Sean C. Capparuccia

15 March 2026

4th Sunday in Lent – Laetare

Is. 55:1-9; Ps. 137; Phil. 4:4-9; Luke 15:1-10

            We have now made it to week four of Lent, the Sunday which is traditionally called, Laetare Sunday, or “Joy” Sunday. The name comes from the traditional – and when I say traditional, I mean the late medieval times – the traditional introit for this Sunday which began with the words from Isaiah 66:10, “Rejoice with Jerusalem and rejoice for her, all you who love her.” It is, for those who are diligently observing the season of Lent, a day to break fasts and enjoy a short respite. And on this Sunday, traditionally, we take a break from the sorrow of sin and repentance and hear about the joy that is salvation.

             Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an early 20^th century French Jesuit, said, “Joy is the surest sign of the presence of God.” Going around with a dour, surly and churlish “just-sucked-a-lemon” kind of face is not a Christian virtue. As Bruce Larson remarked, “There are no sad saints. If God really is the center of one’s life and being, joy is inevitable. If we have no joy, we have missed the heart of the Good News and our bodies as much as our souls will suffer the consequences.”[1]

            Someone else said, “Joy is the flag that flies over the castle of our hearts announcing that the king is in residence today.”[2] Isn’t that a wonderful picture? But it is also a testimony to the fact that the Holy Spirit is the author of joy. Where He resides, there joy will be.

Joy-Happiness

But let me also state that there is a difference between Joy and Happiness. Happiness is a temporary, external emotion that largely depends on one’s immediate circumstances. Happiness moves with the tide, so to speak. I get a check in the mail for $300 – happy. Later that day my car breaks down and it costs $305 to repair – not happy. Joy on the other hand is an internal and lasting contentment which is not dependent on one’s circumstances. Joy comes from within; happiness comes from without.

How Can We Sing?

In Psalm 137 the unnamed author brings us to the shores of the Euphrates River in Babylon where the Jews had been taken into exile. Let us remember, though, that this Babylonian captivity did not happen simply because the Assyrians were mightier than the Jews. The only reason they were taken into captivity was because the Lord willed it in order to punish and teach His people a lesson in humility and faith. They had become idolatrous and prideful and over and over again God sent prophets to warn them of what would happen if they did not repent.

And now, here they sit, captive in Babylon, in Assyria (which is Iraq today), and the Assyrians are asking them to play some of their old Jewish songs on their harps and lyres. Imagine if we were taken captive to China and our Chinese captors had asked some of us to play our guitars and sing some of our favorite American folk songs. What would we sing, I wonder?  Well, they didn’t feel like singing, did they?

“There we sat and wept, when we remembered Zion. And upon the willows there we hung up our lyres. Our captors demanded that we sing songs; one of the songs from Zion. But how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:1-4). How can we have any joy when we are here? How can we laugh and sing and be happy when we are so far from home? How can we be joyful when God is punishing us?

There is a certain irony in this, too. You see, these captives were from the northern tribes in Israel, not Judah. What Israel had been judged for was their complacency toward their brothers in Judah and scorn for the Temple of God. Now they wish they could go there; they are longing to go back there. Maybe they were learning the lesson that God was teaching them. But still, they had no joy.

            Water of Life

            Last week we talked about the Samaritan woman at the well. She, too, had no joy and not much happiness. But where the Jews were captive to foreign nations, she was captive to her circumstances, most of which she brought on herself – bad decisions begetting more bad decisions. In essence, she was not wise and like so many people today, she tended to sell herself out for immediate gratification. This was obviously the case in her “love” life. And our actions have consequences, which are often manifested in our state of happiness.  

