It Is for Your Good That I Am Going Away

There are sentences of Jesus that sound wrong on first hearing, and this is one of them. He tells the disciples that it is for their good that he is going away. Grief has filled their hearts, he says, and then he tells them the grief is misplaced. Unless he goes, the Advocate will not come. If he goes, he will send him.

Consider what the disciples had. They had Jesus in the flesh, within reach, in one place at a time. When he was in Galilee he was not in Jerusalem. When he slept, he was not teaching. When he was arrested, he was gone. The Spirit, by contrast, would be in each of them and with all of them, everywhere, without interruption. What they were about to lose was real. What they were about to receive was more.

Jesus describes the Spirit's work in two directions. Toward the world, the Spirit will prove it wrong about sin, righteousness, and judgment. Toward the disciples, he will guide them into all truth, speaking what he hears, telling them what is to come, and glorifying Jesus by taking what is his and making it known. The Spirit's ministry is not to draw attention to himself. It is to make Jesus present and clear.

The one idea to hold is that Jesus' absence in body is not a deficit the church has learned to live with. It is the arrangement he chose because it was better. Believers sometimes wish they could have walked with him in Galilee. Jesus says, in effect, that you have something the Galilean crowds did not. His Spirit is in you.

Chapter 16 opens with a warning that the disciples will be put out of synagogues and that some who kill them will think they are serving God. Jesus tells them these things so that when the time comes they will remember he said them. The Spirit's presence does not mean the road is smooth. It means the road is not walked alone. The turn toward life is to stop treating the Spirit as a doctrine and start treating him as the promised presence he is. Talk to him. Ask him to take what is Jesus' and make it known to you. That is what he came to do, and Jesus went away so that he could.