“I AM COMING TO YOU” The Johannine Witness
John 1:1—21:25 John 16:13-15: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
INTRODUCTION
Although Pentecost is three Sundays behind us we continue our attention to the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church, to us, his people. We complete the rewritten first chapter of When Jesus Said Goodbye: John’s Witness to the Holy Spirit (1996).
As we noted in the Preface, the Fourth Gospel appeals to us as much in what it evokes as in what it clearly states. In his Gospel, John, taught by the Spirit, interprets the presence of the risen Jesus to the Church in his day. We explore this Johannine witness to the Holy Spirit in an attempt to present a helpful understanding of the Holy Spirit accurate to the John’s witness to Jesus and the Spirit. We briefly review our earlier presentation as we come again to the first chapter:
1. "Peace I Leave with You" John 14:26-27; 16:33; 20:21-22
“But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
“I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage: I have conquered the world.”
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
"My 'peace' is my gift to you,' were the words of Jesus as he imparted the gift of the Holy Spirit to his disciples. Jesus’ gift of peace contained the full meaning of the biblical blessing of peace—and more: "never had that 'common word' been so filled with meaning as when Jesus uttered it on Easter evening” with the impartation of “the peace of reconciliation and life from God.” Yet, this good-bye peace of Jesus to His disciples, presupposes a most difficult question for the human intellect, one that leads to an answer possible only to faith, and that is
The question of Jesus 13:31-38; 16:17-20
This question at the heart of the farewell discourses in the Gospel (13:1--17:26) is that posed by Jesus' departure from his disciples. The disciples were left bewildered and torn apart by discouragement; the object of their hope was slipping out of their sight. The question is ours as well--a world without the physical presence of Jesus, indeed the great question of the Christian faith! How do we follow in person one whom the finality of physical death has taken from us?
At this point, we enter the revised version of When Jesus Said Goodbye with the last paragraph from our previous presentation:
The question remains a valid one that confronts our faith: How do we of the 21st century, follow the Jesus who made his century the 1st century? As Christians we seek to follow him daily who in a flesh and blood like ours belongs to a time and to a place and to a culture far removed from our everyday routines.
This question, the great question at the heart of Christian faith, the one above all others essential for its message and its life, has been debated in biblical and theological scholarship for over three centuries. This crucial question is as alive and relevant as ever within the Church and its contemporary scholarship and among its thinking lay persons. We know it in part as labeled over a century ago in the two phrases “the Jesus of history” and “the Christ of faith.”
How do we relate the Christ of faith to the Jesus of history—identical or different? Continuity or discontinuity? Who was Jesus? Who is Jesus? The Jesus of history was crucified by Roman soldiers and buried by his friends. We are prisoners of earth and time. The Jesus of history belongs to the past, and the Christ of faith is beyond human eyesight: "He has been raised; He is not here" (Mark 16:6). Apart from dying, you and I cannot ascend to the realm beyond death. The very nature of the Christian faith and what it means to be a disciple of Jesus are at stake.
The scholarly quest for the Jesus of the past who at the same time relates to our present lives of faith began with the great mind and unique spirit of Albert Schweizer (1875-1965) whose magnum opus was The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer, a Nobel Prize recipient and famous as a medical missionary to Africa, “had a towering influence on New Testament scholarship.” The story Schweizer tells begins in the latter half of the eighteenth century with one Herman Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) who "attempted to form a historical conception of the life of Jesus.”
Reimarus’ work took the form of a 4,000 page magnum opus, an anonymous manuscript circulated only among his acquaintances. In 1774 Gotthold Lessing began to publish the most important portions of it and by 1778 had published seven fragments. The publication bears the title ‘Von dem Zwecke Jesus und seiner Jȕnger,’ Noch ein Fragment des Wolfenbȕttelschen Ungenannten (The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples. A further Installment of the Anonymous Wolfenbȕttel Fragments). The Fragments were a work of radical or skeptical historical criticism. Schweizer describes Reimarus’ writing:
it rises to heights of passionate feeling, and then it is as though the fires of a volcano were painting lurid pictures upon dark clouds. Seldom has there been a hate so eloquent, a scorn so lofty; but then it is seldom that a work has been written in the just consciousness of so absolute a superiority to contemporary opinion.
