‘It Is Good That I Go’

One way to summarize the ‘Farewell Discourse’ in John’s Gospel (chapters 14’17) is with the phrase ‘trading places.’ In this discourse, the judicial and transformative aspects of the Spirit’s ministry converge, and Jesus impresses upon the hearts of his confused and fearful disciples that his departure is a net gain. We need Jesus Christ ‘enfleshed in our glorified humanity’ at the Father’s right hand, ruling and subduing the enemies of his kingdom and interceding for us. But we also need the Holy Spirit to accomplish what only he can: to work within us to bring about repentance and faith, and to intercede within us so that we relate to the Father in joy as his adopted children rather than in fear (Rom. 8:15).

Before his ascension, Jesus tells the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for ‘the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about.’ In just ‘a few days,’ he tells them, they ‘will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you’ (Acts 1:4’5, 8; cf. Luke 24:49). We do not have to speculate about what the disciples ‘heard [Jesus] speak about’ concerning the Holy Spirit. Whatever else he said about the Spirit must have been an elaboration on what he had spoken to them in the Farewell Discourse, which Jesus said they would understand only later.

This discourse (John 14:16) occurs in the upper room during Passover and the institution of the Lord’s Supper: ‘For this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’ (Matt. 26:28). And it is provoked especially by Jesus’ announcement of his departure. First, Peter asks him:

‘Lord, where are you going?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward.’ Peter said to him, ‘Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.’ Jesus answered, ‘Will you lay down your life for me? Truly, truly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow till you have denied me three times.’ (John 13:36-38)

Then Thomas asks him:

‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ (John 14:5-6)

After all that, Philip pleads, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us’ (John 14:8). Philip’s question is the last straw. Jesus seems exasperated by the failure of the disciples to understand that he is the way: ‘Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?’ (v. 9). Happily, for our sake, these questions provoked Jesus’ most thorough explanation of the Spirit’s mission. He performs the exodus, assumes his conquest-throne, and sends the Spirit to distribute the spoils of victory.

The answer to the disciples’ anxious questions (John 14:1-14) is not to downplay the reality of his departure until he returns in the flesh; rather, it is to promise the Holy Spirit (14:15-31). Just as Jesus went to the cross alone and was raised alone, he ascended to the Father alone, even as the disciples scattered. Only he could perform this work. And yet he performed it as a public, rather than private, person. Jesus not only shows the way: he is the way. They cannot follow him now to where he is going. But they will be united to Jesus after his ascension in a new yet even more intimate way after Pentecost. The disciples will no longer merely walk by Jesus’ side and eat and drink common meals with him. The Spirit will unite them to Christ like branches to a vine (John 15). Because of his work, they will be able truly to eat his flesh and drink his blood for eternal life, as he promised in John 6. The disciples are already clean because they belong to him; already fruit-bearing branches because they belong to the vine. They are, says Jesus, no longer to be called servants but friends. ‘You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you’ (15:15’16). The fruit is love, particularly for one another in the communion of saints (v. 17). They will be a new family, around which a new humanity will grow.

The Paraclete is the answer to their anxiety about Jesus’ departure. Why would Jesus desert them in this hour when they are on the brink of establishing the Messiah on the throne of his father David in Jerusalem? The pattern of Jesus’ course over the next few days recapitulates the pattern familiar to the disciples: Israel’s story of exodus, conquest, and the distribution of the inheritance to each of the twelve tribes. It is, however, no rerun of past episodes. Rather, it is the reality for which the old covenant pattern was merely a preview of coming attractions.

Jesus identifies the Spirit as ‘another parakletos.’ Commentators’and even translators’have frequently sought to distinguish the Spirit from Jesus by identifying the former as ‘comforter’ rather than ‘advocate.’ Already in the early third century, Origen observed that ‘in the Greek [parakletos] bears both meanings.’ Nevertheless, ‘in regard to the Savior ‘paraclete’ seems to mean intercessor.’ When used of the Holy Spirit, however, the word ‘paraclete’ ought to be understood as ‘comforter,’ because he provides comfort to the souls to whom he opens and reveals a consciousness of spiritual knowledge.’ (1)

Though possible lexically, the translation ‘comforter’ hardly catches the courtroom image with which this term was frequently associated. In rabbinical literature, it meant ‘advocate’ or ‘attorney,’ contrasted with ‘accuser’ (Avot 4:11). ‘Whosoever is summoned before the court for capital punishment is saved only by powerful advocates’ (Shabbat 32a) echoes Job 33:23-24. Furthermore, the sin offering is spoken of as an interceding paraclete (Sifra, Me?ora‘ 3:3; Tos. Parah 1:1). And in modern Hebrew, a paraklit is a solicitor/attorney. (2) Most translations render parakletos ‘advocate’ in 1 John 2:1. (3) Furthermore, Origen seems to have overlooked Romans 8:26’27 when he says that ‘in regard to the Savior ‘paraclete’ seems to mean intercessor.’ After all, the apostle applies this intercessory role to the Spirit as well in those verses. The decision for ‘comforter’ in relation to the Spirit is therefore determined by a concern to distinguish Christ’s work from the Spirit’s. I think this is the wrong distinction. The Son and the Spirit are engaged in a judicial operation. Jesus himself said that the Holy Spirit is ‘another paraclete’ (allos parakletos), and the role he attributes to the Spirit is obviously legal.

When this ‘other attorney’ comes, Jesus instructs, ‘he will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment‘ (vv. 8-9). The verb for convict here (elegchein) means ‘to expose.’ Satan is judged already (vv. 10-11). Through Jesus’ victory, the prosecutor of the brethren is defeated, so that the prosecutor of the world and justifier of believers can begin his recovery mission. The primary reference is to what will happen at Pentecost. Of course, the effects will reverberate outward in concentric circles to the ends of the earth. However, Peter’s Pentecost sermon reveals each aspect of the work that Jesus here attributes to the Spirit as the inner witness to his external word. Peter prosecutes the case against them (‘You put him to death’), while also proclaiming God’s righteousness (‘But God raised him from the dead’) and judgment (‘it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him’). Therefore, through the external word of conviction, righteousness, and judgment, the Holy Spirit inwardly convicts and assures. Without this work of the Spirit within, the external proclamation would not have led to its profound effect: ‘Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?” (Acts 2:37). And ‘about three thousand were added to their number that day’ (Acts 2:41). (4) Everything that Jesus promised Peter and the other disciples in his discourse was actually fulfilled at Pentecost’and is still being fulfilled today.

The Spirit’s ministry is not to add something to Jesus’ work, but to remind the disciples of what Jesus has said (John 16:12). This is the basis for the New Testament as revealed Scripture. Just as Jesus didn’t speak on his own authority, but spoke what his Father told him, so now the Spirit will speak the word of Christ and keep the church in the truth. The Trinitarian fellowship is obvious: The Father sent the Son, and the Son took what belonged to the Father and gave it to his people; the Son returned to the Father, gave to his Father the people entrusted to him, and then sent the Spirit who ‘will take what is mine and declare it to you’ (v. 14). We can therefore be certain where the Spirit is active in power: it is wherever Christ is being proclaimed in his saving office for the forgiveness of sins, justification, and an inheritance in the new creation.

We see the qualitative difference that Pentecost brings. Even with Jesus among them, the disciples stand on the old covenant side of the great divide of the two ages. In John 14:16, Jesus distinguishes between the Spirit’s presence now (‘he dwells with you’) and his presence after Pentecost (‘he will be in you’). Whatever graces of the Holy Spirit, whatever forms of his presence for the saints of old, Jesus speaks in the future tense of the Spirit’s indwelling all of his saints. Indeed, ‘I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you,’ Jesus pledges, referring to Pentecost rather than to his second coming. (5) He identifies his own presence with that of the Holy Spirit. Jesus will be with his people in a more intimate way after his ascension than before, because his Spirit will live within us and unite us to Christ. The Spirit is waiting for the cry, ‘It is finished’ ‘for the tearing of the curtain in the temple he has long since abandoned; and then he will fill his true temple in the upper room and begin the last judgment by sentencing guilty sinners and justifying, sanctifying, and glorifying them in Christ.

In relating the Son and the Spirit, there are two dangers to be avoided: confusing and separating them. It is certainly true that the Son and the Spirit exist eternally in an ineffable union of essence. However, I do not think that this is the Johannine emphasis as much as the association of the Spirit with Jesus in the economy’in ‘these last days.’ Here the stress is on the one work in which they are engaged, yet differently as befits their distinct persons and roles. The Holy Spirit is ‘the Spirit of Christ’’not lowercase ‘s’ as if to identify the Third Person with Jesus’ human soul. While remaining a distinct person from Christ, his presence in these last days is Christ’s presence. But they have distinct ministries in the different stages of redemption. Thus unity and distinction are both evident in this discourse. Jesus says, ‘But when the Paraclete comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, he will testify of me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning’ (15:26; emphasis added). The Spirit never confuses himself with Jesus. On the contrary, it is by focusing his ministry on the work of Christ that the Spirit’s difference, as well as unity with him, is demonstrated. Yet precisely in doing so, the presence of the Spirit is identified as the presence of Christ himself.

