John 14 - The New International Commentary
14:1 With this, Jesus abruptly stops speaking to Peter alone, and begins to address the whole group: “Let no one’s heart be shaken! Believe in God, and believe in me!” (v. 1). The twin imperatives for “believe” are plural,* signaling the change of audience from Peter to all the disciples gathered at the table (vv. 1–4). In contrast to the grim warning to Peter (v. 38), the words addressed to the group are words of comfort. Jesus encourages them to “believe” or “keep on believing” in God and in him not in a generalized or merely confessional sense, but specifically in relation to his departure and their hope for the future. That is, “trust God, and trust me; there is no need to be troubled or fearful.” This is in keeping with his consistent claim that he is sent from God, and that to believe in him and to believe in “the One who sent him” amount to exactly the same thing (see 12:44). It is also in keeping with the principle in the Mosaic law that “the testimony of two men is true,” in the sense that “I am the one who testifies about myself, and the Father who sent me testifies about me” (see 8:17–18).
“Let no one’s heart be shaken!” is literally, “Let not your heart be shaken!”* (with “heart” singular but “your” a plural pronoun). One might have expected “your hearts” (plural), but “heart” is always singular in this Gospel, even when it is the heart of many.* With Judas gone, Jesus’ disciples share a common “heart,” with common concerns and similar kinds of questions. Let it not be “shaken,”* he tells them, even though he himself has been “shaken” or troubled in spirit more than once (see 11:33; 12:27), even at this very meal (v. 21). But all that is over, as he now offers them peace and reassurance.
2 “In my Father’s household are many dwellings,” he continues. “In my Father’s household”* does not mean in the Jerusalem temple, as in 2:16 (“Stop making my Father’s house* a house of trade!”), nor in the heavenly temple (which is not mentioned at all in John’s Gospel), but in heaven itself, understood as a household, in keeping with the household imagery of certain passages in the Gospel. Above all, the “household” of God recalls 8:35–36, where Jesus told some “Jews who had believed” that “the slave does not remain in the household* forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will really be free.” Jesus offered them freedom, and with it the opportunity to “remain” or dwell in God’s household. They refused, but here Jesus reiterates to his disciples that there are indeed “many dwellings,”* that is, plenty of room in that household for those whom the Son sets free.* While the verb “remain” or “dwell” is very common in John’s Gospel, the noun “dwelling” or dwelling place occurs only twice (here and in v. 23, the only occurrences in the entire New Testament). The traditional “many mansions” (KJV) is based on the Latin Vulgate’s
Jesus goes on to provide added assurance that this is in fact the case: “If not, I would have told you that I am going off to prepare a place for you.” The translation is based on one of three (at least) possible ways of reading the text. The traditional strategy has been to divide the pronouncement into two sentences: “If not, I would have told you. For I am going off to prepare a place for you” (see KJV, NIV, NEB, REB). The implication is that Jesus’ disciples already knew (by default, as it were) that in the Father’s household were “many dwellings,” so that there would be plenty of room for them. They would only need to be notified if that were not the case. Consequently, the accent falls on Jesus’ solemn promise right here and now, “I am going away to prepare a place for you.” With “many dwellings” available, he is able to go on ahead and make room in heaven for all “his own who are in the world” (see 13:1). The difficulty with this is that dividing the pronouncement is very unnatural.* A new sentence begins with a conjunction* which has to be translated “For” or “Because.” It is far more natural, however, to translate it as “that,” particularly when it immediately follows “I would have told you.”* The latter prompts the question “Told them what?” Merely that there was no room in the Father’s household? Not likely. The more likely answer by far is that he told them “that I am going away to prepare a place for you.”
The second way of reading the text acknowledges this point, but turns the declarative sentence into a question: “If not, would I have told you that I am going off* to prepare a place for you?” (see RSV, NRSV, TNIV, NAB, NLT). The point is that Jesus did tell them just that, and would not done so unless there were plenty of room for them in the Father’s household. This sets the stage perfectly for the next verse: “And if I go off and prepare a place for you, I am coming back and I will take you to myself, so that where I am you too might be” (v. 3).* The difficulty, however, is that Jesus is never represented as saying such a thing anywhere else in the Gospel. He could be referring to a text known from the tradition but not actually found in the Gospel, or (more likely) he could be drawing on something that was implicit rather than explicit in his words.* Once again, 8:35–36 comes to mind, where Jesus offers his hearers a permanent place in the “household” of God, a place that would otherwise not be theirs. Yet nothing was said there about “going away” in order to make such a thing possible. Other texts might conceivably come into play, such as “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw them all to myself” (12:32), especially when the latter is coupled with the preceding promise that “where I am, there my servant will be” (12:26). Yet these shed more light on the next verse (14:3) than on the present one. The absence of any explicit precedent for the saying remains a problem.
The most straightforward reading of the text is like the preceding one, except as a declarative statement rather than as a question: “If not, I would have told you that I am going off to prepare a place for you.” The point seems to be that if there were not “many dwellings” in his Father’s household, Jesus would have had to go away in order to provide them, and in that case he would have told the disciples so. But in fact he has not told them that, because there was adequate room already. This obviously agrees with the fact that no such explicit statement to that effect can be found in earlier chapters of the Gospel. The difficulty comes in the next verse (“And if I go off and prepare a place for you …”), which implies the contrary—that Jesus is in fact going off for that very purpose.* Consequently this way of reading the text has few advocates among modern interpreters or translators of the Gospel.*
Is there a way out of the dilemma? Perhaps the answer lies with the expression, “if not,” or “otherwise.”* It is commonly assumed that it refers to the immediately preceding words, “In my Father’s household are many dwellings”—that is, “if it were not so” (as in the KJV), meaning if in fact there were not “many dwellings” in the household.* But then Jesus should have said, “I would have gone off to prepare a place for you,” rather than “I would have told you that I am going off to prepare a place for you.” It appears to have been a question not of whether there was actually room enough in the Father’s household for the disciples, but of whether or not they believed, or understood, that there was room enough. Edwin Abbott calls attention to this, pointing out that “if not” characteristically follows “an expressed or implied imperative.”* He cites a conspicuous example within this same chapter: “Believe me, that I am in the Father and the Father in me, but if not, believe because of those very works” (v. 11). Here too, Abbott reminds us, are preceding imperatives, “Believe in God, and believe in me!” (v. 1), suggesting that “if not,” or “otherwise,” is introduced in relation to these, not in relation to the adequacy “the Father’s household.” The passage might then be paraphrased roughly as follows: “Trust me that there is enough room in my Father’s household. If I thought you did not believe or understand that, then instead of saying ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’ (13:33), I would have told you, in order to reassure you, ‘I am going off to prepare a place for you.’ ”* Jesus has in fact moved halfway in that direction already by confiding to Peter, “Where I am going you cannot follow now, but you will follow later” (13:36). The fact that Peter would follow later implied already that Jesus’ departure would have the positive purpose of making a way or “preparing a place,” not just for Peter but for all the disciples.* That is their hope and consolation.
3 Building on that reassurance, Jesus draws a conclusion. Verbal repetition carries the thought forward. He could have said merely, “And if go off, I am coming back,” but instead he repeats the whole clause from the preceding verse. “And if I go off and prepare a place for you, I am coming back,”* adding that “I will take you to myself, so that where I am you too might be” (v. 3). This is the only instance in the entire New Testament in which Jesus speaks of “coming back” or “coming again,”* and thus the only explicit evidence in the Gospels of a “second” coming of Jesus (see, however, Heb 9:28). Evidence for a “second coming” in the other Gospels rests on a number of passages where Jesus speaks in the third person of the Son of man “coming.”* These can be set over against just one passage (in a context corresponding roughly to the present one) in which the Son of man “goes away” (Mt 26:24; Mk 14:21) or “goes off” (Lk 22:22)—apparently as a result of being “handed over” to death. A striking feature of the synoptic tradition is that it speaks repeatedly of the Son of man’s impending death and repeatedly of his future “coming,” but never of both in the same pronouncement.* Consequently, some interpreters (Rudolf Bultmann most famously) have concluded that Jesus meant someone other than himself when he spoke of the Son of man “coming.” John’s Gospel, by contrast, draws together the “going” (in death) and the “coming,” so that the “coming” is explicitly defined as “coming back” or “coming again,” at the same time substituting “I” for “the Son of man.”* This step is not altogether unprecedented even in the Synoptics, where (without mentioning “the Son of man”) Jesus can speak in a parable of “a man on a journey leaving his household, and giving authority to his slaves,” commanding his disciples, “Keep watch, then, for you do not know when the lord of the household is coming” (Mk 13:34–37). In John’s Gospel “the lord of the household”—or at least the Son in the Father’s “household” (see v. 2 and 8:35–36)—speaks for himself in the first person: “If I go off, … I am coming back” (v. 3a).
Then Jesus continues, explaining to his disciples what his “coming back” or “coming again” will mean to them: “and I will take you* to myself, so that where I am you too might be” (v. 3b). This is consistent with the future “coming” of the Son of man in the other three Gospels, where Jesus promises that the Son of man will “send his angels and will gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the sky” (Mk 13:27; also Mt 24:31), and with Paul’s vision of that same event (see 1 Thess 4:16–17).* It is also consistent with certain passages in John’s Gospel itself that contemplate a time when “all who are in the tombs will hear his voice, and those who have done good things will go out to a resurrection of life” (5:28–29), or when, as Jesus said, “I will raise him up at the last day” (see 6:39, 40, 44, 54). Moreover, it helps to clarify two other passages, one in which Jesus spoke of “other sheep” that he “must bring,” so that all will become “one flock, one Shepherd” (10:16), and another where Caiaphas prophesied that Jesus would die “in order that the children of God who are scattered might also be gathered into one” (11:52). Now we learn that in “bringing” or “gathering into one” those who belong to him, Jesus is taking them, as he says, “to myself” (as in 12:32, ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw them all to myself’). He promises his disciples, “I will take you to myself,* so that where I am* you too might be,” drawing together 12:32 with 12:26, “If anyone would serve me, let him follow me, and where I am, there my servant will be.” In doing so, he combines two competing images, that of “following” Jesus of one’s own volition (12:26; also 13:36), and that of being “taken” (as here) or “drawn” to him almost forcibly (12:32), and solely at his sovereign initiative (see also 6:44). The tension between those two images is never fully resolved in the course of the chapter, nor for that matter in the entire Gospel or the entire New Testament.
4 “And where I am going,” Jesus concludes, “you know the way” (v. 4). He does not claim in so many words that they know where he is going, though he has implied, almost unmistakably, that he is going to “my Father’s household” (v. 2), that is, to the Father himself in heaven. Instead, he claims only that they know “the way.”* His point is that if they truly know “the way,” they do not even need to know the destination, for their arrival at the right destination is guaranteed. There is an ambiguity to “the way”* that the reader must be aware of, even though the disciples are not. “The way” is not a literal road or path, nor a mere set of directions, but metaphorically a “way” of life, a commitment to “follow” Jesus, as stated earlier (again, see 12:26, “If anyone would serve me, let him follow me, and where I am, there my servant will be”).
The best commentary on “the way” as it is used in the Gospel of John comes not from the professional commentators, but from John Bunyan’s classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress, where Christian, the pilgrim, encounters Formalist and Hypocrisy climbing over a wall to join him on the “way” to the Celestial City. When he challenges them (citing Jn 10:1), they reply, “so be we get into the way, what’s matter which way we get in; if we are in, we are in: thou art but in the way, who, as we perceive, came in at the Gate; and we are also in the way that came tumbling over the wall: wherein now is thy condition better than ours?” His answer is, “I walk by the rule of my master, you walk by the rude working of your fancies. You are counted thieves already by the Lord of the way,* therefore I doubt that you will not be found true men at the end of the way.” The result was that they joined him anyway, “so that they went on every man in his way, without much conference one with another.”* As Stanley Fish points out, “for them the ‘way’ is any way which finds them in an external conformity with the directions they have been given. We are, they say to Christian, in the same place as you; are we not therefore in the same way? Christian answers by internalizing the metaphor,” so that “for him the ‘way’ refers to an inner commitment of the spirit, … a commitment to the rule of his master, and as long as he walks by that, any road he walks in is the way. Being in the way is paradoxically independent of the way you happen to be in, for you will be in the way only if the way is in you.”* He goes on to make the point that “This rule* is nowhere given, but the several scriptural allusions in the passage point us unmistakably to it: I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh to the Father, but by me (John 14:6).”*
5 At this point, of course, Jesus has not yet said, “I am the Way.” All he has said is that his disciples “know the way” (v. 4), even though it quickly becomes evident that they do not know that they know it. Thomas says as much: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” (v. 5). With this, he takes up Peter’s question once more, “Lord, where are you going?” (13:36), as if Jesus had not answered it. Even if Thomas heard Jesus mention “my Father’s household” (v. 2), he does not presume to know where that is, and if we do not know the destination, he reasons, “How can we know the way?” Thomas is still thinking of “the way” as a road or at least a road map, not as an “inner commitment,” or way of life, and in his own literalistic terms he is right. It is useless to ask directions if one does not know where one is going. Unlike Peter (see 13:37), Thomas speaks not just for himself but for all the disciples (“we do not know where you are going? How can we know the way?”).* His question affords Jesus the opportunity to set all the disciples straight—and instruct the reader as well.
6 Although Thomas speaks for all the disciples, Jesus replies at first “to him” alone: “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (v. 6). This is the first “I am” pronouncement since “I am the Resurrection and the Life” (11:25), which it resembles in two ways: first, in that Jesus says it only once, and second, in having more than one predicate (one of which is “the Life”). The dominant predicate here is “the Way.” Jesus could have just said, “I am the Way. No one comes to the Father except through me,” and the dynamic of the exchange would have been the same. “The Truth” and “the Life” simply spell out for his disciples the benefits of the salvation to which “the Way” leads. Jesus has already told Martha explicitly that he was “the Life” (11:25), and he implicitly claimed to be “the Truth” by telling a group of “believing” Jews at the Tent festival that “the truth will set you free” (8:32), and “if the Son sets you free, you will really be free” (8:36, italics added).
The central pronouncement, “I am the Way,” is profoundly significant within the chapter as a whole, for it states in so many words what Bunyan knew, that “the way” is not what Thomas thought it was, a literal route or pathway, but a Person, Jesus himself. The destination, accordingly, is not a place (not even precisely “my Father’s house”), but also a Person, the Father himself: “No one comes to the Father except through me” (italics added). The terms of the whole discussion now begin to change, from talk of a departure, a journey, a “way,” and a destination, to talk of Jesus and the Father. There is profound mutuality in their relationship, for the claim that “No one comes to the Father except through me” stands as a kind of sequel to the principle stated much earlier that “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him” (6:44), or “unless it is given him from the Father” (6:65). That is, only the Father can bring anyone to Jesus, and only Jesus can bring anyone to the Father.* Those who are quite willing to press the exclusivity of the latter principle—that is, that salvation is possible only through Jesus Christ—are sometimes less willing to acknowledge the exclusivity of the former—that is, that no one comes to Christ without being “drawn” or “given” by the Father to the Son. But both things are true, and therein lies the characteristic exclusivism, even dualism, of the Gospel of John.* At the same time, the invitation is universal, for the last phrase, “through me,”* recalls an earlier pronouncement that accented its positive side: “I am the Door. Through me, if anyone goes in he will be saved, and will go in and go out and find pasture” (10:9). Such is the dialectic of salvation throughout this Gospel.
7 Jesus now turns from Thomas alone to the whole group, though the transition (in contrast to the transition from Peter to the group, v. 1) is barely noticeable: “If you all* have known me, you will know my Father too, and from now on you know him, and you have seen him” (v. 7). If this is the correct reading, Jesus is assuming that they do in fact know him,* but some ancient manuscripts have it instead as a contrary-to-fact condition, “If you all had known me, you would have known my Father too.”* This reading implies that they have not known either Jesus or his Father, but that “from now on” they will.
While the contrary-to-fact condition is not without parallel in this very chapter (see v. 28), the simple conditional sentence implying that they do know Jesus has wider textual support, and is virtually demanded by the logic of his argument.* He has just told them, after all, that “you know the way” (v. 4), and then explained, “I am the Way” (v. 6). And two verses later he will express great surprise that Philip still does not know him (v. 9). If they truly did not know him, they would be no better off than the Pharisees at the Tent festival to whom he said, “You know neither me nor my Father; if you knew me, you would know my Father” (8:19). The disciples, by contrast, are those Jesus has identified as his “sheep,” who know their Shepherd and their Shepherd’s voice (see 10:4, 14), just as surely, he said, “as the Father knows me, and I know the Father” (10:15). His promise here is not simply that “you will know my Father” sooner or later,* but that “from now on* you know him, and you have seen him.” The last clause, “and you have seen him,”* is particularly striking when we remember Jesus’ earlier statement of a sweeping principle, “Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God, he has seen the Father” (6:46; also 1:18, 5:37).
8 The third questioner is Philip, picking up on the last clause, “and you have seen him” (v. 7b). Philip, like Thomas, ventures to speak for the whole group: “Lord, show us the Father, and it’s enough for us” (v. 8, my italics). At one level, he is asking in another way the same question Peter and Thomas asked, “Where are you going?” (13:36; 14:5), given that Jesus’ destination has now been defined as “the Father” (v. 6). Yet it is difficult to say just what Philip has in mind. How exactly does he expect Jesus to “show us the Father?” Is he asking for a sign, like Jesus’ other signs? Or a literal vision of God, something Jesus has explicitly ruled out (see 6:46)? Superficially, his question echoes that of the Pharisees at the Tent festival who asked Jesus, “Where is your father?” (8:19), but the circumstances are very different. As we have seen, those Pharisees did not even understand that Jesus was speaking of his heavenly Father, and were simply challenging him to call his second witness (see 8:18). Philip, by contrast, is expected to know both Jesus and the Father (v. 7). His confusion seems to come as a surprise to Jesus (v. 9), yet given the repeated misunderstandings of Jesus’ pronouncements in this Gospel (for example, 2:20; 3:4; 4:11–12; 7:35–36; 8:22), it is perhaps less surprising to the reader, for even the disciples are not immune (see 13:9). The importance of Philip’s remark lies not so much in what he may have meant by it as in the opportunity it gives Jesus to reveal more and more of the truth.
9 Jesus responds to Philip and to the whole group of disciples simultaneously, interweaving plurals and singulars: “Such a long time I am with you all,* and you, Philip, have not known me? The person who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you [singular] say, ‘Show us the Father?’ ” (v. 9). The gentle rebuke is addressed to Philip alone; the words of reminder and instruction are for all the disciples. “Such a long time” that Jesus has been with them stands in contrast to the “short time” left before his departure (13:33). His reply, “The person who has seen me has seen the Father,” is simply a corollary of the principle of agency that he has already presented, first to the reader (12:44–45) and then to the disciples at the meal (13:20). The reader at least has even been told explicitly, “the person who sees me sees the One who sent me” (12:45), and now Philip and his companions are given that information as well. In a larger sense, the reply to Philip is also a corollary of everything Jesus has said in the first half of the Gospel about his dependence on the Father, speaking only what the Father had given him to say and doing only what the Father commissioned him to do. And from the beginning, the bad news that “No one has seen God, ever,” has been balanced against the good news that “It was God the One and Only, the One who is right beside the Father, who told about him” (1:18). To say, “The person who has seen me has seen the Father,” is simply to say that the Son reveals the Father.
10–11 Continuing in the same vein, Jesus asks Philip, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?” Then he reminds the whole group, “The words that I am saying to you all I am not speaking on my own, but the Father, dwelling in me, is doing his works” (v. 10). The hint of mutuality that came to expression in “No one comes to the Father except through me” (see v. 6), now becomes the dominant theme of the discourse, replacing the themes of Jesus’ departure and his destination. Jesus has spoken before of mutual glorification (13:31–32), but here he defines mutuality as mutual indwelling.* He is “in the Father,” he claims, and the Father “in me.”* None of this is new. He has said it all before, not to the disciples but to “the Jews” at the Rededication festival in Jerusalem: “If I do not do the works of my Father, don’t believe me. But if I do them, even if you don’t believe me, believe the works, so that you might learn and know that the Father is in me and I in the Father” (10:37–38). The parallel is striking, not just because of the reference to mutual indwelling but because of the accent on Jesus’ “works” as “the works of my Father” (10:37). The equivalent here is that “the Father, dwelling in me, is doing his works” (v. 10). All of this was wasted on Jesus’ audience at the Rededication, who instead of listening merely “sought to arrest him again” (10:39). Jesus seems to have said it only for the benefit of the reader, who was left to ponder how the Father could be “in” Jesus and Jesus “in” the Father all at the same time. Beyond a vague sense that he was trying to explain in what way “I and the Father are one” (10:30), the reader has had little to go on.