Reimarus, a rationalistic, in the Anonymous Wolfenbȕttel Fragments sought the total displacement of revelation by reason.
Schweizer’s Quest unfolds the story of nineteenth century Gospel criticism with its views about Jesus beginning with Reimarus in 1778 and ending with William Wrede’s The Messianic Secret in 1901. Schweizer attempted to grasp and communicate the nature of the complex historical problem raised by the Synoptic Gospels’ account of Jesus. Students of differing persuasions, compelled by the work of Reimarus, had begun to write their own quests of the historical Jesus.
Schweizer did not include them all in his survey, there were too many. He selected those--pro, con, and mediating, that he deemed significant. Our concern is to stress the past and present challenge of the question of “Who was Jesus? Who is Jesus?” Therefore we will not trace its complex history, only simply end with the famous final paragraph with which Schweizer concluded his book:
He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those men who did not know who he was. He says the same words, ‘Follow me!’, and sets us to those tasks which he must fulfil in our time. He commands. And to those who hearken to him, whether wise or unwise, he will reveal himself in the peace, the labours, the conflicts and the sufferings that they may experience in his fellowship, and as an effable mystery they will learn who he is . . .
Albert Schweizer’s influential work not only brought the first quest to a temporary close but is considered “the highwater mark of the ‘old quest’ for the historical Jesus.” The 1950s and the 1960s brought a new or second quest; a third quest in the 1980s has revived interest the historical Jesus. We skip over a century of “quest” scholarship and conclude with two contemporary scholars and good friends, Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, who compared their visions at the close of the twentieth century as to how we of the 21st century are to follow the Jesus of the 1st century?
Marcus Borg, an American Lutheran, and N. T. Wright, an English Anglican, were both, as they phrased it,
committed to the rigorous practice of the Christian faith and the rigorous study of its historical origins and to the belief, which we find constantly reinforced, that these two activities are not, as is often supposed, ultimately opposed to each other. Rather, we find them mutually informative and supportive. To put this another way: we both acknowledge Jesus of Nazareth as Lord, and we regard the no-holds-barred study of his actual history as a vital part of what we mean by that.
Their friendship began with a first meeting in 1984. In September 1997, Marcus visited Tom in Lichfield, England, and within the framework of morning and evening prayer at Lichfield Cathedral over five days laid the plans for a book together, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (1999). The book cover describes its content as “The Leading Liberal and Conservative Jesus Scholars Present the Heart of the Historical Jesus Debate.”
We do not attempt to describe their views, for that you need to read The Meaning of Jesus and others of their books. As we did with Schweizer, we close with a quotation from each that points us in the direction of their respective visions. We begin with Marcus J. Borg:
The core Christian Christological affirmation is twofold: Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what God is like and what a life full of God is like. Jesus is the revelation, disclosure, and epiphany of both. As both “true God” and “true human,” Jesus is the lens through which we see God and what a life full of God is like.
N. T. Wright on his part speaks of the integration “between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith,” or “between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus” as Marcus Borg would phrase it. In particular, Wright sees “continuity between the things the church claimed about Jesus after Easter and the aims and beliefs of Jesus before Easter.” The church did not invent “a Jesus to suit its subsequent beliefs.”
The above brief inconclusive survey to our all-important faith-question brings us back to its form no better expressed than by that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he faced the Nazi menace to the Church during his ministry. From Tegel prison in Berlin, he sent a long letter to his closest friend Eberhard Bethge (April 30, 1944) desiring Bethge’s theological reactions to his reflections. In it he wrote, “What keeps gnawing at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?” We seek an answer in the Gospel of John to Bonhoeffer’s famous query, “Wer Christus heute fȕr uns eigentlich ist?”
