John 14 - Introduction

On the conversations in chap. 14.

The subject on which this chapter turns is indeed that which the situation calls for: the approaching separation. Jesus calms His disciples, who are profoundly troubled by this prospect, by promising them a twofold meeting again, the one more remote in the Father's house, at the end of their earthly career, the other altogether inward and spiritual, but very near. The historical fitness of these two great thoughts is perfect.

As to the questions of Thomas, Philip and Judas, Reuss finds that they proceed from such strange misunderstandings and such gross mistakes that it is impossible to accord to them any historical truthfulness. But exegesis has ascertained, on the contrary, that they are completely appropriate to the apostles' point of view at that moment. So long as Jesus was with them, notwithstanding their attachment to His person, they still shared in the ideas which were generally received. It was the death of their Master, His ascension, and finally Pentecost, which radically transformed their idea of the kingdom of God. There is, accordingly, nothing surprising in the fact that Thomas, like the Jews in ch. 12, should complain of understanding nothing about a Christ who leaves the earth; or that Philip, like the Jews who demanded a sign from heaven, should, in place of His visible presence, ask for a sensible theophany; or, finally, that Judas should ask anxiously what a Messianic coming could be of which the world should not be a witness. Two conceptions, that of the disciples and that of Jesus, do not cease to come into collision in these dialogues, and in order to have reproduced them so naturally and dramatically, at a period already advanced, when light had come on all these problems which at that moment occupied the disciples' minds, one must certainly have been present at these conversations, and have himself taken a lively part in them. This appears, moreover, from the manner in which the evangelist initiates us in this story into the intimate and familiar relations of Jesus with the disciples and the character of the personages who form the apostolic circle. Either all this these proper names, these questions attributed to each one, these personal addresses of Jesus is a play unworthy of a serious man, or it is the narrative of a witness who himself participated in the emotions of this last evening.