Fifth Sunday of Easter

Fifth Sunday of Easter (C)

May 19, 2019

Text: John 16:12-22

            He is risen!  He is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!

            And because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, no one can take your joy from you.  Because you know how this ends.  You know where this all leads.  The resurrection of the body.  Eternal life.  New Creation.  A new heavens and a new earth.  All that is wrong made right… Perfectly right.  The Holy City, New Jerusalem, Holy Church, prepared as a Bride adorned for Her Husband.  The Wedding Feast.  God Himself dwelling with His people, wiping away their tears.  No more death or mourning or crying or pain.  For the old order of things has passed away.  He who is seated on the throne says, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5; ESV).  That is the reality in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  That is our eternal destiny.  So no one can take your joy from you.  Not a chance.  Not with you in Christ, and Christ in you. 

            Though your three main enemies, the devil, the world, and your own sinful nature, will certainly try.  Christian joy, in this world, does not mean the absence of sorrow.  You suffer your heartaches and you shed your tears in this earthly life.  Of course you do.  Even though you believe in Christ and His salvation, you know that things in this fallen world are not how they ought to be, how they were created to be.  All people, believers and unbelievers alike, know instinctually that something is dreadfully wrong.  This is why depression is an epidemic.  Unbelievers assign the blame to meaningless evolutionary chance, or bad karma, vindictive gods, or powerless ones, anyway.  Believers know precisely what went wrong all the way back at the beginning with Adam and Eve and their serpentine rebellion.  And we know what continues to go wrong in our own rebellion.  Our flesh is fallen.  Creation itself has been subjected to our fall.  And so, there is injustice.  There is war.  Terrorism.  Vandalism.  Poverty.  Oppression.  Broken relationships.  In fact, we need look no further than our own bodies for the brokenness.  We die.  The wages of sin is death.  We deteriorate.  All things decay.  We decay.  There is no evolution, only devolution.  You know that if you keep anything at all for any length of time.  It all falls to pot.  Including your own body.  Your friends and loved ones get sick and die all around you.  You mourn.  You get sick.  You are dying.  You mourn.  You have real tears for God to wipe away.  But you do not mourn as those who have no hope (Cf. 1 Thess. 4:13-18).  You know your Savior, and you know what He is doing about it in the end, though, to be honest, the specifics of it may leave you wondering.  Still, you mourn as those who long for that Day when your mourning will be at an end.  Therefore the deep and abiding joy of the Christian, far from being an absence of sorrow, is a joy that looks through the tears to fix itself on Jesus, who is risen from the dead. 

            “A little while, and you will see me no longer; and again a little while, and you will see me,” Jesus says to His disciples (John 16:16).  They do not know what He is talking about, but they will.  They are with Him in the upper room on the night in which He was betrayed, and He is telling them about His death on the cross for the sins of the world… “you will see me no longer”… and His triumph over death and hell in His bodily resurrection… “again… you will see me.” 

            His death, of course, will cause them unimaginable sorrow.  They will grieve, as one does in the face of death.  But they will not grieve as those who have hope.  Because all their hope was in Jesus, and now He is dead, and they have never understood this talk about Him rising from the dead on the Third Day.  As far as they are concerned, when Jesus is nailed to the cross, suffers, and dies, that’s the end of it.  All their hopes are dashed.  Three years wasted.  And they’ll probably come for us, next.  The world, and the devil himself… all hell rejoices when the Son of God is killed.  “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice.  You will be sorrowful…”

            BUT!  “but your sorrow will turn into joy” (v. 20).  He is risen!  He is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!  He appears to them.  Eye witnesses.  They touch Him.  He eats in front of them.  This is no ghost.  This is the Body that was crucified, dead, and buried, now animated with life and breath, beating heart and coursing blood.  And sorrow is put to flight.  There can be no more sorrow where death no longer holds its prey.  In fact, the very sorrow of Jesus’ death is what is turned to joy.  For His death is the sacrifice of atonement for your sins, my sins, for the sins of the disciples, for the sins of the whole world.  And death didn’t win.  It couldn’t keep Jesus down.  He killed it.  By dying.  And now Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, never to die again.  And He will raise you from the dead and give eternal life to you and all believers in Christ. 