Our quest for the answer to Bonhoeffer’s and our query of “who is Christ actually for us today?” leads us to The Johannine answer 14:1-27; 16:20-22 We begin with John’s answer to the disciples' question as they asked it: the sending of another Advocate. The English word “Advocate” translates the Greek title paraklētos for the Holy Spirit. Rather than attempt an English translation, biblical interpreters often use the transliterated form Paraclete for Jesus’ title for the Holy Spirit in the farewell discourses. Paraclete preserves the uniqueness of this title and does not limit the several functions of the Johannine Spirit. We will employ it frequently.
"He will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever” (14:16) was Jesus' promise concerning the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples; the Spirit will come in a way and with a meaning they did not know before. Jesus' first words dealing with their fears about his departure began with "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me" (v. 1) and closed with "Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid" (v. 27).
Between these encouraging words come the first two sayings of Jesus about the Holy Spirit as the Advocate. The first contains in kernel form all that Jesus is saying in the discourses about the Holy Spirit. It is the basic Paraclete saying of which all the others may be viewed as an expanded exposition:
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and will be in you. I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you (vv. 16-18).
The other is the saying with which we opened our study of John's witness to the Holy Spirit:
But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.; I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid (14:26-27).
The words of Jesus in all of chapter 14 were directed to the hearts of disciples whose world was shattered by his impending departure from them. In fact, the whole of the farewell discourses, chapters 14 through 16, each containing another Paraclete promise (15:26-27; 16:5-11, 13-15), were spoken to the disciples to help them come to terms with the imminent death of Jesus and the absence of his physical presence from them.
The Johannine evangelist recorded Jesus’ promises to provide the Church of his day with a convincing link between the revelation of God in the historical Jesus and their experience decades later of the vitality of that revelation in Jesus’ risen presence among them. He does this by seeing the abiding presence of the risen Lord within the framework of the history of the earthly Jesus.
The Resurrection is for John as for Paul a part of the story of the Cross. The meaning of the Paraclete sayings is bound up with the person of Jesus, his life, his death and his resurrection; they are fully Christocentric: “the Spirit of truth . . . will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine” (16:13-15).
Even all the petitions in Jesus' great prayer of chapter 17 were for them—and for us: “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word” (17:20). As Jesus informed the disciples in the previous chapter,
Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor she has pain, because her hour has come. But her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you (16:20-22).
With these words too, Jesus has in mind the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, to his disciples.
Jesus' farewell words to His disciples were strangely similar to the words God spoke to Moses at the burning bush:
I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain (Exod. 3:12).
For Jesus had said to His disciples, "and now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe" (14:29), and "in that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you" (v. 20). Understanding and certainty come with obedience.
So with good reason we take the step of faith; John’s answer is our answer too. The coming of the Holy Spirit is our answer, the answer to the question left by the crucifixion of Jesus—his death. The Jesus who was crucified and resurrected in the 1st century is alive in our 21st-century world in the presence of the Holy Spirit. This is the Christian proclamation: “Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you”” (20:19). The Christian’s experience of the Spirit comes through the personality of Jesus. The Jesus who lived, lives!
In the Gospel of John, the Spirit bridges all separation between God and Jesus, for it is the Father himself, and not just a gift of the Father, who is encountered in Jesus. Just so the gift of the Spirit to the Church bridges the gap of the centuries between Jesus and the Christian believer. The gift of the Holy Spirit, concludes C. H. Dodd, is seen in John “not as if it were a separate outpouring of divine power, . . . but as the ultimate climax of the personal relationship between Jesus and his disciples.
The words of Jesus in his farewell discourses are designed to tell us what life in the Holy Spirit is like for us—who we are! The activity of the Holy Spirit is precisely how we follow Jesus in our respective worlds of personal life and ministry. The key is obedient fellowship. The Holy Spirit is the Father's grace-gift of the very presence of his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ! This is precisely what Jesus had in mind as he said good-bye to His disciples:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid (14:27).
The lines of T. S. Eliot fit well Jesus’ intentions for us:
Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers.
