What kind of miracles?

What kind of miracles did Jesus have in mind in John 14:14, when he said to his disciples, “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it”? His reply was: anything that “brings glory to the Father” (13). 

Because that was Jesus’ focus: it was the awesomeness, brilliance, majesty, love and wisdom of the Father, which Jesus had unique knowledge of since “No one (else) had ever seen God, but God the only Son who is at his Father’s side” (1:18). And “No one has ever gone up into the presence of God (either), except the One who came down from that Presence, the Son of Man” (3:13). 

So Jesus, with his unique knowledge of the Father, “came from heaven” (3:31) to “testify to what he’d seen and heard” of the Father (32) – having been the only human who’d personally heard the Father’s “words” (34) and experienced the Father’s “love” (35). 

It was Jesus’ job as a human, then, “to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work” (4:34), the aim of that work being us humans “worshipping the Father in spirit and in truth” (23) – “worship” meaning that the awesomeness, brilliance, majesty, love and wisdom of the Father would become our focus too. Because not only would the “truth” of what the Father is like hit us, so would the relationship we can have with him on the same “spirit” level that Jesus has with him.

So Jesus’ work was cut out for him, but he was given “the Spirit without limit” by the Father (3:34), so the Father could live his likeness and love in Jesus as a human (14:10-11) – and to such perfection that when Philip asked Jesus to “show us the Father” in John 14:8, Jesus could reply, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (9). Because being a perfect reflection of him was what the Father had sent Jesus to be.

At the end of his life Jesus could then say to his Father, “I have brought you glory on earth,” John 17:4, “by completing the work you gave me to do” – the work, that is, of “revealing you to those you gave me out of the world” (6).

Because that’s the miracle Jesus wanted most for his disciples. But how does he make that miracle happen in our lives today, when he isn’t here with us like he was with his disciples? He answered that in his request to his Father in the last part of verse 26: “That I myself may be in them”….(next blog)