(This week is a little more technical than previously. I hope you still find it helpful.)
In John’s gospel, his account of events after the Resurrection is very brief. He includes the empty tomb and the meeting with Mary Magdalene, a very brief account of the coming of the Holy Spirit (with none of the pyrotechnics that Luke uses in the Acts of the Apostles), and finally the message to future believers (framed by Thomas’ skepticism) that we heard early in Eastertide.
However John has a lot more to say about the Risen life. He just chooses to put it at a different point in his narrative. The first part is in the chapter we read today, which comes immediately after his account of the Last Supper. Despite finishing this chapter with “Get up, let us go”, there are still another three chapters before anyone actually gets up and goes anywhere! Once again we need to remind ourselves that the Gospels were not written as the ‘Diaries of My Travels with Jesus.’
So, in today’s reading we have Thomas (again) and Philip playing the parts of the regular guys from Missouri… Thomas is still stuck in the practical day-to-day world which would be much improved by GPS. But that is not what Jesus wants to talk about. He is trying to explain something about the nature of reality, not provide directions on a map.
The same is true in the response to Phillip. And here we must imagine that John is using Philip as the set-up guy – there is no way any Jew would ask to see God (i.e. the Father). These were people who wouldn’t even speak the name of God. The idea of seeing God would be literally inconceivable to them. So John here is clearly writing from the perspective of his Greek audience who would not be attuned to the niceties of Jewish thought. For them seeing gods was quite normal (although typically the appearances of Greek gods were occasions for mayhem rather than anything uplifting).
For us, we are now so familiar with identifying Jesus and the Father that “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” doesn’t seem very strange at all. But it took another 400 years (until the Council of Chalecedon in 451) for the Church to work through the question of Jesus’ relationship to the Father to the point where there was general agreement as to what that really meant (and rumbles of dissent continued even after that). So John was not making a clear and obvious point in this dialog, at least as far as the peoples of that time were concerned.
Both these interchanges are focused on what is new and different about the world that Jesus opens up for us. That’s why they are really more to do with the post-Easter experience, despite their apparent chronological positioning – and why the Church uses them in the Easter liturgy.
The third element in this section is even more clearly oriented towards the future life of faith. Jesus says: “whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones”.
Really! We (or someone) is going to do greater works than Jesus? What works can those possibly be. Jesus who raised Lazarus from the dead, Jesus who accepted death to save mankind – we are going to do something greater than that!
Here we also need a shift in perspective, I think, just as John’s Greek audience had a different perspective from the original Jewish followers of Jesus. Neither was wrong. We need to find the perspective that works from our context.
In some ways it seems we are still stuck with the perspective of the Middle Ages, when signs and wonders were all around. Because we also are practical people (like Thomas and Philip) we think in terms of natural miracles – multiplying loaves and fishes, walking on water, curing the sick – as though they were somehow sat alongside physics (albeit uncomfortably). So greater works must be even more extraordinary multiplications, healings, translocations, and so on. Certainly that was the perspective of many in the early and later Church. We see examples in early writings that the Church did not include in the New Testament (because even at the time some seemed absurd or fanciful), and also in later writings criticized by the likes of Augustine, Bede, and others. Within this perspective it’s very difficult to understand what Jesus could possibly mean by greater works than his.
So how are we to take Jesus words? Doubtless there are many ways, but there does seem to be one simple way in which what came after his life on earth would be “greater” than his works.
Jesus only spoke to a tiny number of people, and his immediate impact in that sense was insignificant. Most of those around at the time assumed, quite reasonably, that after his death he would quickly be forgotten, like all the other Messianic preachers who have indeed been forgotten. It was his followers who understood something different and they did indeed do something greater – they started to bring his message to the whole world, just as he had instructed. They could do that exactly because he returned to the Father and sent the Holy Spirit – the Spirit that animated the early followers to spread his message and their understanding of what that means for the relationship between God and humans.
This is why these extra four chapters in John’s gospel, crammed into a non-existent time on the night that Jesus starts his Passion, talk almost exclusively about the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Spirit of truth, and how the Risen Life is different from what came before.
Even if it doesn’t seem like it, we are indeed part of that “greater work”, doing something that Jesus himself didn’t do. We are bringing the Easter message to others, by our words, by our actions, by our lives. If the Spirit lives in us we cannot help but be part of these ‘greater works’, the work of Christ’s redemption continuing in space and time.