Replaced Paragraphs See pages 11-14.
This question is reformulated in our time as "the path leading from the Jewish Jesus to the Christian Jesus, and the rediscovery of the Jewish Jesus in the Christian Jesus'' This question confronts us with a great gap both on the vertical and on the horizontal planes. Human flesh cannot simply leap across either--he vertical gap is between God and our human lives. It is at once the gap between eternity and time, between God's holiness and our sinfulness. Christians believe this vertical gap has been definitively closed in Jesus Christ. It is the horizontal gap, the gap between the present and the past, another time and culture and worldview, that is our question. How do we relate the Christ of faith to the Jesus of history? Can there be a meaningful continuity? What are the discontinuities? This is a crucial question of Christian theology, of a thinking Christian faith.
As we ponder this question in theological terms, we think of the fascinating vision of 19th-century liberalism and the ensuing entrenched stand of 20th-century fundamentalism. We remember the unexpected and startling declaration of neo-orthodoxy and the philosophical reasoning of contemporary process theology? And now we encounter the publicity surrounding the Jesus Seminar, from whose resultant data one of its notable participants has presented us with a "dialectic between a historically read Jesus and a theologically read Christ , , , a Jesus/Christ/ianity.''
We have read with admiration, appreciation, and profit the works of giant minds like Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), who sought to bring the "spirit of Jesus" into the 20th century, and J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937), who attacked head-on the Jesus of the modernists. We can add to these Karl Barth (1886-1968), who declared Jesus as the transcendent "Word of God" who encounters men in pure grace, and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), who proclaimed the "re-presentation" of "the experience of Jesus,'' that is, "the Christ who is present in and through the proclamation of the kerygma.''
We cannot forget Paul Tillich (1886-1965), whose Jesus as the "New Being" became transparent to the ground of being, or Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928--), whose intense look at the human Jesus leads to his vision of the exalted Lord. More recent are Hans Kung (1928--), who, as a Roman Catholic, in his magnum opus testimony, On Being a Christian, bears witness to an evangelical Jesus through a critical methodology; and Jurgen Moltmann, who interprets Jesus as the presence of the future of God within the forward movement of God's history with the world. Finally, from another of the Jesus Seminar's fellows comes Marcus J. Borg's Jesus: A New Vision, Jesus a person of Spirit--"a charismatic who was a healer, sage, prophet, and revitalization movement founder"--whose life provides us with a vivid witness to "the reality life of . . . life in the Spirit.”
To this great question of the Jewish Jesus of history and the Christian Christ of theology, how do we today follow the Jesus who lived, died, and, according to apostolic testimony, rose from the grave in the first century? This is our version of the disciples' question "Lord, where are You going?" (13:36) or "What is this thing He is telling us . . . ?" (16:17).
John in his Gospel attests the unambiguous answer given consistently by historic Christianity. The clear testimony of the mainstream of the Church's devoted theologians down through the centuries--Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria (293-373); Augustine of Hippo (354-430); Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109); Thomas Aquinas (1225-74); Martin Luther (1483-1546); John Calvin (1509-64); Jonathan Edwards (1703-58); John Wesley (1703-91); John Miley (1813-95); H. Orton Wiley (1877-1961); and Karl Barth--echoes the Johannine witness.
