2025-05-25 Easter 6

Scripture Readings

Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

After big life events that have lots of hype and build up, there often comes a big crash afterwards. You know what I mean. You plan a wedding for months and months and then boom, it’s all over in just one day. You take 12 years of school preparing for high-school graduation and then, its over! You have a death in the family and you get all the plans and preparations ready for a funeral and then, it’s over and done. There’s countless experiences like this in life. Loads of preparation and then in the blink of an eye, it’s over. And, then comes the big crash. Your emotions that have been running on high octane have to resettle in to the regular humdrum of everyday life. Your stress levels have to come back down to normal. And often what happens is that we dip down below normal. In fact we might even experience some depression and feeling blue when the crash comes.

That’s kind of how it feels in these weeks after Easter. There is our Lenten journey and build up for 40 days and then Holy Week and then shazam! The tomb is empty! Christ is Risen! Death is defeated! Life reins! Yay! Celebrate good times, come on! And then … what? We are reminded from the scriptures that our Christian lives will still have their challenges. There is sorrow and struggles. Burdens and boredom. We have a hard time with sinning. Conflicts still occur. We have to pick up our own cross and follow after our Lord. We experience failures and hard times. We look anything but the triumph of Easter. The defeated foes of sin, death and the devil still lurk in the shadows, stalking us day after day.

So we have this supreme victory that Christ our Lord wins for us by His cross and resurrection. It utterly shatters our spiritual enemies. Yet at the same time we also struggle with weakness, sin and pain. It seems like a brutal contradiction, but in reality it is a perplexing paradox. Such tensions won’t be erased from our experience until the Day our Lord Jesus comes back. But until then, we are in the middle of it all. We walk as victors, holding the trophy of Christ’s victory, yet at the same time falling down and getting up again, day after day after day. There’s going to be the ups and the downs, the hills and the valleys, the highs and the lows.

Jesus prepared His disciples for this. We heard it today in the Gospel reading: “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” (JN 16:20). He’s telling them and us that life here in this fallen world will never cease to be difficult, especially for those who follow the Christ. The world will mock Christian morality. People will poke fun of anyone who goes against the sinful grain. Speak up in accordance with God’s Word and watch out for the backlash from Satan’s spokesmen on Facebook! I once had a parishioner who was imprisoned in a Siberian concentration camp during the war. He was a strong Lutheran Christian. The Soviet Russians had betrayed their Christian roots and became godless communists, hell bent on spreading atheism and killing everyone who believed otherwise. He told me they mocked him and abused him terribly while he was imprisoned.

There truly are countless examples of sorrow and lamenting in life. You’ve got your very own version. It can be even worse when we have to endure such things as persecution for the faith. But even in the midst of these dark times, our Lord gives us His word of promise. Our sorrow will turn into joy. And this is what we cling to when the crash comes, when we have to walk through the dark days and the laments linger.

Our Lord Jesus uses the example of child birth as a vivid example of this. The mothers in the congregation can certainly relate to His words! “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” (JN 16:21) All of the mothers I’ve talked to about this verse verify it is true! Until, of course, your kid becomes a two year old tyrant who won’t sleep through the night and your joy quickly turns into sorrow again! But you get the point! The sorrow and anguish is eclipsed by joy. Jesus’ own suffering on the cross is eclipsed by the joy of the empty tomb. And so it shall be for all of us who follow Christ our Lord. The dark days will come and they will be hard, but our Lord’s promise of joy remains no matter what.

This is never more real than when you are laying on your death bed. Terminal diagnosis. Suffering. Pain. Drawn out experiences of dying that can last for weeks if not months. We think instinctively that no good can come from this experience. Largely this has fuelled the push in our time for MAiD or euthanasia. We want to end the suffering on our own terms. But for the followers of Jesus, this is simply not an option. The Lord almighty is the giver and the taker. He gives life and He takes it. Just as Job writes: “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (1:21). So we wait on the Lord’s timing and let His will be done. Just as Christ endured the cross, we endure our times of suffering. St. Paul says as much in the book of Romans when he writes we are “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him” (8:17). Our suffering Savior bids us follow Him on the path of suffering, whatever that may entail. But we follow Him boldly, ever clinging to His rock solid promise that our sorrow will turn to joy.

The joy that Jesus speaks of here is none other than our heavenly home. He tells us plainly that He goes to prepare a place for us. For you. For me. For anyone who will trust and believe His promise. And this kind of promise can and does gladden our hearts, no matter what we are facing in life. Dreaded diagnosis? Heaven is our home. Horrific highway tragedy? Reunion awaits. Depression and sadness? The joy of the Lord is strength. So we fix our hearts and minds upon our Lord and His promise of heaven. Just as the baby was there for 9 months but hidden, so too is the joy of our Lord’s heavenly home. It’s always there for us, we just have to wait for it. The expectant mother comforts herself with the knowledge that there is an end to the anguish. She holds on despite her own pain and suffering, knowing and trusting that joy is right around the corner.

And even as we wait for the pure and eternal joy of heaven, we are granted some comforts along the way. God has given us each other. The Christian community and family of God who care for one another. We bear each others burdens. We reach out with love when someone is facing a tough time. If you remember the horrific tragedy of the Humboldt Broncos bus crash back in 2018, you remember how terrible it was. The gofundme donation campaign started out with a goal of $100,000 but ended with $15.2 million. What a massive outpouring of love and support and care in action. We can do likewise on smaller scales when we visit the sick and the suffering and when people are having facing hard times. We don’t need to have all the answers. We simply need to show that we care, just as God does for us.

We also think of the comforts and blessed assurance that we have in our Lord’s Sacraments. We are Baptized into Christ. We are forgiven our sins. We are washed clean by our Lord’s grace. He gives us the medicine of immortality in Holy Communion. He strengthens us in our trials, especially when we are feeling rundown and empty. He fills us with the good things of His Kingdom. It’s amazing that the Lord of all comfort and joy sympathizes with our pain. He is never far from us. And in the midst of suffering, He says that we ought to take heart for all the troubles the world can throw at you, He has overcome the world. A future of pure joy awaits all who trust in our Lord’s promise. For Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!