The Friday after the Ascension finds us in two cities at once. In Corinth, Paul receives a vision in the night that gently overturns his fear. In the Upper Room, Jesus draws on the most familiar of human images — a woman in labour — to tell his disciples that their grief is the beginning of a birth.
"You will weep and mourn… you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy… When a woman is in labour, she has pain because her hour has come; but when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish… and no one will take your joy from you." (Jn 16:20-23a)
The image is so ordinary we sometimes miss its scandal. The Lord, on the eve of his Passion, compares the disciples' coming sorrow to the labour pains of a woman giving birth. He is saying, very simply: pain that produces life is not the same as pain that destroys. There is a suffering that empties; there is a suffering that bears.
Jesus does not promise an absence of grief. He promises a transformation of grief: "your pain will turn into joy." The pain itself, kept in the place where the Spirit works, becomes the very substance of joy. "No one will take your joy from you." It is a joy that has already passed through the worst the world can do; it has been birthed and cannot be killed.
Now turn to Corinth. Paul has just left Athens with the sting of near-failure in his pocket. He arrives in a brutal port city, tired. And the Lord himself appears to him in a night vision and speaks the sentence that should be carved over every missionary doorway: "Have no fear; speak, and do not keep silent, for I am with you… for I have a numerous people in this city."
Read that again, slowly. I have a numerous people in this city. They are already his — before Paul has met them, before they themselves know they belong, before any of them has heard the name of Christ. They are still going about ordinary morning business in markets and shipyards, unaware that they are being prepared for a meeting.
The two readings converge into one breath. The labour pain Christ describes is the same labour the Spirit is conducting in Corinth — and in our own city, our own parish, our own family. There are people being born this very week, hidden, slowly, painfully, into the life of God. The fruit is not in our control. The patience is. The fidelity is. The joy, at the end, will be unmistakable, and no one will be able to take it.
The Child of Bethlehem is the perfect icon of this hiddenness. He came hidden in a hidden city, in the body of a hidden woman, after months of unseen gestation. His birth made the world rejoice — but only after the patience of an unseen waiting.
Prayer of the Day
Lord Jesus, you who turned the cross into the door of life, teach us to read our pain with your eyes. When we are in labour and tempted to despair, whisper to our hearts that no one will take from us the joy you are bringing to birth. As you spoke to Paul in the night of Corinth, "have no fear; I have a numerous people in this city," speak that same word over our families, our parishes, our places of work. Amen.
For Meditation
- Where in our life are we mourning a sorrow that is, perhaps, the labour of a birth we have not yet recognised?
- Whose face would the Lord show us today if he gave us eyes to see his "numerous people" already his in our own city?
- How does the joy we already taste in the Risen One change the way we walk into the difficulties still ahead?
