Bible Text: St John 16:16–22 | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christian Preus
What we don’t often realize about Jesus’ disciples is that they were having the time of their life with Him until Jesus entered into His passion and His crucifixion. If you think about it, they were seeing him do all his miracles, they were basking in His glory, they were drinking the water turned into wine, they saw him raise the dead, they saw him give sight to the blind, they saw demons cringing when he ordered them to leave the demoniacs. There are huge crowds of people following Jesus listening to Him teach, and they were participating in this, they were His disciples. He even says to them that they are going to sit on twelves thrones with Him, judging the twelve tribes of Israel when He comes into His Kingdom. So they are at the height of exhilaration. The Pharisees ask Jesus, “Why aren’t your disciples fasting?” Αnd why aren’t they fasting? Because they’re happy. Life is great. Fasting is for mourning, for sadness, and they aren’t that, and that’s what Jesus says, “How can the friends of the Bridegroom mourn when the Bridegroom is with them?” They are happy. They have every right to be. Jesus is with them and they are seeing God have mercy on his corrupted creation.
But then comes Jesus’ passion and crucifixion, and everything switches for them. Happiness, security, fame, all these things they had and rejoiced in and identified with Jesus’ presence, it’s all turned into sorrow and fear and ridicule against them.
Now Jesus had told them all this. He never taught them a prosperity Gospel, He never told them His Kingdom was in earthly happiness. He gave those things, He can’t help it, He’s the good God, He gives good things, you’ve experienced all sorts of good things from Jesus, He gives them to you because He loves you, but He’s promises a joy that far surpasses all this. He promised his disciples that He would suffer for them, reconcile them to God, win them the forgiveness of their sins and an eternal life lived with Him, without lust or envy or greed or sinful pride. He had told them so many times, “The Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men, be mocked, spat upon, crucified, and on the third day rise again,” but they couldn’t grasp it. Why? Because they hadn’t suffered themselves. So Jesus sent them suffering. He calls it “a little while,” and it was for them, three days, but it didn’t feel that way, suffering never does.
Time flies when you’re having fun, we say, but it crawls when you’re suffering. What was their suffering? It wasn’t just outside factors, the leaders of the Jews arresting their Lord, Pilate playing the political coward and washing his hands and sending their Lord off to be crucified. It was their own sin: they abandoned their Lord, left him to die, and on top of that they doubted everything they had believed about Jesus. The disciples on the road to Emmaus speak for all the disciples when they put their faith in the past tense, “And we thought that He was the one who was to redeem Israel.” There is no suffering we can’t bear, if we know the truth of Christ crucified for us, how much our God loves us, that for a poor wretch of a sinner He willingly gives His eternal and holy Son, and the Son bears our wickedness and suffers for it, and conquers our death and raises us to the status of sons of God. But the worst part of suffering is that it puts exactly this into doubt – Does God love me? Why does He send me suffering? Is this God whom I worship in control?
This is the problem that we Christians run into very often, and that is that we get good things from Jesus and we learn to expect nothing but good things from Him, which we should, we should expect nothing but good things from Jesus. But we’d better include suffering in those good things we expect from Him. Because if we don’t, if we think that Jesus is the dispenser of only earthly happiness, then we’re simply worshiping the wrong Jesus. He is the suffering Savior, and to be a Christian is to be conformed to His image. He suffered before entering into His glory, and we, as St. Paul says, must go through many tribulations before we enter ours.
We do have all sorts of joys, earthly joys. Jesus showers them on us in the Christian life. I’ll focus on just one for a bit here, and then I’ll list off a bunch of others. Our epistle lesson talks about obeying government. Can you imagine living in Nazi Germany and trying to obey the government there? You couldn’t, as a Christian. Can you imagine today living in Haiti, where there has been anarchy, no functional government for 200 years, where poverty and misery are constant, murder and open corruption are simply expected? Here in America God has given us a good government, where we can easily obey our laws as God commands us to do and expect good to come from it. Of all the wicked things our government has endorsed in our lifetime – abortion, so-called homosexual marriage, the closing of churches during Covid, we have been able to speak against it as Christians and act against it and still live in peace and protection. Thank God.
Then just look at the list of our daily bread that God gives us: food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, spouse, children, health, good weather, good reputation, peace. Included in these are innumerable earthly happinesses, all of which God gives to you because He loves you.
But none of this is what Jesus is talking about when He says, “And I will see you again and you will have joy, and that joy no one will take from you.” And we have to guard against making earthly happiness the proof that God loves us or making our faith in Jesus depend on Him giving us these good things. Because while Jesus promises you daily bread, in the end, it will fail, and your earthly happinesses will also end up giving you many sadnesses – good government will fail, our health fails, our spouses die or we never get married or divorce tears asunder what God has joined together, our reputation is never as good as we hope it is, because all men are selfish, and in the end, we die. And all of this happens because of sin, which corrupts us and everything and everyone. God will give us our daily bread perfectly only in the resurrection, and we attain to the resurrection by the forgiveness of our sins. That’s the joy we need. That’s the joy Jesus gives. That’s the joy no man can take from us.
For that joy to come, suffering has to come first. Without suffering, we forget our sin and our need for a Savior. That’s where the disciples were when their expectations were crushed. And the suffering they went through was by far the best thing for them. It was necessary. When they saw Jesus again, they knew Him and loved Him as their Savior from sin; when they saw Him that Easter night, that’s what they wanted from Him more than anything, more than all the earthly treasures in the world, they wanted forgiveness, they wanted to know His suffering was for them, that He once again had proved His love and His mercy toward poor sinners, He’d borne their sins and carried their sorrows.
Because they’d sinned and it left them empty and alone and terrified, and worst of all, guilty before God. Their suffering led them to repentance, to true sorrow over sin, the reality that they had sinned against their God and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. How can you take back a denial, a betrayal, leaving your Lord to die? He was dead, they couldn’t take that back. They were helpless. They could only mourn.
And that is the suffering of Christian repentance. Whatever other suffering God gives, it is always to lead us to repentance, to look at our sin, and see the source of all suffering is right there in our own hearts. We confess in our catechism that we deserve nothing but punishment. We are sinners and God owes us nothing. Even if we haven’t deserved some bad thing that is happening to us, an underserved slander, an unexpected health problem, whatever it is, we have to confess that we have deserved worse. You’re a sinner, and the wages of sin is death. And there isn’t a thing you can do to take your sin away, to make up for it. You are in the place of the disciples. And Jesus put you there, because He loves you.
The Christian life is marked by the joy of Christ that answers suffering. If you sorrow over your sin, see Jesus coming to you with forgiveness, peace with your God, intent on showing you that your guilt and your shame are washed away by the very blood He now pours into your mouth. If you are burdened with anxiety and care, the One who cares for you tells you to throw your cares on Him, that while everything else may fail you He never will; he knows your suffering and knows when best to end it; wait His time and He will teach you that all will work for good for those who love Him.
The joy of seeing a baby born, even that, can fade, but the joy of his Baptism, of his being born as a child of God, that lasts forever. Because the life that was just given to Jonathan Ambrose and the life that has been given to you in your Baptism is an eternal life, a life lived before God that begins now and lasts forever. The goal of our life is to stand before the Son of God and see His glorious face. And that’s because He is with us now, always, to the end of the age. And here is our joy through every single day of our life. He’s committed Himself to us now, and we live before Him knowing this will never change, that He will always love us, always instruct us in what is good, always teach us that His Father is our Father through the blood of His Son, and because He comforts us now in our distress, forgives us now our sins, teaches us now the truth, we know now the joy of seeing our Savior by faith, a joy that will be full when we see Him in glory.