Thursday in the Sixth Week of Easter, May 13, 2021

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, the Solemnity of the Ascension is celebrated on the Sunday following the actual day of the Ascension, which is always on a Thursday, forty days after Easter Sunday.

The Gospel reading for today’s Mass is again taken from Jesus’s discourse during the Last Supper in which he prepared the Apostles for his coming Passion, Death, and Resurrection.

“A little while and you will no longer see me, and again a little while later and you will see me.”  This evidently simple sentence uses two different Greek verbs which are here translated as “see”.  The first of these means to look at something thoughtfully, trying to understand it.  It is more like “observe” than “see”.  The second verb means “to see” in the sense of understanding.  If we look at this sentence again, we might translate it: A little while and you will no longer observe me, and again a little while later and you will understand me.”  The Lord means, first of all, that they will not see him for three days after he has died, but then they will see him again, when he has risen.  He also means that they have observed him for three years without understanding that he must suffer and die and rise again, and he will be taken from them so that they cannot observe him, but then when he return to them, they will understand.  And, indeed, he will go through the Scriptures with them on Easter Sunday to make this absolutely clear to them: “Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46 and said to them: Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead” (Luke 24, 44-45).

“What does this mean that he is saying to us?”  The Apostles question themselves without any hope of finding the answer, and the Lord, in his mercy, steps in to help them.  It is the human dilemma in a nutshell, and one that comes up again and again in the Gospels.  We cannot help ourselves but our pride keeps us from going to God.  The Lord Jesus says to them by way of clarification: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.”  The Apostles have heard him say that he would be arrested, mocked, beaten, and killed in Jerusalem.  He has spoken openly with them about his coming death, and a little earlier during the supper, he even announced that he would be betrayed by one of them.  These words which the Lord says to them here were not riddles.  He is explaining the significance of his coming Death and Resurrection: the world would rejoice at his Death while they would grieve, and then they would rejoice at his Resurrection.  They needed to be taught that his Resurrection would be a cause for joy, not for terror, as though he was returning for vengeance.  But even in their joy, they would be taught to understand what he had done, so unprecedented was his victory over sin and death, and so magnificent.