NOTES for Joh 16:22-23
The Lord tells the disciples that after the joy that entered them with His coming, sorrow will follow, which will then again be turned into joy. It is as though there were two days separated by night. It is very important to understand that this night of sorrow, when the Lord lies in the tomb and He is not with us, this night of abandonment by God, is something that everyone who truly passes along the path of spiritual formation necessarily goes through. This is witnessed by the fact that our great teachers also experienced a similar state, difficult and grace-filled. It is known that St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, who lived in the eighteenth century, experienced the mystical night of the soul, but even earlier, in the sixteenth century, the great Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross created the remarkably deep and rich concept of the "dark night of the soul." It cannot be explained in two words, but in the poem with that very title he gives an allusion to the Easter hymn "Exsultet," which Catholics sing on Holy Saturday:
This is the night
when once You led our fathers, the children of Israel,
out of Egypt
and made them pass through the Red Sea on dry feet. (...)
This is the night
when, breaking the bonds of death,
Christ rose victorious from hell. (...)
O truly blessed night -
the only one worthy to know the time and hour
when Christ rose from hell.
This is the night of which it is written:
and night shall be bright as day;
and night shall be my light and joy. (...)
O truly blessed night,
in which earthly things are joined to heavenly,
and human things to divine.
Let us return again to the experience of Orthodox ascetics. Theophan the Recluse writes this in his commentary on today's reading: "They say that every soul on the path to perfection experiences a similar blow. Darkness everywhere covers it, and it does not know where to turn; but the Lord comes and turns its sorrow into joy." Let us also try, when the darkness of abandonment by God and loss of faith surrounds us, when "the mind seeks the Godhead, and the heart does not find it," not to lose heart, but to understand that this night is inevitable, yet a new day awaits us ahead.