Easter III – Sorrow turned to Joy

1 Peter 2:11-17       St John 16:16-22

When a woman is giving birth, 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.  

Today we celebrate Mother’s Day in the Netherlands and many other countries.

It is a secular holiday, and yet as Christians, we can gladly affirm this day set apart to remember our mothers, and give thanks to God for the gift they have given us: they have given us life from their very bodies; nurtured us physically and spiritually in this life; and they have suffered much as they have seen us grow.

And it is a happy coincidence that this day of remembrance lands on the same day as we have this particular Gospel appointed for today, when Jesus compares Christian sorrow with the sorrow of a mother who has brought a child into the world.

We are all children of mothers.  And if you are a woman, you may be a mother or you have that potential of motherhood, manifested in other ways.  If you are a man who has witnessed your wife giving birth to a child, the imagery in today’s Gospel is also very powerful.

Jesus said these words in the context of his final night on earth with his disciples before His passion and death on the Cross and His resurrection.  They will have sorrow at his death, but they will see him again in his resurrection and have joy.  But these words of Jesus for all of us have a wider meaning.

Jesus compares the sorrow that the disciples, and we, will have as Christians, with a woman in labour – and the joy we will have with the joy of a mother once a human being has been born into the world.

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But wait a minute, I think we pass over this analogy that Jesus makes a little too quickly and assume we understand it.  When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come.

For one thing, many modern translations of this passage, like the widely used NIV translation, use the word “pain” instead of sorrow - When a woman is giving birth, she has pain.  Perhaps the translators are recognizing some dissonance between what one expects to read when we think of a woman entering into labour.  Does she really have sorrow when about to give birth?  When I’ve spoken with mothers about this, they tell me they don’t remember experiencing “sorrow”, though there was certainly anxiety and pain.  Some translators try to smooth it over by assuming Jesus is meaning pain, but I think they hide something that Jesus is really trying to say.  Translators have to be so careful when they make decisions about every word they translate from Greek.

In the verses before and after, Jesus use the same Greek work “lupé”, and it is translated as “sorrow”.  In the verse before verse 21, Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament [weep yes, because of the pain, but lament?], but the world will rejoice.  You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow (lupé) will turn into joy.”  And in the verse after verse 21,  Jesus says, “So also you have sorrow (lupé) now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice.”  So it is hard to see why in verse 21 “lupé” should not be translated as “sorrow”.  Pain is not the opposite of joy, but sorrow contrasts with joy.

One commentator has asked:

“So is this a birthing or a dying?  We meet birth here only when we encounter death.  Indeed, the birth, which is not narrated in this Gospel, becomes through 16:21 a death, or is the death a birth?” [Judith Lieu, “The Mother of the Son in the Fourth Gospel”]

There is a second curious aspect of this verse 21 which is not picked up in most translations, even our own this morning:  “when a woman is giving birth” is more precisely “when the woman (ho gyne) is giving birth.”  Why would Jesus say, “when the woman is giving birth”?  Is it because Jesus is referring to his earthly mother Mary?

There are two other places in John’s Gospel where the Greek term gyne, woman, is used by Jesus for His mother, Mary.  One is in the wedding at Cana where Jesus says, after Mary tells him there is no wine, “Woman, what have you to do with me, my time has not come.”  And at the Cross, where Jesus says to his mother Mary and the disciple John, “Woman, behold, your son!”  Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” [19:26-27]

Surely it is at the Cross, where Mary, Jesus’ mother, “the woman”, finally experiences deep sorrow, “the sword that will pierce through her own soul”, when she sees her son suffer and die.  It was the fulfilling of the prophesy of Simeon which Mary heard when she brought the Christ child to the Temple forty days after his birth. [St Luke 2:35]

John Behr, an Orthodox theologian, in his commentary on John’s Gospel, also notes that, surprisingly, there is no birth narrative in St John’s Gospel (other than obliquely in the Prologue, which states, “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”).  The first two chapters of John’s Gospel are all about the revealing of the Messiah, and the first discussion of birth is in chapter 3 when Jesus tells us we must be born again to enter God’s Kingdom.  Is this because John wants us to understand that we are only fully “a human being born into the world” in the Resurrection? [Behr’s argument]

I think that given Jesus appeared to many people over 40 days, and that we know that Mary was staying with the apostles on the day of Jesus’ ascension [Acts 1:14], it is highly likely that she witnessed His Resurrection.  If so, Mary is truly the first mother ever to see her own child brought to all His fullness in the Resurrection.  She truly had sorrow at his death and we can image that all sorrow was eliminated from her heart when she saw her son, not only restored to life, but Jesus’ humanity, in all its fullness as never before seen.  She saw “a human being has been born into the world.”

On this Mother’s Day we can also remember and give thanks to God for Mary, who unhesitatingly agreed to God’s plan, who brought Jesus to birth from her own flesh, who nurtured our Saviour into adulthood and was nurtured like no other human being on earth by Him (in his presence for more years than any other person!), who witnessed his suffering and death on the Cross and bore witness to His Resurrection.

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And Mary, who brought Jesus to birth, is for us a type of the Church.

Tertullian, an early Church Father from the 2nd century, points out that “as Eve [who’s name means “living”, she is the mother of all humanity] is formed from the rib of Adam when he had fallen asleep, so too the Church, in the form of water and blood, comes forth from the side of Christ in mortal slumber” on the Cross.  [as quoted by Behr, p. 215]  Think of it, Jesus was pierced in his side, where his ribs were and from that side comes forth the Church, the mother of us all [Gal 4:26], constituted through the sacraments of Holy Baptism (water) and Holy Communion (blood).

We are brought to birth by our mother the Church now, and not easily, but in sorrow.  Surely every Christian parent experiences some sorrow until their own child is brought to birth to a living faith in Christ.  St Paul says, “my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!” [Gal 4:19]  And think about it, we in the Church truly experience that sorrow with one another, all the time, with our friends who are struggling in their faith.  We participate in labouring to bring about the fulness of that second birth, anticipated in our baptism, through grace, anticipated as that faith comes alive, through grace, and finally brought to fulfillment only in the Resurrection.  We rightly grieve at the death of our loved ones, and yet we will surely no longer remember that sorrow, but have joy, when we see one another in the general Resurrection.

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So on this Mother’s Day, we give thanks to God for our mothers:  our own earthly mothers;  for the archetypical mother, Mary, who is an example to us all;  and our mother the Church, the new Eve, that labours with sorrow until we become truly “a human being brought into the world.”

We don’t avoid that sorrow, that anguish, it is our very business as Christians.  We engage that sorrow in our own personal struggles in our faith, in the struggles in our families, and in the Christian family, the Church, into which we have been born again.  And we bear these sorrows “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life” [from the words spoken as the coffin is lowered into the grave].  Jesus shows us it is our true end by His own Resurrection.

In heaven no one will take our joy from us.  Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you”.  Heaven is described as “seeing God face to face”.  It is the promise of the beatific vision.

This is our trajectory.  And as we grow we will know it more and more even in this life:  to think the thoughts of God, to will the will of God, and to be infilled with His love, to become God’s true images and likenesses.

It is good on this day to pause to give thanks for our mothers but also think about God's greater plan for us from before the Creation.  It is not only to create humanity in its purity before the Fall in the garden of Eden, but to create our complete humanity as only seen in its fulness in the Resurrection, a second birth through death, when "a human being has been born into the world".

Let us prepare ourselves now for Holy Communion, where our sorrows begin to be transformed into that final joy, and our souls and bodies begin to participate in our resurrected completeness, as we encounter and receive our risen Lord.

Amen +