I hate preaching from John and I love preaching from John!I hate preaching from John because there is so much here and some of it is very complicated. But I love preaching from John because there is so much here, and there are always new truths to discover. John’s gospel is like a mine – the deeper you dig, the larger and the more precious are the jewels that you draw up.
Today is no different. Although I fear that we are not going to dig very deep. We are simply scraping over the topsoil.
Audio of the talk
In John chapters 13-17, Jesus is speaking to his disciples. It is his last night with them. These are his final words. That very evening he will be betrayed by Judas and arrested. That very night he will be tried and sentenced. The following day, at about 9am, he will be nailed to a cross and at about 3pm he will die.
Jesus knows that his followers will be crushed. He knows that they will be lost and broken, feel abandoned and utterly hopeless. He knows that they will want to give up – to give up on the hope that he held out to them, to give up on all that he taught and on all he has commanded them.
And so he is speaking to them.
We live after the resurrection. We know that Jesus came back. We know in our heads that he is alive. But there are many times in our experience when it seems that Jesus has gone AWOL, when the ‘reasoning’ of the world (that does not see God or know God) seems so persuasive, when our prayers are not answered, when there is no sense of communion with him, when we feel abandoned.
Well I think Jesus is also speaking to us.
1.Jesus promises them that they won’t give up. He says, ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments’.
Jesus does not say, ‘If you love me, you should keep my commandments’.This is not a condition. It is not a test. It is a simple statement, even – maybe – a promise. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments”.
In other words, Jesus is saying that even if he is taken from them, if they love him, they won’t give up. He is saying that even if we feel abandoned by him, if we love him we will keep his commandments.
Even if I am not with you, he says, you will hold on to my teaching. And you will continue to obey, even when it gets difficult.
It makes a lot of sense. If we are beginning to love Jesus then we will want to please him and do what he says If we are beginning to love Jesus, then we will do what he says, even if it is difficult or we don’t understand why, because we are learning to trust him. If we are beginning to love Jesus, then we will be beginning to learn to love what he loves and desire what he desires. So of course, we will want to do what he says.
We will want to love our brothers and sisters. That is the great command that Jesus gives in John. He is speaking to his followers, and he commands them, ‘to love one another’. And we will want to love them because we share with them one Spirit, one hope, one destiny. And we are beginning to love what they are beginning to love. We love Jesus. We will want to love others because we will see them as women and men, girls and boys who are beloved of God; We will want to do whatever we can to work for the wellbeing of others: the material and spiritual wellbeing. We will long to see each human flourish and we will begin to hate injustice. And we want to do whatever we can to work for peace - that we will be at peace with each other, and that they will be at peace with God. And so we will say sorry when we have hurt others, we will forgive when others hurt us, we will pray for our enemies, we will kneel down and wash the feet of others, even those who will betray us. And if we love him, we will want to be faithful to the end, to ‘remain’ in his love, to keep on growing in our faith, in our understanding and in our love.
Jesus reassures his followers. He is simply stating a fact: ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments.’
2.Jesus promises them the Holy Spirit.
“I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever”.
It is hard – no, impossible – to do that on our own. But Jesus tells them that he will ask the Father to give them the Spirit.
He describes the Spirit as the parakletos, translated as Advocate, Helper, Interceder, the one who comes alongside us and who speaks to us of God and for us to God.
He is the Spirit of Truth. He reveals to us the Truth: the truth of God, of the love of God, of our need for God. He ignites in us the spark of love for God and for Jesus, the Son of God. He gives us a longing for God; He will begin to open us up to the word of God and open the word of God to us. He will help us to understand and to receive the word of God. He helps us ‘to remember’ what Jesus has said. He helps us to pray, to cry out to God in love and longing, and even prays within us.
Another word used in older translations for parakletos is ‘Comforter’. We tend not to use that now because ‘comforter’ has changed its meaning. We think of comfort blankets, of comfort foods, comfort zones. We think of fluffy slippers and sitting on the sofa under a warm duvet. But in the past comfort had a much stronger meaning. It meant to come alongside and strengthen someone: ‘com-fort’.
