by CCW | 26 April 2026 10:00
The Gospel readings for the next three Sundays encompass almost all of Chapter 16 of John’s Gospel. The central part of Jesus’s “farewell discourse” (Ch. 14-17) ends with his high priestly prayer in Chapter 17, which carried us into Good Friday and Easter. Look in your Prayer Books for a moment and note how Chapter 16 is read on these Sundays.
Today on The Third Sunday after Easter we read from verses 16 to 22 of that chapter. Next Sunday, The Fourth Sunday after Easter, we read from verses 5 to 15 and on The Fifth Sunday after Easter, Rogation Sunday, we read from verses 23 to 33, the very end of the Chapter. In brief, we go from the middle to the beginning and then to the end of the Chapter. The only verses not read on these Sundays are verses 1-4, though they will be read on The Sunday after Ascension Day. In a way, they signal the entire project of Eastertide and Ascensiontide. “These things have I told you,” Jesus says, “that, when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them” (vs. 4).
We begin today in media res, in the midst of things, at least the midst of Chapter 16. Jesus is preparing the disciples and us for the meaning of his going from us in terms of Death, Resurrection, and Ascension which are, paradoxically, the very conditions of his being with us. His words preceding that movement now serve to teach us what it means in terms of our abiding in him and he in us. His going to the Father is ultimately the homecoming of the Son and the exultation of our humanity. Such is the Ascension and our joy.
We read today the profound juxtaposition of two images about how to think the Resurrection by way of the Passion and vice versa. We hear the recurring Easter theme: “because I go to the Father” and what that means for us in the lovely sequence of, first, sorrow turned into joy, second, of the promise of the coming of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit of truth who guides us into all truth, and, third, the peace that belongs to Christ’s overcoming of the world of tribulation and sorrow through his going to the Father. All of these themes belong to the redemption of the world and our humanity as grounded in God and as gathered back to God.
The overarching image of his going to the Father is juxtaposed with the powerful metaphor of sorrow being turned into joy through the maternal image of giving birth. The one, his going to the Father, belongs to the essential identity of Christ as the eternal Son and Word of the Father in terms of his divinity now revealed through his humanity. The other is a metaphor about the Resurrection as new birth likened to child-birth that points to the idea of Resurrection as born out of suffering and sorrow.
I hardly need to remind you that our lives are only too often full of disappointments and sorrows, of pain and suffering. This is neither denied nor glossed over yet becomes the means of ushering us into something greater and prior to all the forms of human suffering. The metaphor is quite concrete. “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.” This is the basis for the remarkable statement for all, men and women alike, whether literally mothers or fathers or not, that “ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.” That seeing is our being known in his love even in times of sorrow and affliction.
As such it is not simply about the highs and the lows of our lives emotionally and experientially but about the theological reality of our lives as both hidden and manifest in Christ. In other words, these images speak to our life in the Risen Christ because his Passion encompasses the full and absolute range of all and every form of human suffering and its total overcoming in the divine love of the Trinity. While human suffering is not equally distributed – some suffer more than others, it is fair to say, though what exactly we mean by more is offset by the subjective nature of human feelings – the more important point is that all suffering is embraced and overcome in Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. That changes our outlook, our being transformed from sorrow to joy, to an everlasting and an abiding joy. We have, perhaps, the hardest time grasping the wonder of such grace.
It is one thing to be angry on one’s own behalf for what has happened or what we think has happened to us and quite another to be angry on behalf of one’s office or vocation that has been compromised or negated by the actions of persons and institutions. Yet how easily do we conflate one into the other, giving way to a tsunami of resentment and personal hurt rather than reflecting in sorrow on the more serious issue of the betrayals of principle. I think we all struggle with this; certainly, I do. Yet what these Eastertide readings convey to us is the radical overcoming of life over death, of good over evil, of joy over sorrow, and in ways that are profoundly transformative and freeing.
In a recent interview, Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, reflecting on the disorders of our times, that “the demonic is everywhere.” It is not about demonising one another. His point is that the devil or evil is at work in all of us to some extent or another, and in our institutions, in ways that inhibit how we think about one another. We cannot really think about ourselves as selves without others. We are not abstract, disembodied beings who come into the world as whole selves with “a little package of rights and entitlements and attitudes,” as he puts it; that is all part of the modern mythology of the self.
We only come to know ourselves as selves through others. This suggests a way of appreciating the drama of the Resurrection in the overcoming of all that is demonic and evil. Williams is pointing us, I think, to the radical ethical teaching about the love of neighbour which belongs to the realities of our very being. We are born into a world that necessarily involves us with one another universally and in very concrete ways, including the institutions which we inhabit and the sorrows we endure. The problem of the demonic lies in substituting institutions as ends unto themselves for the spiritual and ethical principles for which they properly exist. He is rightly critical of overly bureaucratized churches – he has in mind the Church of England – which are “too preoccupied with strategy – with schemes for solving problems – and not preoccupied enough with its own integrity as a community of witness and prayer.”
His comments about our divided and demonic world reminds me of Sartre’s famous phrase, “hell is other people” in his play, “No Exit”. But is Hell other people? The play itself suggests otherwise and in intriguing ways. Hell as other people is really a form of self-delusion on the part of the characters who find themselves confined together after death. Hell is really themselves, not just after death but in their lives as they actually acknowledge.
In the play, the characters ‘know’ they are in Hell but for all of their descriptions of themselves they do not knowthemselves. In a masterful image, they see one another but not themselves for there is no mirror, no glass in which they might see themselves, not even in “a glass darkly.” They are their darkness in their egotistical obsessions about themselves; nor can they learn anything from one another. They lack all and any sense of remorse, let alone repentance about their acts of cruelty towards others. Hell is the rejection of repentance because that would require owning up to one’s own agency and a commitment to an order or sense of an objective and ethical good. There can be no repentance because that would mean love in the recognition of the givenness of the being of others. Hell is the rejection or the refusal of love. Or to put it in Simone Weil’s words, “the Cross of Christ illumines affliction” and “affliction without the Cross is hell.”
Hell is ourselves not others precisely in the failure to see ourselves in one another. In the Christian view, it marks the failure to see Christ in one another and, in some sense, even in ourselves. Imprisoned in themselves they are oblivious to anyone or anything else. Hell, in this sense, is unending solipsism.
It is the modern paradox of self-consciousness without any real self-knowledge. And in the Scriptural understanding that is because of a denial or refusal to acknowledge the objective Spirit of God, the Creator and Redeemer of the world, and the dignity of our humanity, a refusal to seek to know even as we are known in the truth and love of God. But this is what Jesus is saying to us in these readings about the total overcoming of all sin and sorrow, all suffering and death, all evil and wickedness.
He is bidding us to remember and rejoice. “Because I go to the Father,” he says, “your sorrow shall be turned into joy,” a joy that “no one taketh from you” for we are known in the all-knowing and everlasting love of Christ. That is our joy, a joy that is known even in our time of sorrows.
Fr. David Curry
Easter 3, 2026
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