A Sad Goodbye

This is the message given in the Sunday night service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church on Sunday, March 14, 2021.  The Bible verses used are John 13:21-39.

            Have you ever had to say goodbye to friends?  Maybe because they moved away, maybe because you did.  Wanda and I have moved a few times in our lives.  Part of that is just the life of a United Methodist pastor, but we also moved once other time, long before I became a pastor.

Each time we were convinced that the move would be good for us, and that turned out to be true.  Still, moving is hard.  When you live in a place for a while, you make friends.  You have people who are important to you.  And now, you’re not going to see those people for a while.

You promise each other that you’ll stay in touch, and sometimes you do.  It’s a little easier now, with things like facebook--I can keep up with people in Wessington Springs, and in North Sioux City, and from my days in seminary, much more easily than you could twenty or thirty years ago.  I can even keep up with people I knew in Pierre, and it’s thirty years since I lived there.

But still, it’s not the same, is it?  You don’t see these people on a casual, everyday basis.  You don’t get to have those little conversations that cement a relationship.  Saying goodbye may be easier than it used to be, but it’s still hard.  It probably always will be.

It was hard for Jesus, too.  In our Bible reading for tonight, Jesus is saying goodbye to his disciples.  It’s his last night on earth.  And he knows that.  And he knows why.  He has just washed the disciples’ feet, which we talked about last week.  Now, Jesus tells them that one of them is going to betray him.  It turns out to be Judas, of course, but none of the disciples seem to have realized that at the time.  Judas leaves, and it apparently is just Jesus and the other eleven disciples who are there.  

Jesus starts talking to them.  He tells them he’ll only be there a little while longer.  He’s leaving.  He does not say where he’s going, but he’s leaving.  And the disciples cannot go with him.  This is it.  This is goodbye.

He goes on to give them the new command to love one another.  And they obviously remembered that later.  But right now, that’s not their concern.  Their concern is that Jesus is leaving them.  And they cannot go with him to where he’s going.  And they don’t understand why.

Simon Peter asks Jesus where he’s going.  Jesus does not say.  He simply says that the disciples cannot go there, at least not now.  He says they will come later.  Simon Peter still does not understand.  He says, why can’t I come?  I will lay down my life for you.  And Jesus, of course, responds that Simon Peter will disown him three times before morning.

We know now, of course, that Jesus was right.  But I think Peter meant it when he said it.  He did not follow through on it, obviously, but he meant it at the time.  He was carried away with emotion.  The last thing he wanted was for Jesus to leave.  And if Jesus had to leave, he wanted to go with him.  He wanted to go anywhere Jesus went.

Simon Peter, and all the other disciples, were sad that Jesus was leaving. But you know who else I think was sad?  Jesus.  I think Jesus was probably just as sad at leaving the disciples as the disciples were that he was leaving them.

His words just seem completely steeped in sadness to me.  “My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.”  A little later, he says again, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

Now, obviously, part of the reason Jesus was sad was because he knew what was ahead of him.  Arrest, beatings, torture, death.  No one would look forward to that.  But I think he was also sad just at the thought that he was leaving his closest friends.  Jesus had gotten close to these people.  They’d shared the most important experiences of his life on earth with him.  They’d been there through the miracles, through the healing, through driving out demons, through the preaching, through the arguments with the Pharisees, all of it.  And now, he had to leave them behind.  How could Jesus not be sad about that?

But of course, Jesus knew he had to do it.  Jesus knew he had to leave them.  It was his destiny.  It was what he had come to earth for in the first place.  He knew leaving them was the right thing to do.  And he knew it would not be forever, that he would see them again.  But still, this was a hard thing for him to do.  It’s always hard to leave friends behind.

Jesus goes on to tell the disciples a whole lot of things.  We’ve been talking about that in our Wednesday night services.  He tells them that he is the way, and that no one comes to the Father except through him.  He tells them that if they love him, they’ll keep his commands and do all the things he’s told them to do.  He tells them that his commandment is that they love each other, just as he has loved them.  He tells them the world may hate them for following him.  He tells them he’s going to send the Holy Spirit to them.

Jesus tells the disciples all this and more.  And they listen, and they remember.  But none of it really helps, not then.  All they can think about is that Jesus is going away.  He was saying goodbye to them, and they had to say goodbye to him.

It was one of the hardest things they had ever done.  It may have been one of the hardest things Jesus did, too.  But they did it.  They did it, because they knew it had to be done.  Again, Jesus knew it had to be done because it was why he had come.  The disciples did not necessarily understand why it had to be done, but Jesus said it had to be done, and they believed him.  And so, they all did it.  As hard as it was for them to do, they did it.

I talk sometimes about how we should feel joy at serving God.  And we should.  It’s a great honor to serve God.  It’s a privilege to serve God.  It’s incredible that we’re even allowed to serve God.  After all, we cannot do anything for God that God could not do for Himself.  God does not need our service.  God allows us to serve Him, out of love for us.  That thought alone should give us joy.

But even though I say that, and I believe it, the fact is that serving God sometimes requires us to do things we really don’t want to do.  Serving God sometimes requires us to do things that are hard.  And serving God sometimes requires us to do things that make us sad.

Why would God do that?  Why would God ask us to do things that we don’t want to do?  Things that make us sad?  Does God not want us to be happy?  Does God not want us to enjoy our lives?  Why would God want us to do things that make us sad?  Why would God ask us to serve Him in that way?

            Well, look at what happened to the disciples.  Did they stay sad forever?  No.  They were sad for a while, but then Jesus returned!  He rose from the grave on Easter, he appeared to them, he talked with them, he ate with them, he explained things to them.  And when he did eventually leave them again, they understood.  Maybe not everything, but they understood he was returning to heaven.  And they understood that they would go there someday, too, when their work on earth was done.  And they were not sad anymore.  They were filled with joy, knowing that their faith in Jesus had been and would be rewarded.

            And I have to think Jesus was happy, too.  Happy that he had stayed faithful to God the Father.  Happy that he was going to heaven to be reunited with the Father and the Holy Spirit.  Happy that things had gone and would go the way they were supposed to go.  He was not sad anymore, either.  I think Jesus was also filled with joy.

            Because that’s the thing about sadness--it does not have to last forever.  What we need to remember, in this and many other instances, is that God knows so much more than we do.  God has so many plans and purposes that we know nothing about.  What God asks us to do may make us sad right now.  But if we stay faithful, and do what God asks us to do, our sadness will not last forever.  At some point, it will be replaced by joy.  God will act, and things will go the way they’re supposed to go.  We may never fully understand, but we will understand enough.  And we will not be sad anymore.  At some point, we will understand enough that we will be filled with joy, too.

            Life has sadness sometimes.  Ecclesiastes Chapter Three tells us that there is a time to weep and a time to mourn.  But there are also times to laugh and times dance.  If you and I hang in there through the sad times, and continue to be faithful to God, God will turn our sadness into joy.