Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter
“Because I go to the Father”
How do we know what is wanted to be known? More to the point, how do we know what God wants us to know? The Easter Season presents us with some remarkable lessons about who we are in Christ. They are the teachings of Christ about the nature of our radical life with God and in God without which we have no life. At the heart of that teaching is the Resurrection.
We find our healing and our wholeness in Christ. All of the stories of the Resurrection reveal ourselves in ourselves as the community of the broken hearted. Only in facing our brokenness and recognizing our unknowing can we begin to be taught and come to understand what God seeks for us, namely, our wholeness. It happens in the face of our brokenness and not in spite of it or in denial of it. Only so can we begin to be made whole. The education here concerns the whole person; in short, matters of character.
Sorrow and grief, loss and suffering, dying and death are not denied. They provide the necessary occasion in which our wholeness is proclaimed and realized. This is a recurring feature of the Easter Season. The last three Sundays of the Easter Season present us with Gospel readings from what is sometimes known as “the farewell discourse of Jesus” in John’s Gospel, particularly John 16, in which there is the repeated refrain of the Easter season. It is the phrase “because I go to the Father.” Jesus is the teacher who prepares the disciples here for what is to come in terms of his death and resurrection. He speaks directly about suffering and sorrow and about joy. “Ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”
What is our sorrow? Our sense of separation from Christ: “a little while and ye shall not see me; and again a little while and ye shall see me,” Jesus says. This puzzles the disciples and us but reading these passages now in the light of Easter we see exactly what they mean. Sorrow is turned into joy through the triumph of life over death. Jesus uses an image, the image of childbirth, to convey the radical meaning of the Resurrection.
“A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a child is born into the world.” There will be sorrow and suffering “but your sorrow shall be turned to joy.”
