Readings: Isaiah 40:25-31 | 1 Peter 2:11-20 | John 16:16-23
Text: Isaiah 40:25-31
On the night in which He is to be betrayed, our Lord taught His disciples,
20 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. 21 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. 22 So also 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 16:20-22)
During His earthly ministry, there are many healings which Jesus did. Droves of people—the infirm, the fevered, demoniacs, paralytics, even those suffering with diseases which doctors could not help. When we hear these accounts of Jesus healing, we realize that we want that. We want Jesus to come along and cure our diseases—our cancer, our Parkinson’s, our rheumatoid arthritis…some days perhaps even our allergies. We want Jesus to cast away the demons that torment us. And we want it to happen now. And if it doesn’t happen now, then why bother waiting for it at all? If not now, then we won’t believe it’s real. After all, we reason, in the Gospel, all they had to do was show up and ask in faith. Well, here I am, asking, and I’m not getting it. Nothing happens.
The evangelists recorded for us just the moments that these sufferers were relieved. But, how long had the people coming to Jesus already waited? How many times had they already prayed? Those sickness didn’t just start up that afternoon. Those demons hadn’t just shown up that evening. Some of people had been waiting their whole life, asking their whole life. Think of the man born blind in John 9, the cripple at the pool of Bethesda in John 5, who had been waiting 38 years. Jesus showed up at that day, and at that time. What about the people who missed Jesus? Who had died just before Jesus arrived? Couldn’t Jesus have gotten there earlier? Couldn’t God have answered their prayers sooner? What do you do when the Lord arrives too late?
We want to short cut all that time. We ignore that context. We see only what we want to see. And it’s really a fantasy, longing for the cheat codes to life or jumping to the last chapter of the book. Not to mention, we live in a world that can’t stand suffering. There always has to be a quick way out of it, no matter how high a price you must pay later. And we want that kind of relief for ourselves. We want it so badly, that it actually takes away from our ability to endure anything. Because instead of steeling ourselves for the fight, we believe that it needs to be over right now.
And we end up praying with that expectation. It is certainly a good thing to pray that our suffering is taken away. But the moment we’re done with the prayer, we fall into despair, because we consider nothing at all outside of now. Why should we? No one else we know does—not our neighbors, not our leaders, not our enemies. And nobody realizes that this insatiable need for now is destroying us, physically and spiritually.
What then are we supposed to do? Doesn’t Jesus know that there is no time as important as now? Or, instead, are we the ones who do not realize that there are more important times than now coming in our future?
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. (John 16:20)
Make no mistake. Our Lord has indeed promised to take away all your suffering. And God has always, always kept His promises. At some point, whatever we’re going through now will in fact end. But that doesn’t mean it will end now. When it ends, we will be filled with joy. But until that day it does, we are learning how to endure. We endure just as those who waited months, years, their whole lives for Jesus in the Gospel waited. What we should expect—what God has actually promised and will do—is that we will either find God-given relief in this life, or we will find that relief in the next. The pain is for a time, the cross is for a time. The relief and the joy are for eternity. What we endure today teaches us how to endure when our last day arrives.
Let’s get to the heart of the matter: Are you ready to face death? If we live in only now, and question why Jesus hasn’t taken away the pain from now, then I dare say we aren’t. If we don’t know if Jesus is there for us when we go through something that will get better, how can we know when we go through something that will not? We must learn, because there is no shortcut. We can learn from hearing.
In our Old Testament lesson, the people in Isaiah’s day had the same problem we do. So much that God called them out on it.
“27Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”? 28Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. 29He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. 30Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; 31but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:27–31)
When you struggle to endure, it is Christ who gives you His strength to make it through. “So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” Whether that’s this moment, or whether it’s the last moment. What you cannot endure, Christ has. Because He has taken your suffering as His own. This is the reason He saved this discourse in John 16 for the night He was going to His passion. All relief and all end to suffering flows from Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus doesn’t just make these diseases and afflictions vanish. He takes each and every one of them onto His own shoulders. Jesus holds onto them in place of those who were healed. “This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: ‘He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.’” (Matt. 8:17, Isa. 53:4) The demons? They haunt him and leave the crowds alone. And this isn’t just for the crowds who met Jesus on the road; every single person’s suffering that Jesus alleviates, He makes it His own. He takes on your burden and mine as well.
And these are what Jesus carried to His cross—theirs and ours. What you go through today goes to the cross with Jesus. What you will go through when you die, goes to the cross with Jesus as well.
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:3-4) There’s good reason that this is one of the first things we hear at a funeral. But learn to take hold of it now! You are suffering now. You are baptized into Christ. He who endures for you what you cannot, gives you His strength to endure what you face. Whether it’s pain, or grief, or sin, or shame. He gets all of it and takes all of it from you. Not just so that you can have your now taken care of. But so that you can have your always taken care of. Jesus gives you His strength, His life, His forgiveness, so that you are well equipped to face death yourself. Jesus teaches us all how to die. So that we know that now is not the only time there is. Our Old Testament lesson puts our lives this way: “Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows on them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble.” Now is very short. Life in this world is short. But after death, eternity awaits. And that’s what Jesus prepares us for. That’s where we’ll be. In the Name + of Jesus. Amen.
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