If you have been with us for a while, you know we have been going through the book of John actually for over a year now. We actually are getting close to the end. If you have been with us the last few weeks, you know that we have been in the part of the gospel that represents the last week of Jesus’ life on earth known as the Passion Week. If you have been with us, you know that during that time Jesus has pretty much gotten out of the public eye and has been spending some time in intimate fellowship with his disciples. During that time, he has been given them some basic information and some basic instructions before his departure. Last week, the last sentence of the passage that we looked at was verse 16:16, where Jesus begins to unfold a rather cryptic and somewhat mysterious timeline of how future events would unfold. Reading from 16:16 he says “In a little while, you will see me no more and then after a little while, you will see me.” As usual, this caused a little bit of confusion among the disciples. They began to question among themselves what Jesus is talking about. As usual, Jesus goes on to accommodate them. He begins to unpack the meaning of these three little words “a little while”. I will be reading from chapter 16 starting at verse 17 and going all the way through down to verse 33. (Scripture read here.)
We see Jesus giving a cryptic timeline of how some of the future events will unfold. It causes confusion with the disciples. It continues to cause confusion today among the scholars who try to interpret what is going on here. Really, the consensus is that what Jesus is talking about in these “little whiles” is about the coming 72 hours where Jesus will be crucified and ultimately be resurrected. We know that in a little while, Jesus will go out into the garden and will face his betrayer Judas. We know that in a little while, the high priest will come and they will drag him off to Caiaphus where he will have to face him and face the charge of blasphemy and then how he would be dragged away and have to go and face the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. We know that in a little while, Pontius Pilate will sentence Jesus to die a horrible death on a Roman cross. After three hours on the cross, he will die. He will be placed into a borrowed tomb and the tomb will be sealed with a stone. In a little while, the disciples will no longer see Jesus. We also know and should be familiar that because we are in the Easter season, we know that Jesus did not remain in the grave. Is that an Amen out there? After three days, he came forth. When Mary Magdalene went to check him out and see if he was still in the tomb, and she went there to anoint his body with oil, and she found that the tomb was empty. John came out and Peter came out and they too found that the tomb was empty. The angels asked who are looking for and they said Jesus and they said “He is not here, he has risen indeed.”
After a little while longer, Jesus appeared to his disciples in the upper room. He didn’t appear in the physical sense. He appeared in the newly resurrected state. They knew him in the way they saw him again but they saw him in a totally new light. They saw him in his resurrected body. Jesus goes on to talk a little bit more about these little whiles and specifically that there would be a broad range of emotions going on with the disciples during these little whiles. Specifically, there would be two key emotions: the first one being grief and the second one being joy. We know that resurrection Sunday follows Good Friday. We know that Easter follows the time of the crucifixion, but we also know for the disciples there was a very long and dark Saturday in between. A Saturday that they would be feeling a little bit of fear; fear of the unknown. A Saturday that they may be feeling a little bit of regret for words they didn’t say to Jesus or words that they did say to Jesus. Maybe they would be feeling a little bit of confusion. Maybe they would be feeling remorse. They possibly could be feeling a little bit of anger at Jesus. Things didn’t pan out exactly the way that he said. We know that during that time of grief they would be feeling an intense amount of sadness. What makes matters worse is during this time while the disciples are in this period of grief, the passage tells us that the world would be rejoicing. It says “I tell you the truth; you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve but your grief will turn to joy.” Here Jesus is predicting they are going to be in this intense period of mourning, crying, weeping, and darkness, yet he says the world is going to be rejoicing for it. The world is going to be happy. This should not be any surprise to the disciples. It should not be any surprise to us because if you were with us since the very beginning, you know back in John 3 we learned that light has come into the world but for some reason man loved the darkness instead of the light. Why? Because its deeds were evil. As we learned earlier, when that light of Christ comes into the darkened world, the world is going to reject it. All you have to do is pick up your Bible and begin to study about Jesus and pretty soon the light of Christ begins to shine on you and you are feeling I am not sure I like that light of Christ shining on me. Back then, there were people that were very happy that Jesus was going to die on the cross. Following the crucifixion, there would be people around there that would be celebrating. They would be rejoicing. We also know that in a little while, things would change. That mourning time period would be short-lived because Jesus goes on to say that grief is going to take a transformation. It is going to turn into joy. We are going to see grief that is going to turn to joy. The disciples who were sad and dejected and frustrated and fearful would all of a sudden become overjoyed. If we wanted to see proof of that, all we have to do is jump forward about four chapters in chapter 20. The disciples are gathered in the upper room, following the resurrection, still not exactly sure what has happened. Still fearful for the Jews but Jesus makes his appearance and everything changes. It says “On the evening of that first day of the week when the disciples were together with the doors locked, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said ‘Peace be with you!’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.” They were overjoyed that grief did indeed turn to joy. We have Jesus laying out a pretty brief but somewhat cryptic timeframe about how events are going to happen but very true because we know that in a little while he would go on the cross. In a little while, he would find himself crucified. In a little while, he would find himself buried in a borrowed tomb and out of sight of the disciples. But we know also that after a time of mourning, after a time of weeping, a little while later that grief would turn to joy because of the resurrection. Just in case the disciples still don’t quite get it, he decides to create some other analogy to explain it to them; the analogy of birth. He goes on to say “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.”