Now Jesus makes a similar claim to Philip and the other disciples at supper. “Do you not believe?” he asks Philip, who says nothing, but then he drives the question home to the rest of the disciples by underlining the great authority with which he speaks (vv. 10b–11). In referring to “The words that I am saying to you all,” he means the specific words he has just said to Philip about the mutual indwelling of the Father and the Son. These words, he reminds them, are not spoken “on my own, but the Father, dwelling in me, is doing his works” (v. 10b). He has said as much before, about other claims he has made (see, for example, 5:30; 7:16–18; 8:28), but the thought of the Father “dwelling in me” gives this claim added credibility. He then confirms the claim by repeating it verbatim before the group: “Believe me, that I am in the Father and the Father in me, but if not, believe because of those very works” (v. 11).
It is quite noticeable that Jesus speaks of his “words” and his “works” interchangeably.* Where we might have expected, “I am not speaking on my own, but the Father is speaking through me,” he says instead, “the Father, dwelling in me, is doing his works,” and he commands them to believe on the basis of “those very works.” He told them earlier that “The words I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life” (6:63), and they acknowledged that “You have words of life eternal” (6:68), yet he also made clear to his opponents that words are cheap. Even if he calls himself “God” or “the Son of God,” it means little or nothing (see 10:34–36). What really counts are the “works” the Father has given him to do: “If I do not do the works of my Father, don’t believe me. But if I do them, even if you don’t believe me, believe the works, so that you might learn and know that the Father is in me and I in the Father” (10:37–38). Now, in the presence of his disciples, he expects them to recognize those same words about mutual indwelling as words bringing to realization the Father’s “works” of giving life and executing judgment (see 5:20–22). “Believe me” (that is, believe what I say), he tells them, or else “believe because of those very works.” It amounts to the same thing.
12 It is unclear precisely where Jesus’ answer to Philip ends. A case could be made for extending it all the way to verse 22, where “Judas, not the Iscariot” asks a fourth question. Yet here an “Amen, amen” formula (the twenty-second in the Gospel) marks a definite break. While he has had the group as a whole in view as well as Philip in particular as far back as verse 9, Philip is now forgotten and Jesus turns his full attention to them all without distinction: “Amen, amen, I say to you all,”* in contrast to “Jesus says to him” (v. 9). As for the pronouncement itself, it has occasioned much discussion among interpreters: “the person who believes in me, the works I am doing that person will also do, and greater than these he will do because I am going to the Father.” The reference to “believing” and to “the works I am doing” signal that the subject matter has not changed, but the added promise is startling. Those who “believe” (as the disciples are now being invited to do) will do the same “works” Jesus has done, and even “greater than these,”* he promises, all because “I am going to the Father.” Much earlier, he distinguished between the works of the Father “until now” (5:17) which the Father has shown him, and the “greater works than these” (5:20) of raising the dead and executing judgment, both now and at the last day (see 5:21–29). But in what sense are the works of believers after his departure “greater” than Jesus’ works? It is generally agreed that they will not perform “greater” or more spectacular miracles than he did (as is hinted, for example, in the longer ending of Mark, 16:16–18). Possibly their works are “greater” in that more people (Gentiles as well as Jews) will benefit from Jesus’ death than from the works he did while on earth (see, for example, 10:16; 11:52; 12:24, 32). We have known all along that he had a limited time to complete his works (9:4; 11:9–10), and that certain things could not take place and other things could not be understood until after he was “glorified” (see 7:39; 12:16). Here he looks more closely at the impending time of his absence, assuring his disciples that his works will nonetheless continue and, yes, be even “greater” than when he was present. Still, the question persists: In what sense “greater”?
It is important to recognize that Jesus is not settling for second place. The disciples’ works are, first of all, the same as “the works I am doing,” and only “greater than these” because “I am going to the Father” (italics added). The emphatic “I” is quite noticeable. The “greater” works are no less the works of Jesus than of his disciples, for it is he who makes them possible. Just as the distinction in 5:20 was not between Jesus’ works and those of the Father but between the Father’s works “until now” (5:17) and those yet to come, so the distinction here is not between what Jesus does and what the disciples do, but between what Jesus has done so far and what he will do (through them) by “going to the Father.”
Most conspicuous among the “works” of Jesus promised but not yet accomplished are those of “taking away the sin of the world” (1:29), and “baptizing in Holy Spirit” (1:33)—two expressions, it may be, for the same act of purification. Jesus has turned water to wine, healed the sick, multiplied loaves, given sight to the blind, raised the dead, but he has not—at least not explicitly*—forgiven or taken away anyone’s sin.* Those who have come to him have come not as sinners but as “true Israelites” (1:47), who “do the truth” and whose works have been “wrought in God” (see 3:21). Those who opposed him have been told that their sin “remains” (9:41), and left to “die in their sins” (8:21, 24; see also 15:22). Clearly, something is missing—something that will not be explicitly supplied until Jesus’ resurrection, when he will breathe on his disciples and say to them, “Receive Holy Spirit. Whosoever’s sins you forgive, they are forgiven them; whosoever’s you retain, they are retained” (20:22–23). If there is a prime candidate for one of these “greater” works, it is the forgiveness of sins, possibly because it could only come by virtue of the actual shedding of Jesus’ blood on the cross, just as the gift of the Spirit could only come by virtue of Jesus’ glorification (see 7:39).*
13–14 The forgiveness of sins is not explicitly mentioned here as one of the “greater” works. Instead, Jesus singles out the assurance of answered prayer, quite possibly with prayer for the forgiveness of sins particularly in mind. “And whatever you ask in my name,” he promises, “this I will do, so that the Father might be glorified in the Son” (v. 13). Then, for emphasis, he says it again: “If you ask me anything in my name, I will do”* (v. 14). The emphatic “I” is evident once more, signaling again that Jesus is not simply backing off, leaving the authority to do “greater” works in the hands of his disciples. We might have expected, “And whatever you ask in my name, the Father will do, so that the Father might be glorified in the Son,” and “If you ask the Father anything in my name, he will do.” We have come to expect Christian prayer to be directed to the Father through the Son, and this is in fact what we find in this Gospel’s other passages on prayer (see 15:16, “so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he might give you”; 16:23, “whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you”).* Here, by contrast, even though the prayer is offered in Jesus’ name, it is Jesus himself (now “gone to the Father,” v. 12) who “will do” what is asked.* In a sense, the promise that “I will do” (v. 14) echoes and reaffirms his previous reference to the works that “I am doing”* (v. 12). He who carries out the Father’s works in his ministry on earth will continue to perform “greater” works from heaven in response to the prayers of the disciples he left behind.
What is the reader to make of such promises of answered prayer? They should be looked at one at a time, for a single interpretation does not necessarily fit them all. The promise here is notable for what it does not say. Jesus does not invite them to ask “whatever you want” (as he will in 15:7!), but to ask “in my name,”* a phrase that seems to mean “Ask as if I were asking,” or “Ask what I would ask.”* This would suggest that the prayer is directed ultimately to the Father after all, yet Jesus the Son promises to answer it, “so that the Father might be glorified in the Son” (v. 13, echoing 13:31, “Now the Son of man is glorified, and God is glorified in him”). The disciple is invited to come to the Father “in the name of” Jesus, with the promise of enjoying the same access to God that Jesus enjoys (see 9:31, and especially 11:41–42). It is not a matter of an individual’s personal whims or desires, but of bringing to realization all that Jesus wants to accomplish in the world.