This translation of John 14:27a is that of Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, vols. 29 and 29A of The Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday and Co., 1970), 649. Since the two volumes are paginated consecutively, the volumes will be cited by page numbers only. George R. Beasley-Murray, John, in Word Biblical Commentary (Waco, Tex.: Word Books Publisher, 1987), 36:378-79. Subsequent citations will not list the volume number, only the page numbers. These phrases were made famous by Martin Kähler’s The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historical Biblical Christ, trans. Carl E. Braaten (Philadelphia Fortress Press, 1964).This book translates the first two essays in Kähler’s 1896 edition of Der sogennate historische Jesus und der geschictliche, biblische Christus. Albert Schweizer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery, J. R. Coates, Susan Cupitt, and John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). This “First Complete Edition: is edited by John Bowden. Schweitzer’s work was first published in German in 1906 as Von Reimarus zu Wrede and later released as Geschicte der Leben-Jesus Forschung. A sixth edition was issued by Schweizer in 1950. From Marcus J. Borg’s “An Appreciation of Albert Schweizer” in Schweizer, The Quest, vii. Schweizer, The Quest, 14. Gottbhold Ephraim Lessing, ed., Von dem Zwecke Jesus und seiner Jȕnger,’ Noch ein Fragment des Wolfenbȕttelschen Ungenannten (Brunswick, 1778). Schweizer, The Quest, 16. William Wrede, Das Messiasgheimnis in den Evangelien. Zugleich ein Beitrag zum Vereständnis des Markusevangeliums (Gottingen, 1901), The English edition, The Messianic Secret, was published by Cambridge in 1971. Schweizer, The Quest, 487, These sentences reflect Marcus Borg’s “An Appreciation of Albert Schweizer,” ix. Marcus Borg, born March 11, 1942, passed away January 21, 2015. N. T. Wright was born December 1, 1948. Marcus J. Borg, N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (New York: HarperOne, 1999), viii. Borg and Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, 241. Borg and Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, 225. Italics mine. 402. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans, Isabel Best, Lisa Dahill, Reinhard Kraus, and Nancy Luiens (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010 [German 1951/1970], ed. Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, and Renate Bethge, with Ilse Tӧdt), 362. Dietrich Bonhoeefer, Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft (Gȕtersloh, Deutschland: Gȕtersloher Verlagshaus, 1951 [21, Auflage 2013]), 140. John 14:26-27; 15:26-27; 16:5-11, 13-15. C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 227 T. S. Eliot “The Dry Salvages,” in Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1943), 42. Jurgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990), xvi. He precedes this statement with "For a long time one of the important questions in modern christology was the transition from 'the Jesus of history' to 'the Christ of faith.' . . . I have come to find another question more important still." Contemporary examples of this quest are Borg, Jesus: A New Vision; and John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991). For example, Adolf Harnack (1851-1930), What ls Christianity? trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York: Harper, 1957). First published in 1901. See G. M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). A crucial voice was Karl Barth. See his The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns from the sixth German edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933). Der Roemerbrief was first published in 1919. For example, J. B. Cobb Jr., A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia Westminster Press, 1965). Crossan, The Historical Jesus, 421-23 Crossan reconstructs the historical Jesus as "A Peasant Jewish Cynic." See also Borg, Jesus: A New Vision, 10. The results of the Jesus Seminar are now published in Robert W. Funk and Roy W. Hoover, trans., The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1993). See xiii-38 for the explanation of the nature of the work of the seminar. The seminar was concerned only to determine with a high degree of probability "a data base for determining who Jesus was," but the interpretation of that data was "excluded from the agenda of the Seminar and left to individual scholars working from their own perspectives'' (35). Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery (New York: Macmillan Co., 1922). This was first published in German in 1906 as Von Reimarus zu Wrede, later released as Geschicte der Leben-Jesus Forschung J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York Macmillan Co., 1923). His New Testament Greek for Beginners (New York: Macmillan Co., 1923) has been loved and hated by thousands of students for over 70 years. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (New York Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936-69). This set first began to appear in German as Kirchliche Dogmatik in 1932. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminine Huntress Lantero (London: Collins, 1934). Jesus and the Word was first published in German in 1926. The quotation is from James F. Kay, Christus Praesens: A Reconsideration of Rudolf Bultmann's Christology (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994), 173. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-63). Wolfhart Pannenberg, ]esus--God and Man, 2nd ed., trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977). The German, Grundzuege der Christologie, was first published in 1964. Hans Kung, On Being a Christian, trans. Edward Quinn (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Doubleday, 1976). See also his programmatic Theology of Hope (London: SCM Press, 1967). Borg, Jesus: A New Vision, 15, see 190-200.
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