Personally, I have never been pregnant. I have put a few pounds on the last couple weeks, but believe me I am not pregnant. But I suspect if I were to survey the woman in the audience here or some of the woman, labor pains can be a little intense. Debbie also attested to that. I also suspect that once that baby comes out and you are holding that brand new pink little baby and it’s all clean. You have this joy. I have seen the pictures where they are crying they are just so filled with joy; they are not talking about the pain of labor. Is that true? Generally true and then they become teenagers and the pain returns! So Jesus is creating this picture of birth and he is going to the disciples and saying so it is going to be with you. You are going to experience this time of darkness. You are going to experience this time of great pain. You are going to experience this time of grief in my absence but don’t worry. Things are going to get better. There is going to be joy on the other side of that pain. It is going to be a joy that is going to stick with you. A joy that cannot be taken away from you. The world cannot snatch that joy out of your hand because of the resurrection. They are going to need that joy. They are going to need that reality because they are about to go into the world where they are going to face all sorts of trouble. Things just didn’t get all wonderful following the resurrection. Things got worse because now they had this reality of the resurrection and the first thing they want to do is go tell people about it. Unfortunately, the people were not very receptive to it. The Jewish people were not receptive to it. The pagans and of course the Romans were not receptive to it. They began to immediately face all sorts of persecution. All sorts of trials. All sorts of martyrdom. All the apostles went on to become martyrs of the faith. They were going to face a lot of trouble so they needed something to take with them. So they took this resurrection reality, this resurrection experience with them and that became the framework that they would process every subsequent pain and trial through. They knew no matter how bad things got in their personal lives, or in the world, or whatever they were facing, they knew on the other side of that pain was pure joy because of the reality of the resurrection. That is really all I wanted to cover in that particular section.
As I transition, I think what is it in there that can apply to us? I think there is a lot that can apply to us. The first thing being very simple. We too know that in the world we are going to experience trouble. In fact, if we were to jump down all the way to verse 33 we see “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” The first thing to remember is that we are going to experience trouble. We are going to experience trouble on a global level and we are going to experience trouble on an individual and local level. I don’t know how you get your news. Some people get it from the newspaper. How many still get the news from the newspaper? A few of you. How many of you get your news through the internet? How many get your news from NBC channel 11? That is how I get my news but you watch the news and you can’t help but see there is trouble in the world. Especially look at what is going on in Afghanistan. They were on our side and now they are fighting against us. Now they are all mad at us for all the things that are going on there. We look at the shootings in Ohio at the school. We look at the tornados that have swept through the Midwest and all the storms going through there. We look at the stock market ups and downs. We look at the political arena and the trouble going on there and the fighting and badgering against each other. In the world, there is trouble. That is a reality. In fact, some would suggest the trouble is getting worse, not better. It is increasing. The world is getting to be a really bad place to live. Some would suggest that this is the beginning of some new form of labor pains. In fact, Paul back in the book of Romans uses the analogy of labor to describe the situation that was going on back then 2000 years ago. He says “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we await eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” That is a passage that could be applied today. We know that creation is groaning. Doesn’t the physical earth seem like it is groaning? There is a lot of groaning going on. Some would suspect this is because we are between the first and the second coming of Christ. I don’t try to nail that down, but there seems to be a lot of signs that things are getting worse before they get better. On a global scale, we will have trouble. But he also says, not only the earth. We are going to have trouble. We, the first fruits of the spirit, which basically he is saying the born-again believers are the ones that are going to experiencing trouble on the individual level. Especially if you are sharing your faith, which we should be. Just by trying to live differently in the world, by virtue of that, you are probably going to experience some trouble. You are going to experience some trouble at your homes, your workplace, the schools, all over the community if you are trying to live out the Christ-like existence. You are going to be facing some trouble from the world who doesn’t like that light shining on them. Not only that, you are going to be facing the other troubles that the rest of the world seems to experience too. Things like financial crises. Things like bankruptcy. Things like relationship issues and divorce and health issues and sickness and even death. You are going to be facing these troubles for a little while.
Some of you say, Chuck, I have been experiencing trouble more than a little while. I have been experiencing it for a long time. I am tired of that. I am really tired of the trouble. Jesus seems to give the impression that the trouble is short-term. I would take exception to that because Jesus purposely doesn’t put a time frame on his little whiles. He says a little while. In the story of the last week on earth he is talking in the initial little while about a 72-hour range there. He is talking about from the time of the crucifixion to the resurrection. But we also know that since then, we haven’t seen Jesus around and it has been 2000 years. We are still in a little while waiting for the second coming of Christ. What my second point is really is we cannot try to put the little whiles of God into some very specific box. Some very specific time frame. There is a Psalm, I think it is 90:4, that says a day is like a thousand years to God and a thousand years is like a day to God. In other words, God does not live in man-made time. Time is a man-made convention. God, an eternal God, transcends time. We created time. When you think about those 2000 years since the last time we saw Jesus, God is up there saying it has been about two days. What are you being impatient for? It has been two days. The little while cannot be put into some sort of man-made time bracket. The sad thing is we know when you are in the middle of some form of severe life trial, maybe you are in some form of grief, a day can seem like a thousand years. If you have ever struggled with or ever experienced any form of grief, maybe the loss of a parent, maybe the loss of a brother or sister or a friend or a daughter or a son, or a spouse like I have, you know that what happens is right when that happens, everything stops. Everything comes to a halt. All your busyness suddenly isn’t important anymore is it? You want to focus on that person that you lost. You want the whole world to focus on that person. Your world has suddenly come to a halt. Your clock is dragging and the rest of the world says I will stop for a minute. I will come to the service. I will spend an hour and listen to a good eulogy but I have to get on because I have to go back to work. I have to check my email. I have to do this stuff. Isn’t that true? In the meantime, it is so easy for you, the one that has experienced the grief, to get a little offended by that. It is like I lost my loved one. How come you can’t stop and spend a week with me. Spend some time. Walk with me through that dark valley of fear. Why can’t you spend time with me? It is because our time has stopped and the rest of the world keeps going on. That is okay because that is a normal part of the grief process.
But if we are not careful and you are experiencing the grief, you can get into a stage where you kind of freeze. You get in this time warp that you refuse to move forward. You are no longer in grief for a day, a week, or a month. All of a sudden it is going into a year or a couple years and you just can’t move on. That is when healthy grief shifts to unhealthy grief. It is not just related to death. It could be all sorts of severe life trials. It could be a bankruptcy. It could be a divorce. It could be something you did that you got yourself in trouble for. Something you shouldn’t have done. It could be anything for where you have frozen in time. You have locked into this new normal that you will not let go. Sometimes, God will say I am going to leave you there for a while because I have lessons that I want you to learn. I have some things that I want you to learn. I have said it before that I think the best schoolhouse to learn from God is the schoolhouse of grief. There is a passage in Ecclesiastes that says “Better to be in a house of mourning than in a house of feasting.” That doesn’t make any sense at all because we like to party. He is saying be in a house of mourning. While you are there that is when God is going to talk to you. That is where he is going to give you nuggets of truth that you can’t get when you are out having a good time when the sun is shining and you are partying and life is going well. He says sit down and sit at my feet a little bit in the school of mourning and take out your pen and take some notes because I am going to give you stuff faster than you could write it down. He will.
