Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter
“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”
Nowhere, perhaps, is the idea of the Resurrection as radical new life more profoundly and provocatively expressed than in this gospel story. We are presented with a compelling image of transformation, an image that somehow connects to our experiences, whether we are literally mothers or not. All of us can relate to the experience of pain and sorrow, suffering and disappointment in some way or another. For Marilyn and me, it is a particularly poignant image given that our daughter Elizabeth gave birth this week past to Silas Barry King. All is well. The pains of childbirth transformed into the joys of motherhood for her, fatherhood for Evan, and for us the new reality of being grandparents.
The wonderful point of the gospel story is that the difficult and hard things in life are neither denied nor ignored. In a way, it is the experiential reality of such things in our lives that is being emphasized in order to underscore the greater idea, the idea of transformation from the graves of our sorrows and pains to the paths of joy and peace, the idea of the Resurrection itself.
“Because I go to the Father” is the recurring refrain of the Easter season and that refrain becomes the critical matrix through which to understand the radical meaning of these readings on the third, fourth and fifth Sundays after Easter. The gospels that are read on these Sundays are all taken from the 16th chapter of St. John’s Gospel, a chapter which belongs to what is known as the “farewell discourse” of Jesus. Jesus bids adieu, literally, we might say, to God but yet more profoundly to God as the Father and to his disciples and friends. Such things are, of course, wonderfully and emotionally charged but how much more so in this situation? Why? Because of the radical meaning of Christ’s going from us. It is, ultimately, the condition of his being with us. At the heart of that paradox lies the Resurrection.
In the farewell discourse Jesus is talking about his going from them in a twofold sense: his going from them in his passion and death for “where I am going you cannot come”; and his going from them in his ultimate homecoming to the Father in his Ascension, that “where I am you may be also”. He goes “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us that he might open out to us the true homeland of the spirit. But the wonder of it all is that we live in that homeland of the spirit now through the comings and goings of the Son to the Father in prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament, and in holy lives of service and sacrifice.
