In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit

 Seven times in today’s Gospel Jesus refers to “a little while.”  How long is “a little while”?  Well, it depends on what you’re waiting for.  If you’re a child waiting for his birthday to come, a little while, a few days, can seem like an awfully long time.  On the other hand, if you’re on an enjoyable vacation that will be lasting a little while longer, a few more days, that period of time can seem awfully short.   Isn’t that how things are in this fallen world?  Good times seem to go by so quickly; bad times seem to drag on forever.  Doing some boring job seems endless; time for your favorite hobby or recreation always seems to go by too fast.  That’s one of the results of the curse of sin.  The joys of living in this creation and in the realm of time have been turned upside down by the fall, so that now time most often seems to be the enemy.

 We generally view the passage of time is as an evil thing.  All you have to do, especially if you are a little bit older, is think about those places and times that you once had that are nothing but memories now, or more importantly than that, the people you once knew who are now gone.  Memories, while pleasant things, are also so often a cause of sadness, of longing, of wishing we had back what we once had.  But there’s no going back.  Time just keeps on ticking by, and so every joy that you have in this life, every gladness that this earth can give is transitory, a momentary thing.  Those things that you now enjoy won’t last.  Only temporary is the company of those people you love and love being with.  We tend, of course, to ignore this and just live in the present–what else can we do?  But we know in the back of our minds that it’s true.  And it is a terrifying thing to contend with, that time marches on and that there is nothing we can do to stop it.

 Jesus said, “A little while and you will not see Me, and again a little while and you will see Me.”  Jesus knows about the evil of the passage of time, and here is His answer.  Jesus was with the disciples for a little while.  How quickly that time must have gone by as they lived with Him.  How timeless it must have seemed in the upper room as Jesus spoke these words on the night before His death.  But indeed, much more quickly than they ever expected, the good little while was over, and then came the arrest in the garden, and the suffering and the cross, and He was buried and gone.  And they had sorrow for a little while as the world rejoiced, just as Jesus had said.  That bad little while must have seemed like forever–Friday, Saturday, even most of Sunday–the longest days of their lives.

 But Jesus had also said, “Again a little while and you will see Me.”  And so it is that on the third day He rises from the grave.  See what a short little while their time of mourning and weeping was!  On Easter Sunday evening there stands Jesus Christ the Lord in front of them, bringing them joy that no one can take from them.
 

 In a way you might say that Jesus turned back the clock.  Because when someone is dead, there is nothing you can do.  It is a helpless experience.  But look, He who was dead now lives!  He stands again as before.  But actually, it’s not as if the clock was turned back.  For Jesus didn’t come just to make things the way they used to be, but to make things altogether new and better.  More correctly put then, He turned the clock ahead.  For the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave is surely a foretaste of the feast to come and the everlasting salvation to be revealed on the Last Day.  By the forgiveness of sins which He won for us, Jesus has guaranteed resurrection from the dead and eternal life to us in the age to come–an age in which time can no longer devastate us as it now does.

 Now that was Easter Sunday.  How do you think the disciples felt the next day?  By Easter Monday He had already vanished from their sight.  Do you think they were sad now that the little while of seeing Him on Easter was gone?  No, of course they were not sad.  For they knew, as we must know, that the resurrection of Christ is an ongoing thing, and that all sadness must fly away before it.  And sure enough, there was another “little while,” and the next Sunday, there Jesus was again when Thomas was with them.  Of course He would come back; they knew He would because He had already conquered the grave and then vanished again.  They were not sad during the week, that second week of Easter, because they expected Him to return yet again.  And He did, on the third Sunday.  There they were in the boat fishing; and one Sunday morning, on the shore, there He stood cooking breakfast.  There it was, Easter all over again.

 And so they began to expect Him to return every time He vanished out of their sight.  They knew it would only be a little while, and He’d come to them again.  And the events that occurred on one such occasion, on the Emmaus road, foreshadowed how this would be for the church until the end of this age.  When Jesus went in to eat with the Emmaus disciples, they did not recognize Him at first.  But when He took bread and blessed it and broke it, then their eyes were opened and they recognized Him, and He vanished out of their sight.  So they came back and told the others how He was known to them in the breaking of the bread–a clear and unmistakable code phrase for us of how Jesus continues to return among us in the breaking of the bread, the Sacrament of the Altar.

 For then came Pentecost on another Sunday, and Christ returned again.  But this time not in the way He had been returning before, that is, not to their sight, but in the beginning of the ministry of the apostles, in which they began to preach and to administer the Holy Supper in the power of His Holy Spirit.

 Week after week from Pentecost on, Christ kept returning again in the divine service of His words and sacraments, and His people were joyful again.  And so it is to this day.  The life of every Christian is lived in the wake of the resurrection of Christ, which is an eternal, timeless thing.  Every single divine service since then, Christ has returned to His people.  Just as truly as He did on Easter Sunday, when He came back and stood in the midst and gave them His peace, so does He return here and now for you.

 This, then, is Jesus’ answer for the “little whiles” of your life.  There will be those times when you can’t seem to see Jesus, when life is fierce and full of trials, when the world seems to be laughing at you, like it was for the disciples on Good Friday and afterwards.  But He reminds you here, “It really is only a little while that you must endure.  That pain, that disease, that heartache, that difficult situation is almost over.  Just hang on to Me.  Trust in Me to pull you through it.  It may seem like an eternity, but only three days.  Your Easter is coming.  Weeping may remain for a night, but joy comes in the morning.  Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength.”

 And then, after a little while, Jesus comes to you in this place again and comforts you with the Gospel of His real presence.  He proclaims His resurrection victory over all your enemies–not only over Satan and sin and the grave, but even over the passage of time and all that time does to us.  Even this He conquered, bringing us into eternity with Him; and we celebrate it here before Him in the holy liturgy.

 That, by the way, is one of the reasons that divine service remains basically the same week by week.  There is of course some variety in the hymns and readings, and the sermon changes from week to week.  But many of the words are exactly the same.  That is our reminder that this feast of everlasting life is an ongoing and ageless feast.  When you step into church, you are stepping out of ordinary time into the realm of eternity, a glimpse of the unending time of joy you shall have in the presence of our Lord.

 And so your life in this world is a series of little whiles–the times when Jesus is vanished from your sight, when there may be weeping for you and rejoicing for the world, and then the times when He comes to you again and you see Him by faith and He restores to you the joy of your salvation, a joy no one can take from you.  Remember the wonderfully consoling thing that Jesus says here, “I will see you again”–not only in preaching and the supper, but also and especially will He see you on the Last Day, when all the little whiles will be over, and we will enter the unending while of the new creation, in which there is no night, no counting of days and of time, but only the everlasting light and life of Christ.

 As we hope and wait quietly for this salvation of the Lord, St. Paul reminds us, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.”  Our little while here will seem like nothing in comparison to what Christ has in store for us.  And as we live in this in-between time, St. John writes, “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be.  But we know that when Christ is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”  Truly, the Lord is good to those who wait for Him.

 So do not be sorrowful about the passage of time, about people and places and times that you miss and long for.  Do not be worried about those things you must say your farewell to in the coming years.  The little whiles are truly so little, but the eternal life that Christ gives has no end.  Every longing, every sorrow, every grief among God’s people will be put away; and you know it because Christ has risen from the grave, and a new timeless creation has begun in Him.  Let us therefore continue to sing to Him our unending praises.

 In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit

(With thanks to the Rev. Burnell Eckardt for a good portion of the above.)