What it all boils down to is how we process our trials. That is the third point we can take from it. Not only will we have trouble. Not only can we not put a time frame on that period of trouble, but we have to learn that we process our trials in life different than the rest of the world. Or we should. All the world has troubles. All the world is part of this global trouble. All the world has individual trouble in their lives, but the difference is how we grieve. There is a passage in 1 Thessalonians that we use at funerals that says we do not grieve as those who have no hope because we have the hope of the resurrection. Just to lighten things up a little bit, when I first got here I was doing a funeral over at Pinkerton’s for somebody. I used that passage out of 1 Thessalonians but instead of saying we do not grieve as those who have no hope, I said we do not grieve as those who have no “Pope.” The Catholics in the room seemed to appreciate the slip up. Anyway, the reality is we don’t grieve as those who have no hope because of the reality of the resurrection. What we should do is every trial in our lives should be processed within the framework of the resurrection reality. Amen. We know that no matter how bad things get, when we get to the other side, joy is going to be waiting. This is not just some religious mumbo-jumbo. It is not just some feel-good theology. It is actually a very practical method of dealing with the troubles in your life that goes along with current methods of psychology. When I was doing my thesis a few years ago, I remember looking into some of this stuff and there is actually a psychological method out there called reframing. In a nutshell, it is learning to put a positive spin on a negative situation. Then taking that and applying that towards future negative situations. Giving a simple example, let’s say you are a college football star. Everything is looking good. It looks like you might even get drafted into the NFL. But the last year of school when you are supposed to be at your height, you go out and do something silly and break your leg. You are out the rest of the season and skipped over by all the drafts. You are sitting at home and you are just bummed out. You are really depressed. Really down and out about things. Suddenly, you get this notion to look up and you see your piano. You see that you have a piano in the house. You say I have always thought about playing the piano. Maybe I will look into it. You start looking on the internet and find some lessons that are free and pretty soon you start playing the piano. Pretty soon you find you are pretty good. You really take pleasure in playing the piano. Pretty soon that pleasure seems to override any pleasure you had even playing football. You find that you are pretty good at it so you change your major. You now become a music major. You graduate with a music degree and you end up playing piano for a jazz band or the symphony. After that experience, this college football player now turned musician can look at that terrible experience and say you know what, the thing that I thought was the worst thing that could have happened to me turned out to be the best thing that could have happened in my life. From that point on that person processes every negative event through that. They reframe it into a new perspective. If that is true in psychological method, don’t you think that would be true in God’s economy? It is because Jesus was the master of reframing. Think about it. What is the worst thing that could happen to Jesus? What was the worst thing that could happen to God’s son was that the co-creator of the universe would come down and die a terrible death on a Roman cross. Public humiliation. Public shame. Yet the worst thing that could have happened for Jesus became the best thing that could have happened for mankind because it opened the gateway for everybody to have a relationship back with the Father. That is awesome. Because we have that knowledge, that means we too should have that joy. Every negative event that happens to us we process through that framework of the resurrection. This is not just based on some psychological methods out there. This is something that is tied to nothing short of the historical death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The good news about that is that we don’t have to wait until the other side to experience the joy. God’s word tells us that we can experience the joy right smack in the middle of the trials. Even though the job didn’t pan out. Even though the relationship didn’t work. Even though the health situation didn’t work and somebody died, we can still somehow rejoice. There is a passage in the book of Habakkuk that speaks of this. It says “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines; though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food; though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord and I will be joyful in God my savior.” Doesn’t sound like it is a happy situation? It sounds like that person doesn’t have anything. Yet that person is able to rejoice in the Lord. For us, what it means is, if you call yourself a Christian, when you are experiencing the trials in life, which everybody in this room is experiencing some form of trial, some are better, some are worse, but we really all have challenges we are facing, the immature Christian goes through life saying I am dealing with these health issues but God willing I am going to make it through and I will have joy on the other side. I am losing my house. I am going bankrupt. I know it is tough but I know there is joy on the other side. I have lost this person or done this or whatever happened but I know that someday when I get to the other