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This Lectio Divina is the third and final lecture given (lesson taught) by Henri J.M. Nouwen, when he was an invited guest at the Yale Divinity School. The lectures were delivered in Battell Chapel. This last lecture was delivered on October 21, 1973, and it is written verbatim.

Lectio Divina – In Expectation by Henri Nouwen

John 15:16-22

(On the night that he was betrayed, Jesus said to his apostles:) “In a short time you will no longer see me, and then a short time later you will see me again.”

Then some of his disciples said to one another, “What does he mean, ‘In a short time you will no longer see me, and then a short time later you will see me again’? … What is this ‘short time’? We don’t know what he means.” Jesus knew that they wanted to question him, so he said, “You are asking one another what I meant by saying: In a short time you will no longer see me, and then in a short time later you will see me again.”

“I tell you most solemnly, you will be weeping and wailing while the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy. A woman in childbirth suffers because her time has come; but when she has given birth to the child, she forgets the suffering in her joy that a child has been born into the world. So it is with you: you are sad now, but I shall see you again, and your hearts will be full of joy, and that joy no one shall take from you.”

Introduction

“In a short time you will no longer see me, and then a short time later you will see me again. … You are sad now. … but your hearts will be full of joy and that joy no one shall take away from you.”

Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. Don’t you think that there is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives? It seems as if there were no such thing as clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction there is an awareness of its limitations, in every success there is the fear of jealousy, behind every mile there is a tear, in every embrace there is loneliness, in every friendship distance and in all forms of light the knowledge of surrounding darkness.

Joy and sadness are as close to each other as the splendid colored leaves of a New England fall to soberness of the barren trees. When you touch the hand of a returning friend, you already know that he will have to leave you again. When you are moved by the quiet vastness of a sun-covered ocean, you miss the friend who cannot see the same. Joy and sadness are born at the same time, both arising from such deep places in your heart that you can’t find words to capture your complex emotions.

But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence and can make us look forward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us. Let us therefore speak about expectations first about expectations as patience, and then about expectations as joy.

A: Expectation as Patience

The mother of expectation is patience. The French author Simone Weil writes in her notebooks: “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” Without patience our expectation degenerates into wishful thinking. Patience comes from the word “patior” which means: to suffer. The first thing that Jesus promises is suffering: “I tell you … you will be weeping and wailing … and you will be sorrowful.” But he calls these pains birthpains. And so what seemed a hindrance becomes a way, what seemed an obstacle becomes a door, what seemed a misfit becomes a cornerstone. And so Jesus changes our history from a random series of sad incidents and accidents into a constant opportunity for change of heart. To wait patiently therefore means to allow our weeping and wailing to become the purifying preparation by which we are made ready to receive the joy which he promised to us.

A few years ago I met an old professor at the University of Notre Dame. Looking back on his long life of teaching, he said with a funny twinkle in his eyes: “I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I slowly discovered that my interruptions were my work.”

That is the great conversion in our life: to recognize and believe that the many unexpected events are not just disturbing interruptions of our projects, but the way in which God molds our hearts and prepares us for his return. Our great temptations are boredom and bitterness. When our good plans are interrupted by poor weather, our well-organized careers by illness or bad luck, our peace of mind by inner turmoil, our hope for peace by a new war, our desire for a stable government by a constant changing of the guards, and our desire for immortality by real death, we are tempted to give in to the paralyzing boredom or to strike back in destructive bitterness. But when we believe that patience can make our expectations grow, then face can be converted into vocation, wounds into a call for deeper understanding, and sadness into the birthplace of joy.

I would like to tell you the story of a middle-aged man whose career was suddenly interrupted by the discovery of leukemia, a fatal blood-cancer. All his life plans crumbled and all his ways had to change. But slowly he was able to ask himself no longer: “Why did this happen to me? What did I do wrong to deserve this fate?” but instead: “What is the promise hidden in this event?” And when his rebellion became a new quest, he felt that he could give strength and hope to other cancer patients and that by facing his condition directly, he could make his pain into a source of healing for others. And until this day this man not only does more for patients than many ministers are able to do, but he also refound his life on a level that he had never known before.

B: Expectation as Joy

Whereas patience is the mother of expectation, it is the expectation itself that brings new joy to our lives. Jesus not only made us look at our pains, but also beyond them. “You are sad now, but I shall see you again and your hearts will be full of joy.” A man and a woman without hope in the future cannot live creatively in the present. The paradox of expectations indeed is that those who believe in tomorrow can better live today, that those who expect joy to come out of sadness can discover the beginnings of a new life in the center of the old, that those who look forward to the returning Lord can discover him already in their midst.

You know how a letter can change your day. When you watch people in front of that wall of mailboxes, you can see how a small piece of paper can change the expression on a face, can make a curved back straight, and a sullen mouth whistle again. The day might be just as dull as the day before, the classes just as boring, the work just at tiring; but the letter in your mailbox telling you that someone loves you that someone is looking forward to meeting you again, that someone needs your presence, or that someone promise to come soon, makes all the difference.

A life lived in expectation is like a life in which we have received a letter, a letter which makes him whom we have missed so much return even earlier than we could imagine. Expectation brings joy to the center of our sadness and the loved one to the heart of our longings. The one who stayed with us in the past will return to us in the future becomes present to us in the precious moment in which memory and hope touch each other. At that moment we can realize that we can only expect someone because he has already touched us.

A student who had to leave many of his good friends behind to come to this school from a faraway West Coast recently said to me: “It is hard to depart; but if the goodbye is not painful, the hello cannot be joyful either. “ And so his sadness of September will become his joy at Christmastime.

Is God present or is he absent? Maybe we can say now that in the center of our sadness for our longings we discover the footprints of the one who has created them. It is in the faithful waiting for the loved-one that we know how much he has filled our lives already. Just as the love of a mother for her child can grow while she is waiting for her return, just as lovers can rediscover each other during long periods of absence, so our intimate relationship with God can become deeper and more mature while we wait patiently in expectations for his return.

Conclusion

“In a short time you will no longer see me, and then a short time and you will see me again.” We are living in this short time. We can live it creatively when we live it out of solitude, that is: detached from the results of our work; and when we live it with care, that is: crying with those who peep and wail. But it is the expectation of his return which makes our solitude and care into the preparation of the day of great joy.

This is what we express when we take bread and wine in thanksgiving. We do not eat bread to still our hunger or drink wine to quench our thirst. We just eat a little bit of bread and drink a little bit of wine, in the realization that God’s presence is the presence of the one who came, but is still to come, who touched our hearts, but has not yet taken all our sadness away.

And so when we share some bread and some wine together, we do this not as people who have arrived, but as men and women who can support each other in patient expectation until we see him again and our hearts be full of joy, a joy that no one can take from us.