“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.
They recall us to the radical meaning of our life in Christ, the radical meaning of the Resurrection. What is that? It is the radical idea of our lives as incorporated into God’s own life precisely through the life of Christ. The whole meaning of his life is concisely captured in the phrase, “because I go to the Father.”
It is almost too easy to say that the point of this Gospel is that sorrow is turned into joy. It is but there is a much more radical meaning to that concept. Sorrow is in joy and joy is in sorrow. How? In the realisation of the totality of God who embraces our lives and returns us to himself in prayer and praise, in word and sacrament, in sacrifice and service and all“because I go to the Father.”
The disciples don’t get it. What does he mean,“a little while and ye shall not see me; and again, a little while and ye shall see me”? What does he mean, “because I go to the Father?”, they ask. They don’t understand. Neither do we, both you and me. We catch glimpses of this transcendent yet immanent truth but fail to grasp its full significance. Such is the necessity and the joy of the journey, a journey of suffering in which joy is actually the animating principle, the joy that allows us to persevere and to flourish in the face of suffering. This is quite another thing from the flight from suffering.
On the other hand, this does not mean embarking upon the narcissistic quest for suffering, our wallowing in our suffering, as it were. That too is vanity. ‘Look at me and my suffering.’ ‘My sufferings are more than yours.’ ‘I must be better or at least more deserving of attention than you.’ I think you see the adolescent and immature self-serving nonsense in all of that.
That is why we need to attend more carefully to this Gospel reading. Jesus confronts us with our unknowing, our bewilderment, our lack of understanding about the realities of the human condition, the realities of sin and suffering, of death and dying, let alone our ignorance of God’s way of using these to draw us to himself, “because I go to the Father.” These readings from the 16th chapter of John’s Gospel, which provide the Gospel readings for the last three Sundays of Easter, belong to what is called the ‘farewell’ discourse of Jesus. He is preparing the disciples for his going from them in his Passion and for its radical meaning in his Resurrection: “A little while and ye shall not see me: and again a little while and ye shall see me.”
Like the Gospel reading for Quinquagesima Sunday at the onset of Lent, “they understood none of these things.” “Ye know not what ye ask,” Jesus says to the mother of Zebedee’s sons and to them on Passion Sunday. Our unknowing is a recurring feature particularly of John’s Gospel. Yet it is through our knowing our unknowing that we come to know. We learn only after the fact as did the disciples. God shows us who are “in error the light of [his] truth, to the intent that [we] may return into the way of righteousness.” We have to know our untruth, our unrighteousness in order to be turned. The return is the movement of God’s grace in us. John shows this.
It is simply another way of looking at things, a way of illumination, we might say, about the real nature of the paths of purgation and union present here in terms of sorrow and joy. The interrelation of sorrow and joy, of knowing and unknowing, of sin and grace, of separation and union, are all about our being grounded in the dynamic of the life of God. The Christian faith is not about a flight from the world; it is about the grounding of human experience in the life of God. It is now and always, not simply hereafter. Only so is it a “joy that no one taketh from you.”
The metaphor of childbirth is wonderfully apt. It signals the radical meaning of the birth of God in our souls and lives. For that is the great turn, our being turned to God even when we seem overwhelmed by fear and sorrow, by sin and despair. Such is the mothering love of God. So give thanks for your mothers who, perhaps, have made known to you the great love of God for you.
This is the radical good news and the radical truth of the Gospel as signalled in our liturgy. Here we are constantly being turned to joy even in the midst of the struggles and uncertainties of our lives, even in the midst of our dying and death, our sufferings and sorrows. Here is the joy that has no end. We are turned to God who alone turns our sorrows into joy. “Because I go to the Father,” “your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”
Fr. David Curry
Easter III, 2019