Joy of the Lord!

Friday, May 30, 2025

Acts 18:9-18; Jn 16:20-23

Today’s Gospel is a continuation of yesterday’s text on the need for Christians to transition from sorrow to joy as a foundational Christian experience. 

Jesus makes use of a common Jewish metaphor – childbirth – to describe the transition from sorrow to joy in Christian life.

Two insights draw our attention in the Gospel.

At first, we find Jesus getting very practical about life and faith. His realistic approach does not negate the presence of pain and suffering in life. Instead, he inspires us to confide in the impermanence of those hard moments in life and wants us to hope that our moments of hardship will pass. This is why, against the reality of his death, Jesus puts forward his resurrection as the light at the end of the tunnel for Christians. In other words, the present suffering will be incomparable to the future glory that we Christians will enjoy. 

Secondly, we are called to remember that the joy that comes from Christ will be unlike the fleeting moments of happiness or pleasure that we know of and are often familiar with. How can we credibly believe that the joy that Christ gives us will be everlasting? It is because Christian joy is not centered around circumstances, but around the person called Jesus Christ. In other words, the joy that Christians will experience comes from a Person Who never fails, unlike other humans. 

Let us pray that we may partake of the real joy that comes to us from Christ.

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar