Thursday in the Sixth Week of Easter, May 26, 2022

John 16:16-20

Jesus said to his disciples: “A little while and you will no longer see me, and again a little while later and you will see me.” So some of his disciples said to one another, “What does this mean that he is saying to us, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me,’ and ‘Because I am going to the Father’?” So they said, “What is this ‘little while’ of which he speaks? We do not know what he means.” Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, “Are you discussing with one another what I said, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me’? Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.”

In the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, the Feast of the Ascension is transferred to the following Sunday.  This is true in other U.S. dioceses as well, but not in all.  The Mass readings for today continue their sequence from the Acts of the Apostles and the Last Supper Dialogue from the Gospel of St. John.

“A little while and you will no longer see me.”  The Greek word translated as “a little while” is no more specific than that.  As far as the Apostles know, the Lord could be speaking of hours, days, or weeks.  Paired with, “and again a little while later and you will see me”, the Lord seems to speak in a riddle or paradox.  As we know, this confused the Apostles at the time.  They would only have understood his meaning after the Resurrection.  The Lord is not being cruel to them, though.  He is preparing them to understand the meaning of his Resurrection, an unparalleled event of which they had been told but which made no sense to them then.  We might compare the Lord speaking to them like this with his Transfiguration.  Peter, James, and John did not understand that, either, and the Lord told them to “tell the vision to no one, till the Son of man be risen from the dead” (Matthew 17, 9).  Thus, in both cases, the Lord prepares them for their separation from him by his Death but also for his Resurrection by implying or declaring that they will be enlightened when he rises again and appears to them.

So, “A little while and you will no longer see me, and again a little while later and you will see me.”  They will no longer see him because he will die, and when they do see him it will be with his Glorified Body.  He will be the same Son of God united to a human nature but his Body will be glorified in its risen form.  The Lord makes the essential distinction that his Body is mortal before his Death but will be immortal when he rises from the dead.  It is the same Body but transformed in the Resurrection.  We see something of the nature of this Body in that it can pass through walls but still be tangible to the touch of St. Thomas.

The Apostles struggled with this and they began to ask each other what they thought the Lord meant.  They could not, on their own, discover his meaning.  The doctrine of the Glorified Body had to be revealed by God for us to know it at all.  This is for another time, however.  They could begin to understand only when he showed his Risen Body to them.  For now, he prepares them.  He plants seeds in their minds.

“Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.”  This, too, sounds like a riddle or paradox.  The Lord prepares them for the days to come and marks the distinction between how they will respond and how the world will do so.  Before becoming his followers, the Apostles lived “in the world”.   While not wicked men, they set their hearts on material prosperity.  They were practicing Jews, for the most part, but not zealous ones.  They prayed, but they were not spiritual people.  The Lord lifted them up from the world of ambitions and pleasures so that they might learn to serve God alone.  Their interests no longer lay with the world, but with him.  And so the Lord says to them that when he is taken from them, they will “weep and mourn” but the world will rejoice.  The Pharisees and the Jewish leaders, whom they formerly listened to, will rejoice.  All those who set their hearts on exploitation and plunder would rejoice.  The Lord was saying to them, Look how far you have come with me!  You are not of the world anymore but are of me!  And then he comforts them: “But your grief will become joy.”  These words bring to mind Psalm 114, 1-4, where an astonished Israelite exclaims, “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people: Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. The sea saw and fled: Jordan was turned back. The mountains skipped like rams, and the hills like the lambs of the flock.”  The liberation of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt was shocking.  Slave rebellions were severely crushed in ancient times, and here the Hebrews walked out of Egypt, laden with presents from their oppressors.  Even more shocking, the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus.