Jn 16:16-20
[Jesus said to his disciples,] 16“A little while and you will no longer see me, and again a little while later and you will see me.” 17So some of his disciples said to one another, “What does this mean that he is saying to us, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me,’ and ‘Because I am going to the Father’?” 18So they said, “What is this ‘little while’ [of which he speaks]? We do not know what he means.” 19Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, “Are you discussing with one another what I said, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me’? 20Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.”
A LITTLE WHILE: This expression of Jesus which appears only in John’s Gospel is a veiled reference to his approaching death and resurrection. He would be quickly taken from the disciples by death. This event would unfold in the next chapters of the Gospel: Jesus goes to the garden (Gethsemane in the Synoptics), he is arrested and bound by the Roman soldiers and the Temple police led by Judas, interrogated by Annas, tried before Pilate, condemned, crucified, and laid in a tomb. But as quickly as Jesus is snatched from the disciples by his passion and death, he soon rises from the dead, and he is seen again by the disciples, this time as glorified Lord.
According to some Bible scholars, “a little while” may also refer to the short time—the forty-day period—between the resurrection and the ascension when Jesus would be seen alive by the disciples. But this is more a Lucan perspective.
All these events happen so fast that the perplexed disciples could hardly comprehend what Jesus meant by them. And in the end, in “a little while,” Jesus goes to what is eternal—the fellowship with the Father. The short bliss of the Easter fellowship with Christ is but a foretaste of the lasting joy that the faithful will experience in the Father’s kingdom.