In the Bayeux tapestry, which depicts William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066, there is a scene under which there is an inscription, ‘Bishop Odo comforts the troops’. It shows Bishop Odo of Bayeux with a great big club rallying the troops.
And the Holy Spirit rallies us, equips us and encourages us in our service of God. It is the Holy Spirit who gets us out of our chair and onto our knees. It is the Holy Spirit who moves us out of our comfort zones, to love and serve others.
So Jesus, about to be taken from them, promises that they will not be left on their own. Another Advocate will come, another person who will take his place speaking to them of God and for them to God. And this Advocate, the Spirit of Truth will never leave them.
3.Jesus promises that he will come back to them
‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you’ (14.18)
Jesus is going away from them.It is hard in John to work out whether he is talking about his crucifixion and death, or whether he is talking about the time after his ascension (which we remember on Thursday) when he is taken into heaven.
But I guess it doesn’t really matter. Jesus promises the disciples that whatever happens, he will not leave them orphaned. He will come back to them. Jesus has already said this to them earlier in John 14. He has said that he is going away ‘to prepare a place for them’. He continues, “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also”. John 14:3
But this is not only a promise for them. It is also a promise for us. I have spoken of two people who I know who have seen the Lord Jesus, but that is the exception. Those who love him today are called to live by faith and not sight.There are times when we experience the presence of the Lord Jesus with us – when he is so real.But there are also times when it seems that he has been taken from us, when he has gone from us.
But this is the promise.That because he did rise from the dead, that because he lives, even though we cannot see him, we will live.And that he will not leave us orphaned. He will come to us. He will come to us at times in the little ways, the encouragements, the feelings of spiritual closeness. He will come to us through other people and the words of the Bible, and through those marks of his presence with us: the bread and wine and water and oil. All we need to do is hang on in there, with the help of the Holy Spirit who has been given us and wait with expectation. But one day he will return for us and we will see him in the most real way possible: As John writes in his letter: “What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is”. (1 John 3.2)
In both the section about the coming of the Spirit and the seeing of Jesus, Jesus warns his disciples that even though they will know the Spirit, even though they will ‘see’ him, the world will be blind to him.
It is the flip side of loving him. If you set your love on the things of this visible world, if you live for the things of this visible world (for status, stuff and sex) – then you will be blind to God. You will not know the Spirit and you will not ‘see’ Jesus – either with the eyes of faith now, or with the eyes that we are given in the resurrection body.
I guess we know that. Talking with someone about God when they have no spiritual interest whatsoever, is like bashing your head against a brick wall. It can seem so obvious to us, and yet they just cannot see. As Jesus says, ‘The world cannot receive [the Spirit of Truth], because it neither sees him nor knows him. And the answer, in those cases, is not better or louder arguments, not greater incentives or more effective threats, but more desperate prayers and greater love.
4.Jesus promises them that they will share in the life of God, in the life the Trinity
‘On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you’ (v20)
On that day – well it is the day of resurrection, that first Easter when Jesus rose from the dead – on that day they did begin to understand the relationship between the Father and his beloved Son, and they did begin to understand that they could come to know the Father as Jesus knew him. But it was only the beginning.
But I suspect that, ‘that day’ is the day when we see Jesus face to face in heaven.
And then we will understand.Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13: ‘Now we understand dimly, like looking through frosted glass – but then we will understand fully, as we are fully understood’.
We will understand truly the love between the Father and the Son, the delight that the Father has in the Son, and that the Son has for the Father. We will see that for all eternity they are part of each other, belong to each other, that the heart of one is the heart of the other. And we will begin to realize that we too are part of that relationship, because we are part of Jesus. We will be beloved, and we will love. And it is then that we will fully discover our truest identity, our deepest belonging, our greatest glory and our perfect destiny.
