Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter
“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”
Jesus’ words capture the meaning of the Resurrection. It is what we see in the mystery and the wonder of the Resurrection at Easter and throughout the Octave when we are suspended, as it were, in that wonder and mystery. Mary Magdalene comes in sorrow expecting a body; she encounters the Risen Christ. Sorrow is turned into joy. The disciples huddle in fear and anxiety behind closed doors; Christ appears in their midst. Sorrow is turned into joy.
Two disciples flee Jerusalem in fear and sorrow because of the traumatic events of Christ’s crucifixion; on the road to Emmaus, Christ comes alongside them and enters into conversation with them, drawing out their expectations and desires, all of which have been shattered and destroyed, and drawing out of them the confusing and perplexing things that belong to the accounts of the Resurrection: the women finding the tomb empty, the testimony of the angel, and the confirmation of the other disciples of the women’s words. He then opens their minds to the understanding of the Scriptures about his Death and Resurrection but is really only made known to them in the breaking of the bread. Only then do they get it and sorrow is turned into joy. “Did not our heart burn within us?”, they say. They return to Jerusalem, the very place from which they had been fleeing in fear and sorrow. Sorrow is turned into joy.
But this Gospel reading is different. It is, as it were, before the fact and yet already explains the fact. It reveals the deeper and more difficult meaning of the Resurrection. It is not just sorrow turned into joy; it is joy found in the midst of sorrow (and paradoxically, sorrow in the midst of joy). It signals a deeper kind of turning that challenges our more linear way of approaching things and one which the Gospel seems to acknowledge. It does so by way of a metaphor: the metaphor of childbirth, appropriate enough, I suppose, on this day when in our secular culture we celebrate and remember motherhood. No motherhood without childbirth.
The Christian faith is wonderfully grounded in the everyday realities of human lives but without being reduced to them and ultimately provides an important critique of our assumptions about religion and human life. This is the challenge. To see the joy in the sorrow and the sorrow in the joy. That is to be radically changed in our whole outlook which in a narrow and linear way moves from one moment to another. Such a way of thinking is quite inadequate and false to what it means to be human. The Gospel readings of the these three last Sundays after Easter counter such simple determinisms.
