It’s the one reality of traveling with children that every parent learns to dread. You load the kids in the car, fasten their seatbelts, and head down the road. It doesn’t matter where you’re going or how long the trip is going to be – because in what seems to be no time at all, they start asking, “Are we there yet?” You try to be specific in your answer – “No, Johnny, we won’t get to Grandma’s house until tomorrow” or “we won’t be at the hotel for another two hours, Mollie” – but as parents quickly learn, children often have difficulties relating to specific time periods. They become impatient. So after the second or third or twentieth time you hear that question – “Are we there yet?” – you’re so frustrated that you try to put them off by saying something like “We’ll be there in a little while.” We find that children – especially small children – don’t have a clue what a “little while” really means, but the word “little” doesn’t seem like much, and it buys you a few minutes of sanity before they ask again, “Are we there yet?” And again you reply, “In a little while.”
Jesus uses the phrase “a little while” several times in today’s Gospel lesson, and it’s clear that the disciples don’t have a clue what He is talking about. That’s nothing unusual, of course – the disciples often didn’t understand what Jesus was telling them – but what Jesus is doing here is preparing His followers for His arrest and trial, for His death, His resurrection and His ascension into Heaven. He’s speaking to the disciples in the upper room on Maundy Thursday. He has already told them that Judas will betray Him and that Peter will deny his Lord three different times before the coming of day. He’s repeatedly told them that he must suffer and die and be raised from the dead on the third day, but they still don’t understand. So now when Jesus begins to talk about what will happen in the next few hours, they are totally perplexed. “What is this that he says to us,” they ask one another.
We, of course, have a distinct advantage over the disciples, for we know exactly what Jesus means because we know exactly happened next. We understand that when Jesus says, “A little while, and you will see me no longer,” he is referring to His death. When Jesus says “and again a little while, and you will see me,” He is referring to His resurrection. When Jesus says, “you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice,” He is referring to that fact that when Jesus died on the cross, His enemies thought that they had gotten rid of this troublemaking blasphemer once and for all. And when He tells them that “you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy,” he is explaining that their grief will be turned into indescribable elation when their risen Savior appears to them on Easter Sunday.
To us it all seems pretty cut-and-dried. But my fellow redeemed, these words of our Gospel lesson are not just an historical account of part of a conversation that took place between Jesus and His disciples on Maundy Thursday. As we have been studying in our Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning Bible classes, it’s wrong to look at Scripture as nothing more than a long drawn-out series of stories about who did what and when they did it. Yes, the historical facts are there. But every one of those historical facts shows us how God set out to rescue His people from the sure and certain death sentence of sin.
It all began with the historical fact of creation. When God created the world – when God created Adam and Eve – there was no pain, no aging, no death. Most importantly, there was no sin. At least, there was no sin for a little while.
Although Scripture doesn’t give us a detailed time line on this, it seems very likely that it didn’t take long for Satan to show up in the Garden of Eden to tempt Adam and Eve. In what most likely was a very little while, Adam and Eve not only listened to Satan’s temptation to sin – but they actually committed the first sins. And at that very moment in time, everything changed. God’s perfect creation was no longer perfect. God promised that Adam and Eve would die if they ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, and that’s exactly what happened. The death penalty of sin wasn’t just limited to Adam and Eve, for it was imposed on every living creature, including every man, woman and child that has descended from Adam and Eve.
But in just a very little while following sin’s entrance into God’s perfect creation, God announced His perfect plan to save His people from their sins. He announced His plan to send His Son – His perfect, holy and blameless Son – to suffer the death sentence of sin for all of us. Throughout all of the Old Testament we read of God’s plan to send the Messiah from the lineage of historical figures including Adam and Methuselah and Noah and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Judah and Ruth and David and Solomon and eventually – in the fullness of time – a young virgin by the name of Mary.
When Jesus speaks to His disciples in our Gospel lesson, it will be only a little while before He will die. Not only will the disciples be emotionally devastated by the loss of Jesus, but they’ll be so terrified for their own lives that on Sunday evening – even though they’ve heard the stories of the resurrection – they will hide in a locked room for fear that they will be arrested and murdered, too. And so Jesus tells them that even though they “will have sorrow now,” He will soon see them again and their hearts will rejoice.
Almost 2,000 years have passed since that joyous day. The disciples who saw Jesus face-to-face and rejoiced at His resurrection have long since died. They went to their graves remembering Christ’s promise that “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy from you.” And by then they understood that His words referred not just to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead – but to their resurrection, too. Long before Maundy Thursday, Jesus had told His disciples that the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear His voice “and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.”
When Jesus said that “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy from you,” He was speaking to us, too. You see, we – you and I – are living in the “little while” of this Christian life. As Jesus said, we sometimes weep and mourn while the world rejoices. We may sometimes be tempted to deny Him or to follow false prophets who promise the false joys of this life. But Jesus promises that after a little while of suffering and pain – otherwise known as our human lives – we will see Him again. Sometimes, just like this morning, clouds hide the sun, but it is still there. Sometimes troubles seem to hide Jesus from us – but He is still there. As St. Paul writes in the eighth chapter of his epistle to the Romans, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
So are we there yet? Well, almost. It really doesn’t matter whether we’re still alive at Jesus’ second coming or if we’ve all died and been buried – because as believers in Christ, we will be raised from the dead. Our sinful, sickly, pitiful human bodies will be replaced by perfect, glorified bodies that can never get sick, can never hunger or thirst, can never suffer or feel pain, can never again die.
When will the resurrection of the dead occur? We don’t know. We can’t know. Only God the Father knows. But we do know that it will happen. We’re not there yet, but it will most certainly happen in God’s perfect time – in what truly will be a little while. And as we wait during this little while, we remember and cherish these words of Jesus: “So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy from you.”
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