“I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12).
We educate so that students may obtain good jobs, make money, and be successful. In the past we educated so that students would develop character, live responsibly, and contribute to society. I had a professor who studied obituaries from the 19th century and compared them with obituaries of the 20 century; those of the 19th century tended to speak of character, those of the 20th century of accomplishment and personality.
Our utilitarian society employs utilitarian education which produces utilitarian people. If a thing is of no use, it is of no value. If a person is of no use, he is of no value. We consume things, we consume knowledge, and we consume people.
We educate accordingly…and we bring this paradigm of education, this pedagogy, into the church. We look at the Bible as a database to be used, rather than as God’s Word which calls us to submission. We seek to form the Bible into our image, rather than allow the Holy Spirit and the Word to form us into the image of Jesus Christ.
We also deceive ourselves when we speak of values in that values are changeable, whereas virtue is not. Our core values today may not be our core values tomorrow, for that which is not tethered to the transcendent is tethered to nothing. Are we using a compass or a weathervane to navigate life? (Ponder Paul’s list of virtues in Philippians 4:8).
If we think that “knowledge is power” then we are deceived, for true knowledge entails responsibility and service to others and ought to result in the formation of character. Our foolish first parents thought knowledge was power and we are still paying the price for their foolishness.
The reason I’m writing these things is that in John 16:12 – 15 Jesus is speaking to us of the Holy Spirit revealing Jesus to us, showing us what is to come (we’ll explore this), and of us being on a trajectory of growth in Him. There were things the disciples couldn’t yet bear, and there are things we cannot yet bear. Jesus is not speaking to us about knowing “things” apart from knowing Him, but about actually knowing Him; He is not speaking about us knowing information but rather about us personally knowing the Trinity – the Upper Room leads us into the Holy of Holies of John Chapter 17.
Are we teaching information in the church, or are we modeling what it looks like to follow Jesus? When teach the Bible, are we demonstrating seeing Jesus in the entire Bible, or are we teaching the Bible as data? Are we portraying Jesus Christ, or are we disseminating information about Jesus Christ? Can we can believe all the right things and yet not know Jesus? Are we teaching others to know our voices, or are we teaching them to know the Voice of Jesus?
Let us not gloss over what Jesus is saying in John 16:12 – 15, rather let us “receive with meekness the engrafted Word of God which is able to save our souls” (James 1:21).
Let us always recall that our Father desires that we be conformed to the image of Jesus, that He might be the Firstborn among many brothers and sisters – relationship, relationship, relationship! (Romans 8:29).
How do we see Jesus in His words, “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now”?
Our first thought may be that within a few hours Jesus will be betrayed, arrested, tortured, murdered, and buried. The disciples could only absorb so much, and the shock that was coming would disorient them in unimaginable ways. While Jesus had been telling them about His impending death for weeks, they did not understand what He was saying, it was simply too much, too far out of their realm of comprehension.
What the disciples were hearing in the Upper Room was also beyond their clear vision and understanding, the things Jesus was saying to them were other worldly – and would become more so moving into the balance of Chapter 16 and then through Chapter 17. If we do not have a sense of how radical John chapters 13 – 17 are, then we have never experienced the passage…that is the most charitable thing I can write.
To be sure, the entire Gospel of John is replete with other - worldly words of Jesus, words which the disciples may have seldom understood, but words which they could experience to some degree.
What may have Nathanael thought when Jesus said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man” (John 1:51)?
Then in Chapter Two John writes, upon looking back, “His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for Your house will consume Me’” (2:17). And then, “He was speaking of the temple of His body” (2:21).
Or in 7:39, “But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus says things that either make no sense, or which the disciples only partially see and understand. Therefore, His statement that He has many more things to say but that the disciples cannot handle them yet, is both an acknowledgment of the horror and pressure about to descend on the disciples, as well as a continuation of a dynamic we’ve seen throughout the Gospel of John, as well as throughout Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Isn’t it encouraging that Jesus has many things to say to us? Our God is a God of communication, so much so that the Son is termed “the Word” (John 1:1).
But here is something I hope we see, after the Resurrection Jesus did not do a data dump on the disciples and then say, “Okay, now go for it, go do your own thing. I’ve given you all the information you need.” God does not hand out diplomas in this life, His diplomas are bestowed when we appear before Him and the saints – and they are not awarded on what we know, but on how we have loved and served Him and others.
For example, the title Acts of the Apostles can be misleading in that it can focus our attention on what the apostles did, rather than how they and the Church grew into the image of Jesus Christ.
Consider, for example, the following passages: Mark 7:14 – 23; John 4:7 – 38; Acts Chapter 10:1 – 11:18; 15:1 – 35; Galatians 2:1 – 21; Ephesians 2:11 – 4:16.
We’ll do an overview of these passages, the Lord willing, in our next reflection. What do you see in them? What is the storyline?
How might they relate to what Jesus is saying in John 16:12?
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