15 Jesus continues to address his disciples, with another “If” clause: “If you love me, you will keep my commands” (v. 15).* Perhaps surprisingly, he does not pick up on the “new command” he has just given them (13:34) by speaking of his love for them or their responsibility to “love one another.” Instead, he speaks of love in a very traditional way, and of a plurality of “my commands,” not of a single “new command.” His language evokes the covenantal language of the Hebrew Bible, in which the people of Israel are repeatedly characterized as those who “love God” and “keep his commands.”* It also evokes his words in the other three Gospels about the two great commands to “love the Lord your God” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (see Mt 22:37–39//Mk 12:29–31; also Lk 10:26–27). It resonates with these more than with anything we have encountered up to now in the Gospel of John itself. But there is one enormous difference: the command is not simply to love the God of Israel, but quite specifically to “love me,” and keep “my commands,”* presumably including—though not limited to—the “new command” to love one another.* In short, Jesus stands before his disciples at this last meal in the place of God, and representing God.
16–17 Closely linked to the promise of “greater” things (v. 12), answered prayer in particular (vv. 13–14), is the promise of the Spirit. On the basis of the disciples’ love for him and the keeping of his commands, Jesus continues, “And I will ask* the Father, and he will give you another advocate, that he might be with you forever” (v. 16). The phrase “another advocate”* implies that Jesus himself is an “advocate” for his disciples, presumably by virtue of “going off to prepare a place” for them with the Father (vv. 2–3; see 1 Jn 2:1, “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous”).* This other “advocate,” he promises, will be “with you forever” (v. 16), in contrast to Jesus himself, who said he would be “with you” only “a short time” (13:33). He then further identifies the “advocate” as “the Spirit of truth* which the world cannot receive, because it neither sees nor knows it,” adding “You know it, because it dwells beside you, and is in you” (v. 17).*
The neuter pronouns in the English translation (“which” and “it”) reflect neuter pronouns in Greek,* with the neuter noun “Spirit” as antecedent. This is somewhat misleading, for the noun “advocate” is masculine,* and in subsequent passages the personality of “the Spirit of truth” (or “Holy Spirit,” v. 26) will emerge more clearly than anywhere else in the New Testament (see v. 26; 15:26; 16:7–15). For now, nothing is said of how this other “advocate” will carry out its advocacy for the disciples,* only that it is given specifically to them, not to “the world,” to dwell “beside” them, or “in” them. That “the world cannot receive” and “neither sees nor knows” this advocate comes as no surprise, given that the world “did not know” Jesus the Word either (1:10). Nor does Jesus promise that his disciples will literally “see” it, for it is “Spirit” and not flesh. But “You do know it,” he promises them, “because it dwells beside you,* and is in you.”* It is important to understand that even though all the verbs are in the present tense,* they all have a future meaning (no less than the verbs “I am going” and “I am coming” in vv. 2–3). Jesus’ point is that the world will not recognize the advocate when it comes, will not see or know it, but that the disciples will know it (presumably because Jesus has told them in advance), and that it will “dwell beside you” and will “be in you.” This is quite clearly the case because of what has preceded. Jesus has said, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate, that he might be with you forever” (v. 16, italics added). The “other advocate” will not come until the first “advocate” has gone to the Father (this becomes explicit in 16:7). And when the advocate comes, it will “dwell beside” the disciples, or be “in” them. No distinction is intended (see n.
18 What Jesus says next is startling: “I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you” (v. 18). Without an advocate, the disciples would be “orphaned,”* destitute and alone in the world, but as it is they will not be alone. But how can he say, “I am coming”? What has his “coming” to do with that of the “other advocate”? This time he does not say, “I am coming back,” nor does he promise to “take you to myself, so that where I am you too might be” (v. 3). Nor is the “I” emphatic, as if to say, “I” in addition to that “other” advocate. He simply says, “I am coming to you,” and at this point the reader can only conclude that he is promising to come to them in the person of the “advocate … the Spirit of truth,” of whom he has just spoken. If so, this is not the same “coming” promised earlier, after a period of absence and the preparation of “a place for you” (v. 2), but a different “coming” altogether.
19 Further explanation is required, and Jesus quickly supplies it: “Yet a short time, and the world no longer sees me, but you see me, because I live—and you too will live” (v. 19). The phrase, “Yet a short time,”* recalls the pronouncement with which the whole sequence began, “Children, yet a short time I am with you” (13:33), but with a crucial difference. Now, instead of accenting his physical absence from the disciples (“Where I am going you cannot come,” 13:33), he brings good news.* He will be truly absent only as far as “the world” is concerned.* Even though “the world no longer sees me,” he promises them, “you see me, because I live—and you too will live.” Here again (as in v. 17) the present verbs have a future meaning, as if to say that after Jesus’ departure from the world, “the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I will live—and you too will live” (italics added; only the last of these verbs is actually future).
It is the same with Jesus as with the “other advocate.” Just as the world “neither sees it nor knows it,” but “You do know it” (v. 17), so here, Jesus says, “the world no longer sees me, but you see me.”* The disciples and the world perceive things differently. They will “know” and “see” what the world cannot. The only difference is that Jesus is a human being who can literally be “seen” (as in v. 9) while the “other advocate,” being “Spirit,” can be “known” but not actually “seen,” even by the disciples. This raises the question, When will the disciples “see” Jesus after his departure from the world? The next clause provides a clue: “because I live*—and you too will live.” The reference to Jesus’ “living,” or coming to life, in a setting dark with the prospect of his impending death suggests that he has in view here his resurrection. This is supported by the close link in this Gospel between “resurrection” and “life” (see, for example, 5:21; 6:40; 11:25–26). Only twice before has he hinted at his own resurrection, once at the first Passover when he said, “Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up” (2:19; see 2:21), and once at the Rededication when he said, “I lay down my life, that I might receive it back again.… I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to receive it back” (10:17–18).* Here he speaks of it in similarly guarded language, but the reference is almost unmistakable. Then, and then only, was Jesus literally “seen” by his disciples after his death on the cross (for example, 20:18, 20, 25, 29), and it was then too that he “breathed” on his disciples and said, “Receive Holy Spirit” (20:22), so that he “came” (20:19, 24, 26) bringing with him, as it were, the “other advocate.” None of this is clear to the disciples here at the meal (and much is still unclear to the reader), but the one thing that is clear is that they will not only “know” but “see” with their own eyes what “the world” cannot know—that Jesus is theirs, and they are his.
20 “In that day,” Jesus continues, “you will come to know that I am in my Father and you in me, and I in you” (v. 20). “In that day”* places the events of the preceding verse (that is, “seeing” Jesus because he “lives”) on a specific “day,” not “the last day,” to be sure (as in 6:39, 40, 44, and 54), yet an eschatological “day” full of hope and expectancy.* “That day” is understood here on the one hand as the literal day on which Jesus rose from the dead (“that first day of the week,” 20:19) and on the other as the whole age in which the Johannine community now lives, the age of the risen Lord (see 16:23, 26).* In connection with “that day,” Jesus again speaks of mutual indwelling, but with a decisive addition. Instead of “I am in the Father, and the Father in me” (vv. 10 and 11; also 10:38), it is now “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” Jesus has said nothing quite like this before. The closest he came was “The person who eats my flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me, and I in him” (6:56), with the added claim that “Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the person who eats me, even that person will live because of me” (6:57, italics added). That was a scandal and an offense to those who heard it at the time (see 6:60), but now Jesus tells his disciples that “in that day” they will “come to know”* the mutual indwelling of Father and Son—to the point that they are themselves drawn into it! To them belongs the unrealized promise to “the Jews who had believed” at the Tent festival: “If you remain in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (8:32). To know “the truth,” we now learn, is to know “the Spirit of truth” (v. 17), and so be united with the Father and the Son (v. 20).
