“I will come to you”

In John 16:5-6, Jesus knew his disciples would be “filled with grief” on hearing he was leaving them, so in his last few days with them he “showed them the full extent of his love,” John 13:1.

How he showed his love included one key point: that yes, he was leaving – but – he would “come back and take you to be with me so you can be with me where I am,” John 14:3. So, yes, “the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me” (19). And he threw in more comments along the same lines, like “I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you” (18), and “I’ll love you and show myself to you” (21), and “we (my Father and I) will come to you and make our home with you” (23).

In which case, verse 28, “If you loved me you’d be glad I’m going to the Father,” because it’s “for your good that I’m going away,” John 16:7. But what “good” would that be? Jesus answered that in verse 7: “If I don’t go away the Counsellor won’t come to you; but if I go I’ll send him to you.” So the “good” that Jesus was leaving them for, was to ask the Father to give the disciples “another Counsellor,” the Spirit, because in the Spirit “living with and in them” (14:16-17), this was how Jesus would “come back” to them.

But come back to do what exactly? It was to “take you to be with me so you can be with me where I am” (14:3). Jesus expressed that same wish in John 17:24 when he said, “Father, I want those you’ve given me to be with me where I am.” He also hinted at it in John 14:19, when he told his disciples, “Because I live you also will live.” In other words, whatever existence Jesus was about to enter, they would enter it with him. So rather than Jesus coming back to them in a physical human body like before, the Spirit would lift the disciples into Jesus’ world, which is where the Spirit would open their minds to the realization in verse 20, that “I (Jesus) am in my Father, you are in me, and I am in you.” 

Jesus dropped a clue to help explain what he meant by that in John 16:32, when he told his disciples, “You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me.” Jesus lived in the constant knowledge of his Father’s love. So when Jesus said, “you are in me and I am in you,” his disciples would experience living in the constant knowledge of his love too – just like they had when he’d been with them in person before. So leaving them wouldn’t change that. What they needed to concentrate on instead, then, according to Jesus in John 15:9, was to “Remain in my love”….(next blog)