            All your sorrows, whatever they may be (and they are very real sorrows), are the death throes of death itself.  All that is wrong in this world and in your life, all that causes you to mourn, is the handiwork of sin, and has the fingerprints of death all over it.  But it is precisely sin and death that is defeated in the death and resurrection of Christ.  The very event that turns the disciples’ sorrow into joy that cannot be taken away, namely, the death and resurrection of Jesus, is what turns your sorrow into joy that no one can rob from you.  God’s answer to your sorrow is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

            Now, the disciples find this all so confusing, and who can blame them?  Frankly, so do we.  Because we know the sorrow by sight.  It is plain to the eyes and to our very nerve endings.  But the joy?  That is by faith.  Sure, we get little glimpses of it in this life.  Beautiful music.  The splendor of the setting sun.  As Jesus says, the joy we have at the birth of a child.  In fact, even unbelievers can be happy… which is not the same thing as joy… not in the biblical sense.  Happiness is a surface emotion.  It doesn't mix with sorrow.  Joy… Christian joy, again, fixes its gaze through the sorrow on Jesus, the risen One.  And that is what sustains it.  Jesus.  Risen from the dead.

            If you want to see this in action, just go to a couple of funerals.  Watch how unbelievers deal with death.  There will be one of two things, or a combination of them.  There will either be denial manifested in all the silly things people say to one another in order to cope: He lives on in our hearts.  We scattered his ashes around that tree, and now he gives life to that tree, so we can always think of him in the spring when the tree turns green.  He’s that star up there, shining down on us.  He’s playing that great golf course in the sky.  I could go on.  Or there is utter hopelessness.  Everybody dressed in black, sitting around silently, staring off into space.  I’ve been around those situations.  It’s devastating.  And the couple times that I’ve been given a chance to say a prayer or a few words into the hopelessness, all I do is talk about the resurrection of Christ, and you can almost see the darkness fleeing the light.  Do that, if you’re ever at one of those affairs.  Speak the risen Christ into the darkness.

            Then go to a Christian funeral, especially a good, old-fashioned Lutheran one.  Of course, there are tears and there is sadness.  Death is always a tragedy.  We were created to live forever.  Sin messed all that up.  And unlike the funerals of unbelievers, we stare that reality right in the eye.  He died because he’s a sinner.  The wages of sin is death.  Death is ugly and cruel.  Here it is, in the casket.  Don’t look away. 

            BUT!  But… this body will rise.  Because Christ is risen from the dead.  He died to redeem this body, and He rose to raise this body and give it eternal life.  So at the Christian funeral, we sing.  And not dirges, but Easter hymns.  Alleluias.  Praise and thanksgiving for the Lord’s faithfulness to us and to the one who has died, but lives, and will arise on that Day.  We look death in the face, only to spit in its eye and proclaim the everlasting Easter Gospel.  “Death, you can go to hell, because Jesus has defeated you.  He is risen from the dead and He’s taking me with Him.”  Then, of all things, we go into the fellowship hall and have a feast.  Lutheran ladies know how to set a table, and there is no lack.  We eat and drink and laugh… and cry, but not only cry.  It’s a joyous affair.  Almost irreverent in the eyes of unbelieving mourners.  But see… Our sorrow has been turned to joy.  Because Jesus died, and He is risen!  He is risen, indeed!  Alleluia! 

            Now, we’ve spent so much time on the second half of our text, that we’ve virtually ignored the first half.  I guess you can’t do everything.  But suffice it to say, our sorrow turning into joy depends on this first part; that is, the promise of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus Himself didn’t say everything there is to say to the disciples that night.  They couldn’t bear it then.  But there is the Promise of the Spirit.  He will be poured out on Pentecost.  Then they will understand, after Jesus is risen from the dead, after Pentecost.  The Spirit will guide them into all the truth.  Which is to say, the Spirit will give the apostles to write the truth down.  The Holy Scriptures.  And in this way, He will guide us into all the truth.  This is an inspiration of the Scriptures text.  The Spirit speaks to the apostles all that He hears from the Father and the Son.  The Spirit takes all that belongs to the Son, which He has received from the Father, and declares it to the apostles, and they write it down.  That is what we read and preach in the Church, through which the Holy Spirit comes to us and gives us faith in Jesus, who reconciles us to the Father by His death and resurrection.  It is only in this way, by the Spirit coming to us in the Scriptures, that we know the death and resurrection of Christ for us.  It is only in this way that we know how all this ends, where all this is going.  Resurrection.  New Creation.  Eternal life.  God wiping away our tears.  All things new.  That turns all our sorrow into joy.  Because He is risen!  He is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.