21 Returning to the thought of verse 15, “If you love me, you will keep my commands,” Jesus now translates the mystical notion of mutual indwelling into more traditional language: “The person having my commands and keeping them, that person it is who loves me, and the person who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and I will reveal myself to him” (v. 21). He could have merely said, “the person who loves me I will love,” but because of what he has just said about mutual indwelling (v. 20), he brings the Father into the picture first—that person “will be loved by my Father”—adding (almost as an afterthought) “and I will love him.” Finally, repeating in different words his promises that “I am coming to you” (v. 18),” and “the world no longer sees me, but you see me” (v. 19), he concludes, “and I will reveal myself to him.”* The “coming” promised here (unlike the “coming back” mentioned in v. 3) is defined not as a return from heaven or “the Father’s house,” but as a revelation or self-disclosure prompted by the Father’s (and Jesus’) love for those who “love him and keep his commands.”
22 After the long response, direct and indirect, to Philip’s request to “Show us the Father” (vv. 9–21), the fourth and last question is asked, as “Judas, not the Iscariot, says to him, ‘Lord, and how come* you are going to reveal yourself to us and not to the world?’ ” (v. 22). This “Judas” is otherwise unidentified. The only “Judas” mentioned in the lists of the apostles other than “the Iscariot” is “Judas of James,” who appears only in Luke (6:16) and Acts (1:13).* Unlike the first three, Judas’s question is not one that betrays a lack of understanding or failure to pay attention.* On the contrary, it is a legitimate question that might well have been on the minds of many of the Gospel’s readers. “To reveal yourself”* echoes Jesus’ promise, “I will reveal myself to him” (v. 21), but the notion that this revelation is “not to the world” shows the speaker’s awareness of Jesus’ previous words as well, that “the world cannot receive, because it neither sees … nor knows” the Spirit (v. 17), and that “the world no longer sees me, but you see me” (v. 19). It may even look back to the still earlier promise that “if I go off and prepare a place for you, I am coming back and I will take you to myself” (v. 3), which did not mention the world but held out for the disciples a very personal relationship with Jesus in a “place” prepared just for them.
The question is a natural one against the background of certain primitive Christian expectations that when the Son of man comes, “every eye will see him,” and “all the tribes of the earth will mourn over him” (Rev 1:7), or “then will appear the sign of the Son of man in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of man coming on the clouds with power and much glory” (Mt 24:30; see also Mk 13:26; Lk 21:27),* or even the very last words of the second-century Didache: “Then the world will see the Lord coming upon the clouds of the sky” (Didache 16.7). This expectation did not necessarily imply redemption for “the world”; on the contrary, the rhyming “they will see” and “they will mourn”* suggests the opposite. Still, Judas is puzzled. What happened to this expectation of a public visible “coming,” he wonders, and possibly readers of the Gospel are wondering the same thing.* Whether he (or they) were expecting universal salvation on the one hand, or the public vindication of Jesus and his disciples before the entire world on the other is not altogether clear, but in any event Judas’s question is the best anyone has asked yet. It deserves an answer, but the answer is complex. It will not come all at once, but the reader will do well to keep the question in mind.
23 For the time being Jesus contents himself with a kind of non-answer: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and we will make a dwelling right beside him” (v. 23). For the most part, he merely repeats the very thing he said that provoked the question in the first place (see v. 21),* adding only that when he “comes” (v. 18) and “reveals himself” (v. 21), he will not come alone, but the Father will come with him. “We will come,” he promises, and “we will make a dwelling right beside him.”* The imagery of “many dwellings” in a “place” prepared for the disciples “in the Father’s house” (v. 2) is here reversed, as the Father himself comes with Jesus to make his own “dwelling” alongside the believer. Startling as the addition sounds, it does not speak to Judas’s question. It has no bearing on why the revelation is only to the disciples and not to the world. It is simply a corollary of what Jesus has said already: that “I am in the Father, and the Father in me” (v. 11), and “I am in my Father, and you in me and I in you” (v. 20). If there is such a thing as indwelling, then when Jesus comes the Father comes, and if Jesus is “in” the disciples or “beside” them, so too is the Father.*
24 If there is a real answer here to Judas’s question, it comes not in the added promise (v. 23), but in the negative saying that follows: “The person who does not love me does not keep my words” (v. 24a). The reference to “the person who does not love me”* is Jesus’ way of defining “the world.” Jesus will not reveal himself to those who do not love him or keep his “words” or “commands” (v. 21),* therefore not to “the world” (later he will be even more emphatic: “If the world hate you, you know that it has hated me first,” 15:18). But even this briefest of answers is overshadowed by what he immediately adds, returning to his overarching theme, his relationship to the Father: “and the word which you all hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me” (v. 24b). Instead of responding in detail to Judas’s question, the pronouncement concludes and frames the whole of verses 10–24, beginning with Jesus’ answer to Philip, “The words that I am saying to you all I am not speaking on my own, but the Father, dwelling in me, is doing his works” (v. 10). Jesus’ “word”—or “words,” or “commands”—are not his own, he insists, but those of “the Father who sent him,” who dwells in him and in whom he dwells. This is, of course, true not only of the foregoing speech, but of everything Jesus says, always and everywhere. Therein lies his authority.
