"Come receive what Chronos cannot touch!" Jubilate 2026

08. February 2026
Jubilate
John 16:16–22

This is the Word of the Lord that came to me, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His + Name. AMEN.

Two kinds of time run through this morning's Gospel. The first is the kind we all live by: clock time, calendar time, the kind that marches forward without asking permission. Call it chronos. The second is different. It is appointed time, purposeful time, the kind that carries meaning because God has filled it with His purpose. The Greeks called it kairos. Jesus does not give His disciples the chronos. He gives them the kairos.

"A little while, and you will not see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me" (John 16:16). He says it three times, and the disciples still cannot work out what He means. They huddle together, asking each other, not yet willing to ask Him directly. Their confusion is not stupidity. They cannot hold together two things that seem to contradict: He is going away, and they will see Him. Their categories break. Ours break too.

We confess the resurrection every Sunday. We say the words. But by Tuesday morning, when the grief sits across the breakfast table, the resurrection can feel like a doctrine on a shelf rather than a fact on the ground. Something has gone on too long. A diagnosis that has now had months to settle in. A marriage that ended and left a silence where a person used to be. A loneliness so familiar you have stopped expecting it to leave. Chronos does its cruelest work in the gap between what we confess and what we feel. The clock runs without mercy, and the longer it runs, the more convincing its argument becomes: this is simply how it is now.

Isaiah names the complaint from the inside: "Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel: 'My way is hidden from the LORD, and my just claim is passed over by my God'?" (Isaiah 40:27). That is not a pagan talking. That is a baptized believer in the middle of something interminable. God, you have forgotten my case. My grief has been here long enough to have furniture, and you have not answered. The clock is running and nothing is moving.

Peter calls us sojourners and pilgrims, strangers in a world that is not our home (1 Peter 2:11). He means that as comfort, and it is — but the pilgrim road is exhausting. Submit, do good, endure, suffer wrongfully and take it with patience. The world watches, scrutinizes, and draws its conclusions. It sees the church's sorrow and reads the chronos: they are on the losing side.

The disciples reached the same conclusion on Good Friday. They wept. The world rejoiced. Chronos had settled the matter. Christ was dead, the stone was in place, and the clock ran on without them.

Christ knows the disciples want to ask. He knows before they open their mouths. "Are you inquiring among yourselves about what I said?" (John 16:19). He does not wait for the question. He gives the answer: your sorrow will be turned to joy.

And He gives them an image. A woman in labor has sorrow because her hour has come. The Greek word is hora — her appointed hour, her kairos. The pain is not pretend. Christ does not minimize it. He does not suggest she breathe through it or reframe her attitude. But the pain moves toward something. It has a telos. When the child arrives, she no longer remembers the anguish, "for joy that a human being has been born into the world" (John 16:21). The labor was real. The birth is realer.

This distinction changes everything. Chronos just passes. Kairos arrives. Chronos accumulates suffering with no frame around it. Kairos holds suffering inside an appointed purpose and a guaranteed end.

When Christ says "a little while," He is measuring kairos, not hours. His death was the appointed hour. The Father raised Him on the third day — not the second, not the fourth — on the day the Psalms and the Prophets had pointed toward since the Garden. That resurrection was kairos: the moment God filled with the weight of all His promises and kept every one of them. Because the resurrection was kairos, our grief is kairos too. It fits inside something larger than itself. It has a destination.

Isaiah shows us the destination from God's side. "The everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary" (Isaiah 40:28). The God who set the third day also put His appointed time on your suffering. "He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might He increases strength" (Isaiah 40:29). Even young men fall exhausted under chronos. "But those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint" (Isaiah 40:31).

Waiting on the LORD is not resignation. It is active faith in God's appointed time, held against every chronos argument that it will never come.

The world had its moment of chronos triumph. It saw the cross, read the clock, and handed down its verdict: finished, buried, closed. Three days of silence, and the world considered the case settled.

Then the appointed moment came.

The Father raised Him from the dead. The tomb answered the world's ruling. The disciples' sorrow turned, exactly as Christ had said it would. "The world will rejoice, but your sorrow will be turned into joy" (John 16:20). The world's joy did not last. The church's joy has not ended.

That reversal is not ancient history sitting in an archive. It is the shape of Christian life until He returns. The world still reads the clock. It still announces that grief is the last word, that the church is losing, that our confession is something for people who cannot face reality. But we carry a word the world does not have. We have the promise of the One who was dead and whom the Father raised: "I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you" (John 16:22).

The joy He gives is kairos joy. The world did not give it, and the world cannot reach it. It is anchored in the resurrection, held by His word, immune to every piece of chronos evidence that it is over.

In a few minutes, we come to this Table. Christ does not arrive here as a memory or an idea. He comes as the One who was dead and whom the Father raised. The Supper is kairos — Christ's appointed meeting with His people, week after week, pressing His body and blood into our hands and mouths, repeating the promise: I will see you again. Every communion is a little while already redeemed. The deadline is real because He is here.

We began here: two kinds of time run through this Gospel. Chronos, which counts every loss and draws its conclusions. And kairos, which speaks the word of the risen Christ into the middle of those losses and names them for what they are: labor pains, not graves.

Your grief has a deadline. A kairos deadline, set by the same God who set the third day, who gives strength to those with none left, who put His appointed time on the cross and on the empty tomb. He has said it three times in this Gospel alone, and He says it to us again this morning at this altar: a little while, and your heart will rejoice.

The world has been arguing otherwise since Good Friday. It read the evidence, announced its verdict, and got it wrong.

"Your joy no one will take from you" (John 16:22). Those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength. Come receive what chronos cannot touch.

This is the Word of the Lord that came to me, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His + Name. AMEN.

Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School - Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin