Reliving The Passion #4

John 16:20–22

“Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.

“So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

John 20:19b–20

Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.

So then, in three days we have counted three good reasons for reliving the passion of our Lord:

Ashes: it is necessary now to remember death, our own and our Savior’s.

The mirror: it is right to recognize our sin as the cause of death, to see in Christ’s story our sorrier selves and our need of his holy self.

The roadmap: it is expedient to study the Way by which all his disciples must follow him, and to receive the promise of a personal meeting with Christ on the Way.

There is yet a fourth good reason: that we prepare for joy.

The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can’t stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of character into hope—and the hope that has become our joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend upon it) disappoint us.

In the sorrows of the Christ—as we ourselves experience them—we prepare for Easter, for joy. There can be no resurrection from the dead except first there is a death! But then, because we love him above all things, his rising is our joy. And then the certain hope of our own resurrection warrants the joy both now and forever.

For the moment, lay yourselves aside. Become one of the first disciples. And in that skin, consider: what makes the appearance of the resurrected Lord such a transport of joy for you? Consider this in every fiber of your created being. How is it that so durable a joy is born at this encounter?—joy that shall hereafter survive threats and dangers and persecutions, confusions and death, even your own death?

Well, Jesus has been dead. Now he is alive. No one expects the dead to live. This causes a speechless astonishment. Is this also joy?

Well, the one whom you loved is here! Your beloved is back, Hooray! This is “gladness.” This is delight and “peace,” and gratitude. But is it also joy?

Well, and at his appearing, the Son of God has just kept the hardest of all his promises: he rose from the dead, exactly as he said. This is marvelous affirmation, the absolute guarantee that he shall keep to every other promise, from salvation to the sending of the Spirit to the raising of the dead. This is bright, sustaining assurance of faith. Is it also joy?

What causes joy?

What transfigures you, you flaming disciple, you burning witness, with such a fusion of joy in the encounter?

This: not just that the Lord was dead, but that you grieved his death. That, for three days, you yourself did suffer his absence, and then the whole world was for you a hollow horror. That, despite his promises, this last Sabbath lasted forever and was, to your sorrowing heart, the last of the world after all. You experienced, you actually believed, that the end of Jesus was the end of everything.

Death reigned everywhere.

Death alone.

But in the economy of God, what seems the end is but a preparation. For it is, now, to that attitude and into that experience that the dear Lord Jesus Christ appears—not only an astonishment, gladness and affirmation, but joy indeed!

It is the experience of genuine grief that prepares for joy.

You see? The disciples approached the Resurrection from their bereavement. For them the death was first, and the death was all. Easter, then, was an explosion of Newness, a marvelous splitting of heaven indeed. But for us, who return backward into the past, the Resurrection comes first, and through it we view a death which is, therefore, less consuming, less horrible, even less real. We miss the disciples’ terrible, wonderful preparation.

Unless, as now, we attend to the suffering first, to the cross with sincerest pity and vigilant love, to the dying with most faithful care—and thus prepare for joy.

Jesus, come again!

You need never suffer again. That was done once and for all. But come and remind me of the suffering, so that I recall and regain the purer joy of your rising after all.

Amen.