“Shortly, none of you will look at me any more. Shortly after that, all of you will see me.”
So his students discussed with one another, “What’s he mean by this?—
‘Shortly none of you will look at me,’ ‘Shortly after that, all of you will see me,’ and‘Because I go to the Father’ ? What’s he mean by ‘shortly’? We don’t get it.” Jesus knew they wanted to ask him about it, and told them,
“You’re all asking one another about what I said, ‘Shortly none of you will look at me. Shortly after that, all of you will see me.’ Amen amen! I promise you all: You’ll weep and mourn. The culture will rejoice; you all will suffer. But your suffering will become joy. Whenever a woman gives birth to a child, she experiences suffering when her time has come. Once she’s given birth to the child, she no longer remembers her labor, because she’s brought another person into the world. So for now you’ll all experience suffering. Later, I’ll see you all, and you will experience joy, and nothing can take that joy from you.” —
Frequently, when we read how Jesus’s students had trouble understanding him, we tend to think, “How dense were they? It’s so obvious what he was saying.”
Here he told them that, shortly, they weren’t going to look at him: He’d be off getting crucified. They’d be off in hiding, scared to death lest they get arrested along with him, and get nailed to crosses beside him. Shortly after that, they would see him, and rejoice: He’d be raised from the dead, never to die again, ready to achieve and receive his Kingdom, and his followers would utterly forget their misery in sheer joy.
Right? So why were the students having such a hard time following this line of thinking? Had they drank too much wine during Passover? Was it so late in the evening, they were too drowsy to think? Was it because (as is so often condescendingly taught) Jesus picked a bunch of under-educated lunkhead fishermen, because he wanted them to be functionally retarded so as to show off how the Kingdom doesn’t come through intellect?
No. I don’t buy the idea that the students were too stupid to understand Jesus. For even the densest of Christians read this passage and know what Jesus means by it. Even pagans, who don’t believe Jesus was raised from the dead, can read this passage and follow what Jesus said.
The reason Jesus’s students didn’t understand him, was because they weren’t looking at this passage in hindsight. Hindsight is 20/20. We know what Jesus was predicting. They didn’t. We know how the world works. They thought they knew how the world worked. But their worldview, their theology, their perspective, was not the same as Jesus’s. They couldn’t imagine what he was describing. Their minds were closed.
One resurrection?
The Pharisees taught resurrection happened at the End. And only at the End. Everybody in the world would be resurrected from the dead, and judged by God. (Sadducees, on the other hand, believed as pagans do nowadays: Nobody comes back. When you die you go to heaven, and stay there.) From the Pharisee point of view, there’s one resurrection, one time only.
Not, as Christianity teaches, multiple resurrections: Jesus resurrected first, his followers at the rapture, and everyone else at the second resurrection. God isn’t limited to those three instances. These are the three we know about. But as you can see, that’s two more times than the Pharisees believed in. The students, who’d been raised by the Pharisees before Jesus got ’em and trained ’em, still believed as the Pharisees did: There’s only one resurrection, at the End. And if Jesus died (and perish the thought!) he’d stay dead, till that resurrection.
This, despite Jesus telling them many times before that he’d rise again in three days. John doesn’t list these instances, but it did hint at it. And the way Jesus was talking in the Passion Discourses, it looks as though he had taught this concept at some point. He kept telling them he was going to the Father, yet coming back shortly. But this fuddled them. The Pharisee concept of only one resurrection had produced a giant blind spot in Jesus’s students: They couldn’t fathom he was talking about being killed, then resurrected, before the End. They figured he must be talking about physically going away. They just didn’t know how. Because if he was talking about death… well, that didn’t fit their worldview. Once you die, you’re dead till the resurrection. At the End.
You might recall Martha of Bethany. She had this blind spot too. Jesus said her brother Lazarus would live again. Her response was that of course he’d live again: At the resurrection. At the End. But that’s not at all what Jesus meant. He meant to bring Lazarus back to life that very day. Not only could Martha not imagine that idea, she even complained when Jesus had Lazarus’s tomb opened. Because the stench.
Well, despite spending all that time with Jesus, despite hearing about his special-case resurrection on the third day instead of at the End, more than once, the students didn’t get it. They were, you recall, shocked when Jesus turned up alive on Sunday. All of them. No one expected it; no one believed it.
Great big blind spots.
Such is the power of a deeply-held belief. It gets in our way of understanding Jesus. It gets in our way of believing him. Even when he teaches us something over and over again, it won’t crack through our utter conviction that he can’t be saying what he appears to be. He must mean something else. We, after all, know better. We are right, and Jesus is… well, not wrong (we won’t go that far) but… we’re not sure what he is. But until we can resolve that discrepancy in our minds, we put his teaching aside. Trouble is, we never take the time to resolve it, and continue to believe as we do, and continue to put Jesus aside. Functionally, we treat him as if he’s wrong.
And that’s what we have here. Mere hours—minutes—before Jesus was arrested, he was explaining yet again how things were gonna happen, and his students were listening yet not understanding. “What’s he mean by ‘shortly’? Is he leaving tonight? Tomorrow? Next week? Before the police arrive? Does he mean the very same thing by ‘shortly’ when he says we’ll see him again? Is he going to escape the arrest? How’s he leaving, anyway?” All this, despite having told them exactly what will happen. But they couldn’t hear it, and had pushed it out of their minds.
I worry we Christians act the very same way about many of his teachings. Like loving our neighbors, or obeying his commands, or seeking the Kingdom. We have our own ideas about how those things are supposed to work. (Or not.) Consequently we don’t pursue his idea about how they work—because we think we know better. But I pray we realize otherwise.