25–26 “These things I have spoken to you while dwelling beside you,” Jesus continues, as if signaling an end to his speech, and an imminent departure (v. 25). He speaks as if the end is approaching, yet it is not quite here, for the expression “these things I have spoken to you”* is one that he is quite capable of repeating again and again (see 15:11; 16:1, 4, 6, 25), before finally using it to conclude the entire discourse (16:33). He introduces it here to set the stage for a second glimpse of the “other advocate” he has promised (vv. 16–17). His reference to himself as “dwelling beside you”* recalls that promise, particularly the words “it dwells beside you and is in you” (v. 17). What Jesus does for them now, “another advocate” will continue to do after his departure, for in spite of all he has said about mutual indwelling, the departure is real. With this, the “other advocate” takes on a definite identity, and with it a title, along with a job description (hence the capitalization): “But the Advocate,* the Holy Spirit,* whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and remind you of all things that I said to you” (v. 26).* Like Jesus himself, the Spirit is “sent”* from the Father, but “in my name,” Jesus says, that is, in response to his intercession (see v. 16). The “he” and the “I” are both emphatic, framing the last clause.* That is, “He [the Advocate] will teach you all things and remind you of all things that I [Jesus] said to you.” The effect of the “he”* is to highlight the personality of “the Advocate,” corresponding to the personal “I” who speaks. The Advocate, moreover, will do things only a person can do, the very things Jesus has done from the start. He will “teach,” and his teaching will be a continuation of Jesus’ own, in that it will include “reminding”* the disciples of what Jesus has already taught them. In contrast to Jesus, the Advocate will not be under time constraint, for he will teach them “all things,” and remind them of “all things”* that Jesus ever said. While there is no evidence that the disciples themselves grasped the full significance of this promise, it helps the reader understand why, after Jesus was “glorified” or “raised from the dead,” his disciples “remembered” not just the words that he spoke, but what his words and his actions meant (see 2:22; 12:16). In this way, it gives authority to the text of the Gospel, implying that with the help of the Advocate the disciples—and by implication the Gospel writer—finally “got it straight,” whatever their limitations might have been during the course of Jesus’ ministry. The accent on “all things that I said to you” could even suggest that they came to know far more than they ever put into writing (see 20:30; 21:25).*
27 The impression that Jesus’ speech is drawing to a close (v. 25) is heightened by his next words, “Peace I leave with you, my peace* I give you. Not as the world gives do I give to you” (v. 27a). This first mention of “peace” in the entire Gospel stands as the positive sequel to the words with which he began, “Let no one’s heart be shaken!” (v. 1), and to those very words he now returns, framing the entire discourse: “Let no one’s heart be shaken, nor let it be fearful!” The added words, “nor let it be fearful”* (v. 27b), are significant. Jesus himself, as we have seen, had been “shaken,” or troubled (11:33; 12:27; 13:21), but never “fearful,” a term implying cowardice or lack of courage.* With these words (right on the heels of the promise of the Advocate!), he implies that his disciples are still badly in need of his “peace,” with some distance yet to go before truly “believing” in him” (vv. 1, 10, 11) or “loving” him (vv. 15, 21, 23) as they should. In the same breath, he takes another opportunity (as in vv. 17 and 19) to distance himself and the disciples from “the world” and the way the world sees things. In saying, “Not as the world gives do I give you,” his point is that the “peace” he leaves with his disciples is not necessarily what the world calls peace—that is, the absence of conflict. Without quite saying so, he hints that persecution may await them, and that this would not be incompatible with the “peace” he is offering them, for the peace he offers is in their “heart,”* not in their outward circumstances. He will make this explicit later on when he finally bids them farewell: “These things I have spoken to you that in me you might have peace. In the world you have distress, but take courage, I have overcome the world!” (16:33).
28 Summing up the whole discourse, Jesus continues, “You heard that I said to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you’ ” (v. 28a). The summary draws on a number of pronouncements all the way back to 13:33, when he first told them that “where I am going you cannot come” (for “going away,” see 13:36, 14:4; for “going” or “going off,” 14:2, 3, 12; and for “coming,” 14:3, 18). Only once has he spoken of “going” and “coming,” in one breath, “And if I go off and prepare a place for you, I am coming back” (v. 3),* and only once has he used the exact words, “I am coming to you” (v. 18). It is not altogether clear, therefore, whether the “coming” to which he now refers is his “coming back,” presumably at “the last day” (v. 3), or “coming to you” in the person of the Advocate (v. 18). Nor is it all that important, for the accent here is on the “going,” not the “coming.”*
Jesus quickly makes this explicit: “If you loved me, you would rejoice* that* I am going off to the Father, because the Father is greater than I” (v. 28b). What is striking is that “If you loved me, you would rejoice,” is a contrary-to-fact condition, suggesting that the disciples do not in fact love Jesus as they should.* That he loves them is beyond question (13:1, 34), and it is easy to assume that they love him as well. Clearly they do, in the sense that they do not belong to “the world” (see vv. 23–24). Yet their love is less than perfect. The contrary-to-fact condition is not as surprising as it sounds, given the implication that they are still “fearful,” or lacking in courage (see v. 27).* Their four questions have given evidence of their emotional dependence on Jesus, but love is another matter. Three times he has set forth obedience to his “commands” (vv. 15, 21) or his “word” (v. 23) as the undeniable evidence that a person “loves” him, but neither he nor the disciples have ever said in so many words that they do. As late as the very last chapter of the Gospel, he can still ask Peter (not once but three times!), “Do you love me?” (21:15, 16, 17). This time the test of love is not simply keeping Jesus’ commands, but something more difficult: rejoicing and not grieving that he is “going off to the Father, because the Father is greater than I.”
Theologians have long debated in what sense the Father is “greater”* than the Son, and how this assertion relates to Jesus’ earlier claim that “I and the Father are one” (10:30). But in the immediate context Jesus is doing little more than reinforcing his earlier pronouncement that the true disciple will do “the works I am doing … and greater than these he will do because I am going to the Father” (v. 12, italics added). Now we learn that the works will be “greater” because the Father is “greater.” The Advocate will come only because Jesus “will ask the Father” (v. 16), probably in the Father’s presence when he has “gone away” (see 16:7). Despite the accent on mutuality (as in vv. 10, 11, 20), there are certain respects in which it has been clear all along that the Father is “greater.” Certain statements about the Father and the Son are not reversible. That is, the Father sent the Son, not the other way around. The Son does what he sees the Father doing, does the works of the Father, says what the Father gives him to say (see, for example, v. 24, “and the word which you all hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me”). None of these pronouncements makes sense when turned around: the Father does not imitate the Son; the Father does not do the works of the Son, nor speak the Son’s words. In that sense the Father’s priority is undeniable. If Jesus is “the Way,” he is the way “to the Father” (v. 6), who sent him in the first place, not an end in himself. His disciples should rejoice in his “going,” because only by “going to the Father” can he “come” to them and be able to say, “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (v. 20). The promise of mutual indwelling is Jesus’ answer to their fear of his departure, while at the same time their acceptance of that departure is the key to their experience of mutual indwelling. Thus when Jesus “comes back” at last to take them to himself in the Father’s spacious household (v. 3), it is simply the natural and inevitable consummation of an already existing vital relationship in the present world.
