John 16:21

He adds an illustration of the manner in which anxiety and dread pass into joy: ἡ γυνή “the woman,” the article is generic, cf. ὁ δοῦλος, John 15:15, Meyer, ὅταν τίκτῃ, “when she brings forth,” λύπην … αὐτῆς, “hath sorrow because her hour” the critical or appointed time of her delivery “is come”. The woman in travail is the common figure for terror-stricken anguish in O.T.: Psalms 48:6; Jeremiah 4:31; Jeremiah 6:24, etc. ὅταν δὲ γεννήσῃ τὸ παιδίον … “but when the child is born, she no longer remembers the distress, for the joy that a man is born into the world”. The comparison, so far as explicitly used by our Lord in John 16:22, extends only to the sudden replacement of sorrow with joy in both cases. But a comparison of Isaiah 66:7-9; Hosea 13:13, and other O.T. passages, in which the resurrection of a new Israel is likened to a difficult and painful birth, warrants the extension of the metaphor to the actual birth of the N.T. church in the resurrection of Christ. Cf. Holtzmann.