John 14:15-31
Jesus Promises the Holy Spirit
15 “If you love me, keep my commands. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. 18 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 21 Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”
22 Then Judas (not Judas Iscariot) said, “But, Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?”
23 Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. 24 Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.
25 “All this I have spoken while still with you. 26 But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. 27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
28 “You heard me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. 29 I have told you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe. 30 I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me, 31 but he comes so that the world may learn that I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me.
“Come now; let us leave.
John 14:5-6
Jesus is the Only Way
5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”
St. John writes much about Jesus talking about heavenly things…This should not surprise us, because He is from heaven…Understanding how we are to be reborn, and how we are to receive the Holy Spirit and what the Holy Spirit is, are hard concepts for us to understand, and not for Jesus of course…He is telling us things about His home in heaven, and what we need to learn and try to understand to help get us there…
Jesus says some very interesting things here to His disciples and to Nicodemus…He promises the Twelve to send them the Holy Spirit…He was going to send them a Counselor, a Connection to Him and His Father, the Spirit of Truth…This Connection, this Spirit of Truth, this Holy Spirit, is coming from Jesus (and only from Him)…Maybe this ties to His earlier statement that the only way to the Father is through Me (John 14:6)…He tries to explain to Nicodemus (and us) about the difficulties of understanding how we must be reborn and these other difficult things, to the Twelve…
When Jesus said that His Father is greater than I, what could have He meant…He could have meant that the Father is greater than Him, while He was on earth…Because while Jesus was in the flesh, we know that the flesh is weak…Then when He returned to His Father in heaven, maybe they would return to being equal, if they were, in fact, equal all along… But maybe the Father in the Trinity is greater than the Son…If this is the case then maybe the Holy Spirit lesser than the Son…So the Father and Son maybe greater than the Holy Spirit…And the Father, which is greater than the Son, is therefore greater than the Holy Spirit in the Trinity…But this is only a guess, because these things are of heaven and are heavenly things…
The Father being the Greatest and the Father being greater than Jesus makes sense to me…The Holy Spirit that Jesus promises His disciples, could do great things and great miracles…But clearly we see in the Acts of the Apostles and in Paul’s epistles, as they are carried along by the Holy Spirit, they do not have the same aura, the divine charisma, the miracle worker ability that Jesus has had in His three year ministry…
But we do know that one, the Father is divine…We also know that two, His Son, Jesus is divine…And three we know that the Holy Spirit, that Jesus promised to send to the disciples is divine…The Trinity, who is our Father and Son, and our Connection to the Divine Two is also divine…
Many of His words here are mystique…They are mysterious…They are hard to understand…It must be that way because, He is from above, and we are from the earth, and only know the earthly things that we have learned…His words and testimony are from heaven and are about heavenly things…No one at this time, the time of Jesus, has ever gone into heaven…He is the exception, because He is the One who comes from heaven (John 3:13)…These things are hard to understand, because we do not understand heaven like He does…When we cannot comprehend and understand all the things on earth, it will be much harder to try to understand the things that He talks about in heaven (John 3:12)…We should not want it any other way…God must be a mystique, in a sense…He must know more than us…After all He is all knowing…He is in control…He is our Almighty Father…This is what we should want…Our faith should want it no other way…