side, I will be happy. That is not what this is saying. It says you can experience joy in the midst of your circumstances. That is going to become your witness. That is when people are going to sit up and take notice. You will get somebody who will say I don’t get you Christians. You pray and I get praying but what I don’t get is you make these prayer requests for your finances to come through or your job to come through or your relationship be restored, even if you don’t get it, it looks like unanswered prayer, but somehow you are still happy. I just don’t get that. What is going on here? You can say the best explanation I have is the resurrection. I process everything through the frame of the resurrection. That is how I live my life. The person says I don’t get that. I don’t believe in the resurrection. Can you give me something else? You say to that person have you been outside lately? You have noticed spring came a little bit early this year. There are blossoms on the tree and people are pulling weeds and mowing their lawn in March. Could you have predicted that? They say of course not. Nobody could predict that. Not even our local weatherman Dennis Bowman could predict that one and he is pretty good. How could somebody predict an early spring down to the day? Maybe you couldn’t predict that but could you predict that spring was going to come? Of course. We know spring is going to come. How do you know? I know. Spring comes all the time. I have seen it over and over and over again. I have seen spring come. Even in the dead of winter, I know that in a little while the blossoms are going to come back on the tree. How do you know that? I just know that. What happens is that those trees become a living witness to the resurrection to God’s faithfulness. You tell somebody if the resurrection is not enough to turn you to God, let nature turn you to God. God makes it so no man or woman is without excuse. Anybody can be converted. Not simply by hearing the reality of the resurrection. They can see the reality of the resurrection in God’s own nature. What they call general revelation.
I would like to close by sharing a story of someone who was converted just simply by staring at a tree. There is a book I read every few years. It is a short book, under 100 pages, called The Practice of the Presence of God. It is actually just the letters written by a 17th century monk called Brother Lawrence. Brother Lawrence’s whole goal in life was to just learn to be in God’s presence 24 hours a day. His whole life he was trying to do that. He would fail on and off but he found moments that he would just constantly be in God’s presence even while he was working. He decided it didn’t just happen during his prayer times. He didn’t have to just stop everything and go in his prayer closet to get in the presence of God. His goal was to do it during the day, during the work, when he is walking along the street, when he is picking up trash, when he is flipping an omelet, whatever he is doing, he wanted to be in the presence of God and he figured out how to do it. The thing that is interesting, the thing that got him to this point of wanting to do that was simply his conversion at the age of 18. He was in the military. He was sitting out staring at a barren tree in the dead of winter. There was such a wave of understanding that came over him that he just suddenly got this presence of God through the knowledge that even though the tree is barren now, in a little while the tree is going to blossom and there is going to be fruit. This put such an impression on him that he decided that there was a God and he was going to give his entire life to him. That is when he went into the monastery. Reading from the very first chapter when somebody writes of Brother Lawrence’s conversion: “I met Brother Lawrence for the first time today. He told me that God had been especially good to him in his conversion. He was 18 at the time and still in the world. He told me that it all happened one winter day as he was looking at a barren tree. Although the trees leaves were indeed gone, he knew that they would soon reappear followed by blossoms and then fruit. This gave him a profound impression of God’s providence and power which never left him. Brother Lawrence still maintains that this impression detached him entirely from the world and gave him such a great love for God that it hasn’t changed in all of the 40 years he has been walking with him.”
It is amazing how God works and how someone could be converted by simply staring at a tree and seeing God’s faithfulness in that. We are all at various times in the winters of our discontent or whatever you want to call it. We are all at the places where we are experiencing some form of grief. Some form of emotional turmoil. Some sort of heaviness. Some sort of anger. Some place where we feel stuck. The good news that we have once again is that there is not a time frame attached to it. We in many ways determine how long we are going to stay in that period. We particularly have the choice to determine how we are going to process it. Are we going to process it like the world and be negative and bitter? Are we going to process it within the framework of the resurrection? Are we going to process it looking back and knowing because of the reality of the resurrection that the tomb is empty, that he is not there, and that he is risen, and that we too can experience new life? We can experience joy not only in this world when the fig tree doesn’t bloom and the stalls are empty or whatever it is. We can experience that overwhelming sense of joy, a joy that cannot be snatched from our hands, and a joy that is going to be with you in a little while and for all eternity. Let us pray.
