“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”
Jesus comes and goes, it seems, yet he is always in our midst. He is in our midst not as a static presence but in the dynamic of the true meaning of his life captured in the recurring refrain of Eastertide, “because I go to the Father.” That is the radical meaning, in its Christian form, of God as essential life. And while the Passion and the Resurrection open us out to the idea and the reality of God as essential life, they do so only because the joy of the Resurrection is greater than the sorrows of the Passion. Why? Because life and light are greater than death and darkness. The goodness of God and his creation is greater than all sin and evil by definition. It belongs to the good news of Easter to show how this understanding comes to birth in us.
The birthing image is a mothering image. Jesus explains the transformative nature of the radical meaning of the Resurrection by way of an analogy to child-birth. God in relation to us is like a mother; there are a number of mothering images in the Scriptures which signal the deep love of God for our humanity and our world in spite of ourselves.
God is not a reflection of ourselves in the endlessly divisive celebrations of diversity. That is the post-Christian religion of identity politics which endlessly divides us. Rather the wisdom of the Scriptures in the life of the Church is about the redemption of images which unite us and gather us into the essential life of God. We honour our natural derivations, the mothers who bore us, for instance, on this day in our secular culture, Mother’s Day. For there is none who is not born of woman. We honour our mothers best when we place them in the dynamic of God’s life. The image here is about the eternal motion of the Son to the Father. It is the motion of love and sacrifice which conveys joy and delight. It redeems us from ourselves by placing us in the life of God but not in a flight from the world.
We are confused about the images of revelation when we misconstrue them to become reflections of ourselves such as in the competing advocacy agendas of the culture of diversity. “There is,” as Paul so wonderfully puts it, “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ.” We are one in Christ in spite of differences of identity and not because of them. The Resurrection affirms the categories of creation; it does not negate them but neither does it reduce us to them. It seeks instead for us to know ourselves even as we are known in God. That is very different from seeking self-affirmation.
Both the Epistle and Gospel today remind us that we are part of an ordered world under the Providence of God which extends to our lives as social and political beings. Such things belong to our liberty as the servants of God. The point is the idea of being an individual not in isolation and separation from one another but as belonging together in the body of Christ. What unites us in Christ is greater than what divides us and, paradoxically, provides us with a way to live in a divided world.
God is neither male nor female. He cannot be constrained to the categories of finite reason or to a social construct. What Christ shows us is “the infinite content in the finite context” (Hans Urs von Balthasar). Such is revelation which uses the things of nature and the created order to gather us into the things of God. “Christ is man born of woman to redeem both sexes,” Bishop John Hackett noted (1592-1670).
The last three Sundays of Eastertide focus our attention on the so-called farewell discourse of Jesus to the disciples in John’s Gospel. What he is saying to the disciples before his Passion and Resurrection is about God as essential life in our midst but we only come to learn this through the Resurrection. Jesus speaks to the confusions and anxieties of our souls by way of the contrast between sorrow and joy. The birthing image is a powerful example of how the one gives way to the other not in denial of suffering but in its redemption. Joy by definition is something more and greater than sorrow yet we come to it only through sorrow. Here we see the radical meaning of redemptive suffering. There is joy in the midst of our world, come what may in the way of the sufferings of our fragmented and broken world. Christ is in the midst because he is always going to the Father. It is an image of our being gathered to God in his essential life. This frees us from the narcissisms of ourselves about ourselves. Christ in our midst and our life in Christ is our endless joy.
In a way the Church and its ministry is profoundly feminine in this mothering sense of bringing to birth in us the things of joy and gladness. It is the job of teachers, Plato suggests, to impregnate their students, albeit with good ideas! Bringing to birth in us good ideas is the lesson here. It sets us in motion towards one another in joy not sorrow, and a “joy that no man taketh from you.” The joy is greater than the sorrow but only in and through the travails and sorrows of our lives. We give thanks to God for our mothers who have brought us to birth yet we also give thanks for Mother Church who has brought us to birth as the children of God. And all “because I go to the Father.”
“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”
Fr. David Curry
Easter 3, 2022