The joy of Easter.
The joy of Easter.
The good news of the resurrection and God’s great reversal.
Throughout each of Jesus’s upper room discourses, his imminent death and resurrection come into focus, with the Lord’s remarks near the midway point of Chapter 16 serving as the most lucid albeit veiled reference to this culminating event of divine self-disclosure. “A little while, and you will see me no longer,” Jesus mysteriously says, “and again a little while, and you will see me” (John 16:16). These aren’t the first words that have left the disciples bewildered that evening. The whole tenor of the room was previously upended when their Teacher suggested that his betrayer was in the room with them (John 13:20–21). Things further devolved when he insisted that he would soon be leaving them. Jesus’s suggestion that he would soon no longer be present with his disciples surely threw their thoughts into all kinds of disarray (John 16:17–18). “Wait, isn’t the Christ of God?” they scrambled. “Isn’t he the Messiah? Doesn’t that mean he’s supposed to be setting up the kingdom of Israel? Why is he talking about going away? Why is he leaving us? And where is he going?”
The prospect of Jesus’s looming departure haunted the room like a worrisome specter, as his closest followers did their best to deduce the meaning of their Master’s riddle. At the heart of their confusion was the phrase “a little while,” which occurs no less than seven times in a span of four verses (John 16:16–19). In each case, it is the single Greek term mikros or mikron, from which we get the prefix “micro-,” meaning “small” or “extremely small.” In that way, then, the Lord has just revealed to his disciples that in a minuscule amount of time, they would no longer seem, crescendoing a theme that John weaves into his Gospel narrative (John 7:33; 12:32–35; 13:33; 14:19). An uneasy sense of urgency descended upon that motley crew of fishermen turned spiritual students, which was compounded by their Lord’s paradoxical assertion that in “a little while” they wouldn’t see him but then in “a little while” they would see him again (John 16:16). Confused and anxious, they worriedly whispered among themselves about the words could mean. “We do not know what he is talking about,” they confess (John 16:18).
Jesus, of course, deciphered their whispers. More than that, he knew their hearts; he knew how troubled they were at this moment. Whereas we might the Lord to clarify his statement in a manner that softens the blow, considering his disciples are already beyond the point of bewilderment, he doesn’t do that. Instead, he intensifies their perplexity by adding a dash of pain into the mix as well. “Truly, truly, I say to you,” the Lord declares, “you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful” (John 16:20). If the disciples weren’t already staring at their Teacher like deer in headlights, they definitely were now. The daunting notion of his departure was aggravated by the personal harm that would come along with it, and not just harm but abject sorrow. Twice Jesus says “you will” about the impending despair that would descend upon his followers (John 16:20), implying that adversity was not only a possibility, it was a certainty (John 15:18, 20; 16:2).
The ultimate effect of Jesus’s words warned that in “a little while,” his beloved disciples would be grieved, hated, persecuted, and even killed because of their allegiance to him. “You will weep and lament,” he ominously says, “but the world will rejoice.” Their immediate future would be filled with the mourning that ensues when someone passes away too soon. We, of course, understand Jesus’s words as a reference to his own death, but it is unlikely that The Twelve, distressed as they were, put those pieces together. They were somewhat oblivious to the fact that their sorrow would arise because of their Lord’s death, despite the fact that he had warned them of his demise multiple times before this moment. But like a word or thought that you don’t want to hear that gets stowed away or shoved down, Jesus’s warnings went unheeded and unheard. Compounding the disciples’ grief was the fact that their anguish would be the world’s joy. While they would weep, the world would celebrate. The same scene that would pierce the disciples with the sharpest sorrow would cause the world to cheer. But this is when the Lord Jesus adds some of the most beautiful and powerful words in all of Scripture: “You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy” (John 16:20).
In “a little while,” there would be sadness, but also, in “a little while,” that sadness would be turned into jubilation. This, of course, is still a puzzle albeit a slightly happier one than before. As Jesus makes this claim, he knowingly invokes the anthems of the Old Testament prophets concerning the one who would come and transform Israel’s “mourning into dancing”:
You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
you have loosed my sackcloth
and clothed me with gladness,
that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever!
(Ps. 30:11–12)
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain gladness and joy,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
(Isa. 35:10)
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted . . .
to comfort all who mourn;
to grant to those who mourn in Zion —
to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit.”
(Isa. 61:1–3)
Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,
and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy;
I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.
(Jer. 31:13)
Israel’s great hope rested in the Messiah and his divine ability to reverse their fortunes from sorrow to gladness. But even if the disciples had a faint recollection of those prophecies, the question of how would still remain. How was this “great reversal” supposed to happen if Jesus was going to be gone in “a little while”? How could any of this be true if he would no longer be with them? The disciples had invested a lot in Jesus being “the one,” with many of them relinquishing their families and careers in order to follow him. If he leaves, what was it all for? What then? Was it all for naught? Even as these questions lingered in their minds, Jesus proceeded to illustrate his point by describing life’s greatest “everyday miracle”: childbirth. “When a woman is giving birth,” he explains, “she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world” (John 16:21).
It’s hard to put into words the flood of emotion that overwhelms you when your wife pushes your son or daughter into the world and the room becomes a frenzied rush of pain, nerves, and concern all rolled into one. I was in the delivery room with Natalie for each of our three children, but Bailey’s arrival was surely the most eventful. After checking into the hospital on a Wednesday evening after church, things remained relatively calm as we waited for “stuff” to get going. The atmosphere shifted dramatically at around 7 a.m. the following day when a swarm of nurses and physicians darted into the room. As they quickly began re-positioning Natalie from one side of the bed to the other, I slinked into the corner and watched as more and more hospital staff scurried around along with a surgeon who, I noticed, was already prepped for the OR. At this point, I’m still clueless as to what’s going on but I know it doesn’t feel “standard.” Eventually, the obstetrician arrived still in street clothes and immediately started assisting Natalie with the delivery. I can still vividly recall how fearful I was at that moment. I honestly thought something dreadful had happened; that I was losing them.