Blurring the distinctions between the Son and the Spirit’and then, between Christ and the church’has become a dominant tendency in much of contemporary theology. This tendency is discernable even in the otherwise helpful work of theologian and Eastern Orthodox metropolitan John Zizioulas. Although I agree wholeheartedly that pneumatology (study of the Holy Spirit) is a crucial (and often missing) link between Christ and his church, I demur from his conclusion in Being as Communion that this means ‘there is no gap to fill by the means of grace.’ (6) This reflects an over-realized eschatology. I would argue that it is precisely because of the Spirit’s work in these last days that there is both a real union with Christ and a gap to fill by his return. Therefore, the means of grace remain crucial in this semi-realized era of Christ’s kingdom. Zizioulas adds, ‘The Holy Spirit makes real’¦Christ’s personal existence as a body or community.’ Consequently, ‘All separation between Christology and ecclesiology vanishes in the Spirit.’ (7) Zizioulas is to be commended for a more robustly pneumatological perspective on Christology and ecclesiology. However, a proper pneumatology will preserve rather than resolve the ‘distinction without separation.’ Christology and ecclesiology remain distinct because Christ forever remains the head rather than the body, and yet Christ and his church are not separated because the Holy Spirit unites the members to the head. As in the analogy of husband and wife, Christ’s relationship with his church is a union and communion rather than a fusion of persons (Eph. 5:23’32).

The tendency to conflate Jesus and the Spirit is evident also in Raymond Brown’s argument in the Gospel According to John: ‘The Paraclete is the presence of Jesus when Jesus is absent’’indeed, ‘another Jesus.’ (8) I suggest that this reflects an over-realized eschatology that tends to collapse Jesus into the Spirit and then both into the church as a continuing incarnation. (9) It fails to appreciate Jesus’ promise to send the Spirit as ‘another Paraclete.’ Taking its cue from Augustine’s concept of the totus Christus (‘the whole Christ’ as the head of his church), there is a recurring emphasis in Roman Catholic ecclesiologies on collapsing the historical Christ into the church. (10)

It was good for Jesus to go to his Father, not because the Spirit would replace him but precisely because the Spirit is different in his person and operations from the Son. Jesus has accomplished what only he could and is still fulfilling his mediatorial office in heaven. But now we need the Spirit to accomplish what only he can, given his distinctive role in the economy of grace.

The further conflation of the pneumatic Christ with the church leads inevitably to a domestication of the Spirit’reducing him to the immanence of ecclesial being and action. However, this is not only a Roman Catholic temptation. It reaches an extreme in the conviction of Russian Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov that the church is the incarnation of the Spirit. (11) Yet increasingly in Protestant, even evangelical, theological circles there is slippery talk of the church as the extension of Christ’s incarnation, whether the church is understood as an institution or a charismatic community.

In spite of the emphasis on the free Spirit who descends where he will, even in Pentecostal and charismatic circles, the tendency to treat the Spirit as a possession of the individual believer or a particular movement of revival is evident. A chapter in Pentecostal theologian Frank Macchia’s Baptized in the Spirit is titled ‘Christ the King and the Spirit the Kingdom.’ (12) First of all, there is the depersonalizing tendency: the Spirit not as the one who brings the kingdom to completion but simply as the kingdom. Does this not belong to the history that speaks of the Spirit as ‘the bond of love’ or ‘the fellowship of the Father and the Son’? Would it not strike us as odd to hear the Father or the Son spoken of as ‘the kingdom’? Second, rendering the Spirit identical to the kingdom makes him just as indistinguishable from the field of his agency as it does to say that the church is the Spirit’s incarnation. One serious cost of such immanentizing of the Spirit (and over-realized eschatology) is that a church, kingdom, individual, world, or movement that simply is the Spirit cannot be brought into being, sustained, and led into the consummation by the Spirit. It cannot be judged or saved; it cannot hear a word that is external to itself.

Therefore, we must not run too quickly past the ascension to Pentecost. Where is Jesus? He has ascended bodily to the right hand of the Father, from whence he will return at the end of the age to judge the living and the dead. Everything that Jesus had taught them in the upper room before his death is now about to be fulfilled. And yet, just at this point when they are prepared for conquest’with the Greater Joshua as their leader’Jesus leaves.