            The passage we read from Isaiah is sometimes called “The Great Invitation.” Isaiah 53 talked about the Messiah who would come; here, two chapters later, Isaiah is prophesying about to whom this Messiah would come: He would come to all the world. I love the opening line, “Ho! Everyone who thirsts…” (55:1). Ho! Why don’t we use that word anymore? The Hebrew is hoy and is sometimes translated “Ho there!” or “Alas!” or “Listen up!”  It’s like a salesman standing on top of his little stool and beckoning the passers-by,

“Ho there! Yes, you… and you…. everyone who thirsts: have I got a deal for you! You’re thirsty? You want water? Well I‘ve right here some living water that you are going to love. What? You have no money? That’s all right, what I’ve got ain’t for sale. But I’ll tell you why you don’t have any money. You’ve gone and spent it on not bread, on not water. This morning you did have money, but you’ve wasted it on things that don’t satisfy your deepest need. Now listen carefully. You sir, yes, you sir, and ma’am – are you together? I thought so, I could tell by the way she was looking at you; with love in her eyes. Listen carefully to me now and come eat what is good. Listen up and come to Me so that you may live.”

He goes on to say, “I will make an everlasting covenant with you and not just you, but with other nations, too.” Friends, this was momentous. Because of God’s covenant with Abraham, and then with Moses, the Israelites have been separated from everyone else. God had chosen them out of all the nations in the world to have a people for Himself. A people that wouldn’t worship everything coming and going, statues, rocks, mountains, rivers, cows, the sun, the moon, the stars, their kings, their ancestors – the people of the nations would worship anything and everything except the Creator. But God chose Israel to worship Him alone. And they were told not to mix with other peoples. They were, in a sense, isolationists. They had the Lord, and they had the Law. They were the chosen race and yet there was a serious lack of joy, partly because they couldn’t keep the Law. God was saying to them over and over again, “Come to Me; Seek Me; Call upon Me; put away your wickedness; stop your unrighteous thoughts; Return to Me.”  You see, they had the Law, but they were slaves to it. They thought that their salvation would come by strict adherence to God’s Law but that was never God’s intention. The Law is meant to protect, but salvation is from the Lord, not His Law. And because of their idolatry and other sins, they would be sitting on the banks of the foreign rivers feeling sorry for themselves and refusing to sing the songs of Zion. No joy, just gloom.

            “Return to Me. I will give you water to drink and food to eat.”  What water? What food? What is He talking about? This sounds a lot like what Jesus said in John 6, doesn’t it? “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me shall not hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.” Christ is our food and He is our water and we partake of Him by faith, by believing in His word and doing the will of the Father. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

            He said, “I will make an everlasting covenant with you.” In Jeremiah 31:31 the Lord says, “Behold, the days are coming, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…” And then in Joel, the Lord says, “And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Joel 2:32). And Jesus told Nicodemus, that leader of the Pharisees, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” This new covenant will include people from the whole world, not just Israel. It will emanate from Israel, but it will spread to the whole world of men. Yes, even the Assyrians who once held His people captive. “All whom the Father gives to [the Son] will come to Him” (John 6:37); God’s elect from every nation and tribe and tongue will be partakers of this new covenant.

            Now, you can see why this would not go over so well with the Jews. What should have been a source of great joy became a source of great contention. That Gentiles should be invited into this new covenant was, for many, an appalling thought. “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.”

            Seeking the Lost

            This brings us to our Gospel passage in Luke. In Luke 15 there are three parables about lost things: a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son, and in them we see the Father’s love for the lost.  We only read the first two, but you know the third one well enough. When Jesus told these parables He was speaking primarily to the Pharisees who were grumbling that Jesus “welcomes sinners and eats with them” (15:2). Now this is hundreds of years after the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Joel. It’s been a very long time since God said He was going to make this new covenant and maybe they had forgotten the details of it, like, it was going to go beyond Israel; that it might just include sinners and Gentiles. These Pharisees, especially, were still holding onto that isolationist attitude which thought God could never choose people like that. So Jesus told them this parable.

            Vs3-4: “Suppose you had a hundred sheep and one got lost, what do you do? Would you not go after it until it was found? And then what would you do? You’d carry it home and then call your neighbors and friends, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, I have found my lost sheep.’”  Obviously this sheep was dear to the shepherd. He had already asked his friends and neighbors if they had seen it anywhere. Then he left the 99 sheep for a while to go searching.  This wasn’t an hour-long search and rescue. This could have taken several days, we don’t know. But he searched everywhere for his lost sheep until he found it.