As I would soon learn, though, the reason for all the scrambling was Bailey’s heart rate, which had dipped to an alarming level, putting her life and Natalie’s at great risk. The point of all the hustle and bustle was to jumpstart active labor, with a cesarean delivery as a last resort. Through it all, Natalie was amazing and Bailey arrived as beautiful and healthy as ever. And when I held her in my arms for the first time, all those worrisome thoughts melted away. Nothing else seems to matter once that newborn is in your arms. All other noises seem to fade away as you stare into the eyes of another life — another soul — staring back at you. The point is, as Jesus describes, that this is how the next few hours would unfold for his followers. There would be sorrow, there would be anguish, and there would be fear. But in “a little while,” their deep affliction would be swallowed up by deeply rooted joy. “So also you have sorrow now,” Jesus says, “but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:22). The very same event that would cause so much pain would be the very occasion for joy. Lutheran theologian R. C. H. Lenski is helpful here:
This does not mean that eventually the sorrow of the disciples shall subside and that in spite of their former grief they shall again become joyful; but that their very grief, i.e., the very thing that plunged them into such excessive grief, shall turn into joy, i.e., into a glorious cause of joy. The identical event shall plunge them into grief and then lift them into joy . . . it is one and the same thing that by producing great sorrow presently produces the greatest joy: the birth of the child — Jesus’ going to the Father. His entering death and dying causes the sorrow; seeing Jesus again brings the joy. (1096–97)
Jesus has in mind, of course, his impending death and resurrection. In just a few short hours, his apostles would witness abject horror as their Lord and Teacher would hang lifeless from a Roman cross. They would watch as his body would writhe in agony as the blood streamed from his head and side. And all the while, the deafening din of the Jewish mob would ring in their ears. The disciples would be forced to watch as the one who encapsulated all their hopes would be mercilessly executed, his death being the death knell of all their dreams. All this in just “a little while.” The only thing that stood in between the disciples’ sorrow and their joy was Christ’s resurrection. The only thing that separated the discombobulated disciples from the dogged apostles who would turn the world upside down was the Lord Jesus walking out of the grave on the third day. After that, everything was different.
All of the darkness and defeat were overcome by the light of the Lord’s triumph. “The Cross was their despair; it became their hope when they saw it in the light of [the] resurrection,” G. Campbell Morgan attests. “The Cross was the place of defeat, but when they saw Him alive they knew that the Cross was the place of victory” (Westminster Pulpit, 5.123). The horrors of Calvary became the hopeful notes of redemption, as Christ left sin, death, and hell in the grave. Tears of lament become tears of joy, anguish becomes anticipation, and mourning becomes dancing. “The same death,” declares Alexander Maclaren, “which, before the resurrection, drew a pall of darkness over the heavens, and draped the earth in mourning, by reason of that resurrection which swept away the cloud and brought out the sunshine, became the source of joy” (11.133). This is what the resurrection did for the apostles and this is what it’s still doing for the church today.
The message of the church is still much the same as that which Jesus gave to his own in that upper room. There will be sorrow in this world of tooth and claw. There’s no promise of tomorrow except that pain will be there, too. There will be frustration and sadness and grief and loss and heartache. God’s Word never tells us otherwise. What the word of his gospel does tell us, though, is that all of that sorrow will be undone and reversed because his Son walked out of the tomb. “The gospel,” Presbyterian minister William James once wrote, “is the instrumentality by which this condition is reversed; by which the whole evil of the fall is repaired” (95). The grave is empty and Jesus is alive. This is the good news of Easter, which announces that what is catastrophic has been reversed into something joyous — or, to use J. R. R. Tolkien’s remarkable turn of phrase, this is the “eucatastrophe” of Easter. In his renowned essay “On Fairy-Stories,” the architect of Middle Earth coined this term to explain the resonance of true storytelling. He wrote:
The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function . . . The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’, nor ‘fugitive’. In its fairy-tale — or otherworld — setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far as evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. (153–54)
Tolkien’s vocabulary offers, perhaps, the best perspective on what Jesus accomplished on that first Easter weekend. He died as the epitome of the world’s sin. But on the third day, he rose again as the emblem of God’s great reversal of death. In Christ’s resurrection, we are given a glimpse of the “eucatastrophe” that God has been cooking up from before the foundation of the world. “The Birth of Christ,” Tolkien continues, “is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy” (155–56). As Jesus assured his disciples, this joy can never be taken away (John 16:22). Come hell or high water, the eucatastrophe of the gospel provides a reason for rejoicing. Therefore, even though we might endure unfathomable grief, in Christ alone all of life’s pain and perplexity find their ultimate resolution. In Christ, “the very sorrow, the very thing causing your sorrow will be transmuted into joy,” Morgan says elsewhere. “The joy will come out of the sorrow” (John, 264). Only in Christ alone can sorrow be turned into joy, gladness come out of grief, rejoicing come out of mourning, and victory come out of defeat. Easter’s joy is realized in the eucatastrophe of the resurrection of Christ alone. He is risen and so we rejoice. Amen.
Works cited:
William James, The Marriage of the King’s Son and the Guilt of Unbelief (New York: Randolph & Co., 1869).
R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. John’s Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1961).
Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture, Vols. 1–17 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1944).
G. Campbell Morgan, The Gospel According to John (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1933).
G. Campbell Morgan, The Westminster Pulpit: The Preaching of G. Campbell Morgan, Vols. 1–10 (Fincastle, VA: Scripture Truth Book Co., 1954).
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics: And Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2006).