And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold two men stood by them in white robes, and said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’ (Acts 1:9’11)

Understandably, the disciples were stunned. At first, it must have seemed as if they had been bereaved of their Master once more. We must join the disciples in their anxiety over the Lord’s heavenly repatriation before we can experience the full impact of the Spirit’s advent.

In one sense, Jesus is absent, and the church has to fully accept this fact. Jesus is not the Holy Spirit or the church or the inner soul of the pious individual or community. His absence from us in the flesh underscores the difference from the head and members of this new commonwealth. Not even his omnipresent deity can save us from the longing for his bodily return. Instead of looking away from the absent Jesus, taken up from us in the cloud, we must reckon fully with this fact if we are to appreciate the glorified humanity we share with him by the unique work of the Holy Spirit.

In another sense, though, Jesus is present’and not simply in his omnipresent divinity. It would require the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost for them to realize the comfort of Jesus’ earlier instruction: ‘I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you’ (John 14:18’20). At Pentecost they will come to know Jesus in a way that had completely eluded them. They will know Jesus not simply as a unique individual, but as the eschatological Vine, Head, Cornerstone, and Firstfruits of the New Creation in whom they share. Jesus can say ‘I will come to you’ (John 14:18) because the Holy Spirit is the One who ‘will take what is mine and declare it to you’ (John 16:14). Though he departed in the flesh, he is present not only in his divinity but in the power of his indwelling Spirit who unites us to his glorified humanity in heaven.

Once we accept the real difference between the ascended Savior and the indwelling Spirit, the real unity between them and their work becomes visible in the different things that they do in one and the same work of salvation. Paradoxically, the Spirit is responsible both for the Son’s departure and for uniting us to the Son who has departed’in a new way never experienced, even yet by the disciples.

This intimate relationship that Jesus divulges in the Farewell Discourse of John’s Gospel is also apparent in the Pauline corpus. Strictly speaking, Jesus does not indwell believers. And yet, Jesus and the Holy Spirit become somewhat interchangeable characters in the Epistles. The Spirit by whom the Son became incarnate was also present at the cross. We are redeemed by ‘the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God’ (Heb. 9:14; emphasis added). The Spirit raised Jesus from the dead (Rom. 1:4;1 Tim. 3:16; 1 Pet. 3:18). Once more, the external works of the Godhead remain undivided: Christ’s resurrection is attributed also to the Father (Acts 2:32; 17:31; Rom. 6:4; 8:11; 1 Cor. 15:15) and to the Son himself (John 2:19’21; 10:17’18). However, each is responsible for the resurrection according to his own distinct attributes and actions. The Spirit’s role in the resurrection was to make Jesus’ humanity the life-giving firstfruits of the new creation (Rom. 1:4). Adam became ‘a living being’ by the Spirit’s breath, but the last Adam is for us ‘a life-giving spirit’ (1 Cor. 15:45’47).

As Sinclair Ferguson observes concerning Romans 8:9’10, ‘Here, clearly, the statements ‘Spirit of God lives in you,’ ‘have the Spirit of Christ,’ and ‘Christ is in you’ are three ways of describing a single reality of the indwelling of the Spirit.’ (13) No longer a body of death, Christ’s humanity ‘has become a body of glory’ (Phil. 3:21). It is now ‘spiritual’’not as opposed to physical, but as glorified and life-giving spirit. Ferguson writes:

Such is the fullness of the Spirit into which Jesus entered at the resurrection that Paul is able to say that ‘the last Adam [became] a life-giving Spirit’ (1 Cor. 15:45). Thus, to have the Spirit is to have Christ; to have Christ is to have the Spirit’¦.In this sense, through the resurrection and ascension, Christ ‘became life-giving Spirit.’ The explanation for this is found in a further remarkable statement: ‘Now the Lord [the antecedent is ‘Christ,’ 2 Cor. 3:13] is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit’ (2 Cor. 3:17’18).’¦In effect, Paul is teaching that through his life and ministry Jesus came into such complete possession of the Spirit, receiving and experiencing him ‘without limit’ (Jn. 3:34), that he is now ‘Lord’ of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18). With respect to his economic ministry to us, the Spirit has been ‘imprinted’ on the character of Jesus. This is precisely what it means for Jesus to send him as allos paraklÄ?tos. (14)

Paul prays that the Father ‘may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith’ (Eph. 3:17; emphasis added). (15) From now on, the Son’s identity is shaped by the Spirit, the Spirit’s is shaped by the incarnate Son’s ministry, and we are being shaped into Christ’s likeness by the Spirit ‘from one degree of glory to another’ (2 Cor. 3:17’18). (16)