            Vs8: Then Jesus hits them with another story. A story about a woman who had ten coins and lost one. These coins were very special coins. Coins that may have been worn on a traditional headdress when a Jewish woman got married. Jesus wasn’t just talking about some coins from her coin jar. These had sentimental value that was far beyond their monetary value. She had ten, and now one was missing. She looked everywhere for it, possibly even into the night she was looking for it. She looks and searches until she finds it. Then she, like the shepherd, calls her friends and neighbors saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin I lost” (9). And in both instances, Jesus says, “There is joy in heaven, in the very presence of the angels of God, over one sinner who repents” (7, 10). God knows who will come to faith and He will search, He will prick the heart, until each and every one comes to faith in Christ.

            I really wish we could see into the realm of the angels so we could actually see and hear the rejoicing that Jesus is talking about here. When every one of us came to faith and we repented of our sins it would have been so awesome to see the angels rejoicing. But I tell you, those same angels rejoiced when any of those Assyrians came to faith. They rejoiced when former Nazis came to faith. And they rejoice whenever any sinner – from the least to the greatest – repents. And who is the least and greatest sinner? The least sinner is the one you don’t know, the one far away; the greatest sinner is the one that ever did you any harm. The enemy that you’re supposed to love; the one that Jesus tells you to forgive.

            So joy comes from within. It is the natural product of being satisfied – not just satiated – but satisfied, and that comes by the Holy Spirit. “Ho, everyone who thirsts,” God said, “Come to the waters.” Those waters are nothing other than the Holy Spirit. Again, in John 3, when Jesus told Nicodemus that “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, they will not enter the Kingdom of God.” Water and Spirit are synonymous, just as when John said that Jesus “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire,” the Holy Spirit and fire are synonymous. The Holy Spirit is water, He is fire, He is wind.  

            When we become part of the New Covenant we are given this joy that wells up from the inside. We don’t, like the Pharisees, worry about who else God gives this to, we are joyful that He gave it to us! And we rejoice, like the woman at the well that God would save a sinner such as I, and we rejoice whenever anyone comes to faith for they too have received the unmerited and unasked for gift. Chuck Swindoll said, “Joy is a magnet which draws people in because it is one thing they don’t have.”[3] You know, we ought to feel sorry for those who don’t have the joy of salvation; for those who have no hope of the Resurrection or of living a joyful life now.

            Habbakuk 3:18, says, “I will exult in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.” Do we rejoice? In Philippians 4:4, Paul writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice!” This is a command. We are to be joyful. We are to cultivate an attitude of joy by continually being thankful. Another way Paul tells us we can be joyful is by thinking on things that are true, honorable, right, pure, lovely – things worthy of praise (4:8). When we don’t do this, don’t think it can erase the joy of the Lord, but it does cast a film over it. The joy is there by virtue of our salvation and the indwelling Spirit, but if we truly want to feel that joy then, as Paul says, think rightly and joyfully. And it stands to reason: if God is the source of our joy, then thinking on godly things should exacerbate our joy.

            There may be times when we truly do not feel much like singing the songs of Zion and we just want to hang up our lyres and wallow in our life’s disappointments. But I think what Scripture is telling us in all of this is that we need to pick up our lyres whether we feel like it or not, we need to lift our voices, and sing praise to God regardless of what’s going on. Joy begets joy. Salvation and joy are not “feelings.” They are the result of what God has done in you and me and the testimony of Scripture to the Truth of who our God is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  

            When we were lost, God searched for us until He found us and then His angels rejoiced. May we, full of joy at being found, rejoice with them every day until we see Him face to face. That day will come for all of us, and we are to have joy in the waiting. So, fly that flag of joy so that everyone knows the King is home in you. Amen.   

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[1] Bruce Larson, quoted in Swindoll’s Ultimate Book of Illustration… [Joy].

[2] Walter B. Knight, Knight’s Master Book of New Illustrations.

[3] Swindoll.