John 16:21 - Exposition

The next illustration is very remarkable, and surely cannot be a simple analogy of the supervening of joy on sorrow. The woman (the article does not point to any special γυνή , but refers to a universal fact and law of womanhood, cf. ὁ δοῦλος , John 15:15 ) when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come. So now there are the travail-pangs of the new humanity, the new theocracy, bitter and terrible, But as soon as she has brought forth the child, she remembereth no longer the anguish, for the joy that a man is born into the world. The old prophets often compared the grief of Israel or her peril to the pangs of a travailing woman preluding deliverance ( Isaiah 21:3 ; Isaiah 26:17 ; Isaiah 66:6 , Isaiah 66:7 ; Hosea 13:13 ) and even joy—the joy of bringing manhood into the world and the new consciousness of maternity. Meyer and others rebel against any meaning beyond that of the following of joy upon sorrow; but Tholuck, De Wette, Ebrard, and Moulton see here the obvious reference to those "travail-pangs of death" with which St. Peter ( Acts 3:24 ) said that the Holy One could not be restrained, agonies in which for a while every apostle must have wept and lamented, dying and being crucified with him, and to the glorious deliverance of all who suffered with him, when they live again in newness of life by the power of his resurrection.