29 “And now I have told before it happens,” Jesus concludes, “so that when it happens you might believe” (v. 29). When what happens? The parallel with his words just after the footwashing in connection with the citation of Psalm 41 is striking, as we have seen: “From now on I tell you before it happens, so that when it happens you might believe that I am” (13:19). There he was speaking of the prospect of dissension and betrayal within the community of disciples after his departure. Here too he has hinted at impending trouble (v. 27), but what he has said explicitly is far more positive—a reason to “rejoice,” in fact: “I am going away, and I am coming to you,” and “I am going off to the Father” (v. 28). His intent is that when this happens, “you might believe.” The reader is left to wonder, When did it happen, and did the disciples in fact “believe”? As we have just seen, there is an ambiguity about the “coming.” It could be the traditional “second coming” at the last day (v. 3), or it could be the coming of Jesus to his disciples after his resurrection (see vv. 18–20, 23). But the coming at the last day is hardly an appropriate occasion for the disciples to “believe.” It is rather too late for that. More likely, the “coming” he has in mind is the day of his resurrection, when Jesus “came” (20:19, 26), and his disciples “saw” (20:20, 25, 29), “rejoiced” (20:20), and finally, in the person of Thomas, explicitly “believed” (20:29). The stronger accent here, however, has been on the “going away,” or “going off to the Father” (v. 28). That seems much less ambiguous. Jesus seems to be referring simply to his impending death. But why will his death become the occasion for his disciples to “believe”? By itself it cannot, even if it confirms to them that in fact he correctly predicted it. Only the “coming” can validate the “going away.” Only the resurrection can prove that in dying Jesus actually did “go to the Father,” and “prepare a place” in the Father’s household. Or so it would seem. Yet as the narrative plays out, one of them, significantly, will “believe,” even before the decisive “coming” (see 20:8, “and he saw and believed”). Jesus wants his disciples to believe that “I am going off to the Father” no less than that “I am coming to you,” for as he has just told them, “the Father is greater than I” (v. 28). Only by coming to terms with his absence can they fully experience his presence.*
30 Finally, after repeated signals that his discourse may be drawing to a close (“These things I have spoken to you,” v. 25; “Peace I leave with you,” v. 27; “now I have told before it happens,” v. 29), Jesus finally sounds ready to wrap things up: “I will no longer speak with you very much, for the ruler of the world is coming, and in me he has nothing” (v. 30). Still, the adverb “very much”* leaves the door open a crack for a little more to come.* Whether the crack is wide enough to accommodate all of the next two (or three) chapters is another question. Probably Jesus is saying no more than that he will be around for only “a short time,” which he has already stated twice (13:33; 14:19), so who knows how much more he will have to say?
Again we hear of “the ruler of the world.”* Earlier, Jesus said, “Now is the judgment of this world. Now the ruler of this world will be driven out” (12:31).* There we observed a certain tension between “now” and the future verb, “will be driven out.” As we saw, the world’s “ruler” can only be “the devil,” or “Satan,” and here we learn that he is still very much in the picture (see already 13:2, 27). He is “coming,”* Jesus says, no less surely than Jesus himself is “coming” (vv. 3, 18, 28), and presumably sooner. The reader is left to wonder: If the devil, or Satan, “entered into” Judas (13:27), and went out when Judas “went out” (13:30), in what way is this world “ruler” now “coming”? In the person of Judas still, or in other ways? Jesus has just one more thing to say about him, “And in me he has nothing,” distancing himself once again both from “the world” and from its “ruler.”* Just as “the world” cannot receive, see, or know “the Spirit of truth” (v. 17), and “no longer sees” Jesus when he goes away (v. 19), and just as he is not “from this world” (8:23), and gives peace “Not as the world gives” (v. 27), so here, he and the world’s “ruler” have nothing in common.
31 No sooner has Jesus finished distancing himself from “the world” and all it represents than he offers a ray of hope that this dissociation will not last forever. “But”* signals the contrast: “But that the world might come to know that I love the Father, and just as the Father commanded me, thus I do. Rise, let’s get out of here!” (v. 31). We have heard already that Jesus is both “Savior of the world” (4:42) and “Light of the world” (8:12), and that his very flesh is given “for the life of the world” (6:51), and we will hear more later of the hope that “the world” might “believe” (17:21) and “know” (17:23) certain things of which it is now ignorant.* Therefore, his intent “that the world might come to know that I love the Father” is by no means out of place here, even after all he has said of the world’s blindness and hostility to his claims.* Nowhere in the entire Gospel of John (or the entire New Testament for that matter) does Jesus himself ever say either “I love God” or “I love the Father”* except here, but the measure of his love is a familiar one: “just as the Father commanded me, thus I do.” Jesus “loves” the Father in that he keeps the Father’s commands (see 15:10), just as the measure of his disciples’ love for him is that they keep his commands (see vv. 15, 21, 23). Without using the actual word “love,” he has said that the Father “has given me a command what I should say and what I should speak” (12:49), adding that “I know that his command is life eternal; so then the things I speak, just as the Father has told me, thus I speak” (12:50). Earlier, he said, “This command I received from my Father,” referring to his intention of “laying down” his life and “receiving it back” (10:18). Here too it is a matter not of things he is about to “speak” (12:50), but of something he is about to “do”* (v. 31), that is, “lay down his life” and “receive it back.” It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Jesus’ words here place him right on the threshold of the arrest, and the events that will quickly unfold in chapters 18–21. For this reason there has been a growing consensus that at some point in the composition history of the Gospel, this verse was followed immediately by 18:1, “Having said these things, Jesus went out with his disciples across the valley of the Kidron, where there was a garden into which he entered, he and his disciples.” The reader might have been able to infer all this even without the final exclamation, “Rise, let’s get out of here!”* but the added words seem to put the matter beyond doubt.
The whole scene bears a striking resemblance to the synoptic accounts of Jesus and his sleeping disciples in Gethsemane, when Jesus said to them, “Look, the Son of man is handed over into the hands of the sinners. Rise, let us go!* Look, the one handing me over has come near!” (Mk 14:41–42//Mt 26:45–46). As in John’s Gospel, the “one handing over” Jesus is clearly Judas, who immediately makes his appearance (Mk 14:43//Mt 26:47; also Lk 22:47). Jesus is summoning the disciples to wake up and face the approaching enemy. That parallel has largely shaped the interpretation of our text here, where the one “coming” is not explicitly Judas but “the ruler of the world” (v. 30). Here too, most commentators have assumed that Jesus is calling the disciples to confront him head-on, not escape him.
Yet there are differences that give us pause. Chronologically, Jesus’ summons here is parallel not to anything that happened in Gethsemane (which has no place in John’s Gospel), but to the notice at the end of the last supper in Mark and Matthew that “when they had sung a hymn they went out to the Mount of Olives” (Mk 14:26//Mt 26:30). Jesus and the disciples are together at a last meal, not already in the garden, and the disciples are being summoned to get up from the table, not awakened from sleep. The change of location is evident in the wording: not “Rise, let us go!” but “Rise, let’s get out of here!”* accenting flight fully as much as confrontation.* If in fact “the ruler of the world is coming, and in me he has nothing” (v. 30), is that a reason to go out to meet him, or a reason to escape, as Jesus repeatedly escaped before (see 8:59; 10:39; 12:36)? It is difficult to say, because we are not told what the approach of “the ruler of the world” might have meant concretely. “The Jews” and “the Pharisees” who had tried to arrest him before are for the moment out of the picture, so that if Jesus and the disciples are fleeing, it is unclear just what they are fleeing from. Moreover, the intervening words “just as the Father commanded me, thus I do” (v. 31a), evoking the words “not what I want but what you want” (Mk 14:36//Mt 26:39; Lk 22:42), point forward toward the arrest and the passion, just as in the Synoptics, giving the scene a certain finality.
At the end of the day it is doubtful that either the aspect of escape or the aspect of imminent confrontation can be excluded. If there is an aspect of escape, then Jesus may be buying time (as in 8:59, for example), and in the canonical text as it stands, there clearly is still time for considerable instruction on mutual indwelling, love, and impending persecution (15:1–16:33), even for a long prayer (17:1–26), all of it cut off somewhat from its narrative setting. Not until Jesus finally goes out “with his disciples across the valley of the Kidron” (18:1) are we reminded again of the setting in which these chapters have taken place.
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