“But now I am going to Him who sent Me; and none of you asks Me, “Where are You going?” But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you.” (John 16:5 – 7).
In John 16:5 – 22, Jesus returns to two themes that we saw earlier in the Upper Room, that of His going away and of the Holy Spirit’s coming. This is a reminder for us to read the entire Upper Room passage (chapters 13 – 17) again and again and again until it becomes familiar to us the way a favorite song or piece of music does. There is probably not a week that goes by that I don’t read at least one section of the Upper Room, whether or not I’m writing a series of reflections on it. For years, when Vickie and I go on vacation, my practice is to meditate on John 17 the entire week.
When I ponder the Upper Room, I see myself in the room with Jesus and His disciples; I also see Him in my own room with Me, this is especially true in John 17 – I watch Jesus talking to the Father. The Scriptures are transcendent, the Word of God is heavenly, and when we are in Christ we are made to sit in the heavenlies in Him (Ephesians 2:6). We are called to worship God in Spirit and in truth as our Way of Life (John 4:21 – 24), our worship and koinonia with the Trinity is not confined to a place or to a time.
Let’s note that when Jesus says, “None of you asks Me, ‘Where are you going?’” that in 13:36 Peter says, “Lord, where are You going?” What are we to make of this apparent contradiction?
To begin I’ll mention that John 16:5 – 11 is, I think, a particularly enigmatic passage within an extended passage with many enigmas, with many puzzles and mysteries. I think some of the best words a good teacher can say or write sometimes are, “I don’t know.” After all, isn’t our quest to know Jesus and to love Him more today than we did yesterday? Isn’t friendship with Jesus and love toward Him and others the desire of our heart? We don’t need to “know” everything, but we do desire to love Him with all that we have and all that we are.
It isn’t the end of the world or of the Kingdom of God if we don’t fully understand a passage of the Bible, in fact, acknowledging that God is God and that we are not, and that we don’t have full understanding of the Scriptures can be a very good thing for us, it can remind us of our utter dependence on Him for all wisdom and knowledge (see 1 Corinthians Chapter 2).
This also ought to be a caution against primarily using humanistic approaches to understand and teach the Bible, including those employed by Evangelicals – if our epistemology and hermeneutics are not rooted in Jesus’ teaching on the Holy Spirit and in 1 Corinthians Chapter 2, we have a foundational problem (which we do). Jesus says, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (John 6:63).
We ought not to feel compelled to know everything and to answer every question; but we should certainly feel compelled to pursue Jesus and to love and serve others.
Since when we come to 16:16 – 22 we will spend extended time on Jesus going and coming (as we did in John 14:16 – 22), we’ll move on from verses 5 and 6 for now but return to them when reflecting on 16:16 – 22.
In 14:16 – 17 and 15:26 Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit’s coming. In Luke 24:49 He calls the coming of the Holy Spirit “the Promise of the Father,” and in Luke 24:49 and Acts 1:8 Jesus associates the Holy Spirit with the power for witnessing, of proclaiming Jesus Christ to others, of revealing Jesus in Word and deed to others.
In the Upper Room we see the Holy Spirit both in terms of revealing Jesus to us, the Family of God, and also enabling our witness to the world; while in Luke and Acts we see the Holy Spirit especially in terms of giving us the power to reveal Jesus to the world, to bring others into God’s Family.
In John 14:17 Jesus says that the Holy Spirit “abides with you and will be in you.” Since the Holy Spirit has already been with the disciples, when Jesus speaks of His coming He is speaking of the Holy Spirit coming in a new way, in a way that they have not previously known Him, “He abides with you and will be in you.”
Many things change when Jesus dies on the Cross and conquers death. Many things change when Jesus rises from the dead. Many things change on the Day of Pentecost. Our failure to have a holistic view of the Atonement, of the wonderful and perfect work of Jesus Christ, and our fractured idea of salvation and our virtually nonexistent understanding of sonship – all of this means that we live as blind men and women even though the Light of the world has rescued us from sin and death.
An entirely new creation now lives on earth, a New Man, a new Race (1 Corinthians 15:45 – 48; 2 Corinthians 5:14 – 21). We are now called to live every day and every moment in the Holy of Holies, for the veil has been rent and intimacy with God ought to be our normal Way of life, we see this throughout the Upper Room and we see it in Hebrews 10:19 – 22 and 1 John 1:1 – 4; it is the motif of the New Testament. We have now been placed in Christ Jesus as sons and daughters of the Living God who are coming into their inheritance, crying out, “Daddy! Father!” (Romans 8:14 – 39).
As the Holy Spirit comes to live within us God once again breathes the Spirit of Life into mankind, the very Life of Jesus Christ. Those who are in Christ have the very life of Jesus Christ, the very life of God. Sadly, much (most?) of our teaching denies this glorious reality – if not explicitly, certainly implicitly. While we may have been delivered from Egypt, we are taught that we are still slaves, still sinners, still bearers of the image of fallen humanity.
One of the many reasons I so dearly love the Upper Room is that in it Jesus calls us to intimacy with Himself, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. Jesus calls us to a life that is beautiful and wonderful and so very sweet. Jesus calls us to a life that lies deep inside of us, but which we seldom taste and live. We live as if the veil in the Temple is still blocking the way to intimacy with God, yet Jesus cries, “Come in! Come in! Come in! I have broken down all barriers, you are now holy in Me and have been made whole in Me, come in! Come in!”
How will we respond to Jesus today?
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