John 7:39

Ver. 39. “ Now he said this of the Spirit whom they that believed on him were to receive; indeed, the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified. ”

Lucke and others criticise this explanation which John gives of the saying of Jesus. The future ῥεύσουσιν, shall flow, they say, is purely logical; it expresses the consequence which must result from the act of faith. Moreover, the living water is the eternal life which the believer draws from the words of Jesus, and by no means the Holy Spirit. Reuss finds here a proof of the way in which the evangelist misapprehends the meaning and import of certain sayings of the Lord.

Scholten thinks he can reject this passage as an interpolation. Certainly, if John 7:38 only reproduced the idea of John 7:37, the promise of Jesus might refer to a fact which had already occurred at the time of His speaking: comp. John 5:24-25; John 6:68-69 (the profession of Peter). But we have seen that the promise of John 7:38 passes far beyond that of John 7:37, and must refer to a more advanced and more remote state of believers. The facts prove that if, until the day of Pentecost, the apostles were themselves able to quench their thirst in the presence of Jesus, they could not before that event quench that of any one besides. The rivers of living water, those streams of new life which flowed forth from the heart of believers by means of the spiritual gifts (the different χαρίσματα, the gift of tongues, prophecy, teaching), all these signs of the dwelling of Christ in the Church by His Holy Spirit, appeared only after that day. Jesus distinctly marks this advance from the first state to the second in the passage John 14:17-18; and no one could understand better than John the difference between these two states. Let us remember St. Peter, the Twelve, the one hundred and twenty, proclaiming the wonderful things of God at Jerusalem, and bringing on that day three thousand persons to the faith! Nothing like this had taken place before. John also does not, as Lucke supposes, confound the Divine Spirit with the spiritual life which He communicates. The figure of living water, of which Jesus makes use, unites these two ideas in one conception: the Spirit, as the principle, and life, as the effect. The term “ he said this of...,” is broad enough to include this double reference.

The strange expression οὔπω ἦν, was not yet, occasioned the gloss δεδομένον, given, of the Vatican MS. and of some MSS. of the Itala, and ἐπ᾿ αὐτοῖς, upon them, of the Cambridge MS. This expression is explained by the words of Jesus: “ If I go not away, the Paraclete will not come to you ” (John 16:7), and by all the words of chaps. 14 and 16 which show that the coming of the Spirit is the spiritual presence of Jesus Himself in the heart; comp. especially John 14:17-18. Until the day of Pentecost, the Spirit had acted on men both in the Old Covenant and in the circle of the disciples; but He was not yet in them as a possession and personal life. This is the reason why John employs this very forcible expression: “ The Spirit was not,” that is, as already having in men a permanent abode. Weiss supposes that the participle δεδομένον, given, might well be genuine, and that it may have been omitted because, according to 2 Corinthians 3:17, Jesus was made the subject of ἦν, was, in this sense: “Because Jesus was not yet spirit (pure spirit), since He was not yet glorified.” But, in that case, why expressly repeat the subject Jesus in the following clause. And how unnatural is this comparison with the passage in Corinthians!

The relation which John establishes between the exaltation of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit is explained in different ways. According to Hengstenberg and others, the ἐδοξάσθη designates the fact of the death of Jesus as the condition of the sending of the Spirit, because this gift implies the pardon of sins. The idea is a true one; but the term to be glorified is nowhere applied to the death of Jesus as such. In this sense, ὑψωθῆναι, to be lifted up (John 3:15; John 12:32; John 12:34) would be necessary. According to de Wette and Vinet, in a fine passage from the latter which Astiequotes, the connection between the glorification of Jesus and Pentecost consists in the fact, that, if Jesus had remained visibly on the earth, the Church could not have walked by faith and consequently could not have lived by the Spirit. But in the word ἐδοξάσθη the emphasis is by no means on the putting aside of the flesh, but on the being clothed with glory.

This remark seems to me also to set aside the explanation of Lucke and Reuss: “It was necessary that the veil of the flesh should fall, in order that the liberated spirit might freely manifest itself in the Church” (Lucke). It is neither the expiatory death nor the bodily disappearance which are laid down as the condition of Pentecost; it is the positive glorification of Jesus, His reinstatement, as man, in His glory as Logos. It is this supreme position which renders Him capable of disposing of the Spirit and of sending Him to His own. The truth expressed by John may also be presented in this other aspect. The work of the Spirit consists in making Christ Himself live in the heart of the believer. But it is evident that it is not a Christ who is not perfected, whom the Spirit is to glorify and to cause to live in humanity, but the God-man having reached His perfect stature. The epithet ἅγιον, holy, was probably added (see the variants) with the purpose of distinguishing the specifically Christian Spirit from the breath of God as it was already acting in the Old Covenant. By reading simply πνεῦμα one might take this word in the special sense in which it is so frequently used in the Epistles of St. Paul: the spiritual life as the fruit of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, the spirit born of the Spirit (John 3:6); this would facilitate the explanation of was not yet. Nevertheless, we do not think it possible to defend this meaning.