coming of the kin-dom. To express our joy, to cling to it with all that we have, and to share it with others, is to proclaim that the powers of this world have no power over us, for our joy is in the revolutionary world we see through God’s eyes. So listen to the joy of the poor. Make space for those who are most in danger to find and share their joy. Find the things that bring you joy—and share those things.
Our call is to embody this joy. Our call is to magnify this joy by our very souls. By the way we live and the way we die, we are called to practice joy, to practice this alternative way of being. In practicing joy, the profound joy that causes our very selves to vibrate, we do so deliberately. Practicing joy, refusing to let joy fail even in the face of mourning and misery, is a sign that nothing can take away our joy. In the midst of a world that crushes hopes, that disturbs peace, and that delights in taking away our joy, sharing in joy together is how we endure. Sharing in our joy together, building bridges between us and our neighbors, is how we carry on through difficult times. It’s how we resist losing ourselves and our communities. So embrace the joy of the season! Embrace the joy that arises from hearing the Good News of the world that is about to turn. Embrace the joys of the everyday—the music, the dancing, the art, the games, the family and friends. And share this joy with one another. Not so that we will never be sad, not because we’re not allowed to grieve or lament. But so that no one is allowed to fall too deeply into their despair. Joy will not fail. Not if we don’t let it. May it be so. Amen.