Parting Gifts: The Paraclete, and Peace

Easter 6 Year C 2025; John 14:23-29*

This passage is from the long farewell discourse in John that had begun with last week’s Gospel reading, straight after the foot-washing and the command to love one another thus. Jesus then announced his departure, and this remains the theme. A series of disciples have been asking “clarifying” questions; Peter, Thomas, Philip, and now Judas probe in turn what Jesus means. It will not surprise readers of John that Jesus’ answers are not straightforward; but they lead the perturbed apostles, and the reader, to a deeper understanding of what is going to happen when he departs.

For context it helps to go back to where Philip had asked, or rather pleaded, ““Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied” (v.8) Jesus ends that response “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.” While this seems an oblique answer to a question about seeing God, throughout the passage we find the question of God’s visible presence (and of course Jesus’) being answered in terms of the continuing community and its discernible love.

This week’s passage is the answer to the next question, from Judas (not Iscariot): “‘Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?’” (14:22) which is not itself provided in the lectionary extract. Judas here refines Philip’s concern for what Jesus might show them and how; so the question of seeing God in Jesus’ foreshadowed absence is still before us.

Once again Jesus does not initially seem to be answering the question, but the indirect response is intended to have us rethink it. What does it really mean to see the Father? What will Jesus’ apparent absence mean? So Jesus now says to Judas “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (v.23). We can see continuity with the answer to Philip (and also that to Thomas, and Peter). This is still about what life in Jesus’ apparent absence will be like, and again centers the life of the community.

Judas is still wondering, on behalf of us all, what kind of a “show” it is, when Jesus’ followers will apparently be shown something that others cannot see. This may seem a familiar concern to people of faith and questers; why can’t all this—not just the Easter message narrowly speaking, but faith as a whole— be easier, or at least more obvious? Why does the character of God’s presence seems to be cryptic or elusive?

The divine presence that Jesus refers to is something real, and even visible, but not quite an external or public spectacle like a theophany at Sinai, or a magnificent Temple. It is seen as the community in which, through the love they bear for each other by keeping his word, Jesus and the Father will live. There really is a revelation to the world because, just as we read last week, the love which is manifest in the community will show that they are Jesus’ disciples; the catch is that only that love allows the discernment of God’s presence. Divine revelation is not a spectacle, but a practice.

Monument of Cerula, “in peace”; Catacomb of San Gennaro, Naples, c. 500

While it is a practice, it is not one that the disciples create or perform. Jesus does not make divinity their task, as though the love to which they are called were some massive, noble effort. It is an organic part of a continuing relationship with Jesus himself, and with the Father, that the Spirit enables; it is a parting gift. In the following verses, two additional aspects of this gift of divine loving presence in the community are elaborated.

First, the Paraclete (or Advocate, or Comforter) will be given. This repeats part of the answer to Philip (vv. 16-17), but now Jesus specifies that the Paraclete will come “in my name,” and emphasizes the role of the Spirit in teaching as Jesus taught: the Spirit “will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (v. 25). We should understand this promised work of the Paraclete as basic to how the authors and first readers of this Gospel understood Jesus’ words came to them, which helps us now see why John reads so distinctively among the Gospels. Jesus’ teaching did not just consist of scraps of reminiscence, or depend on how well someone or other had once noted down his sayings; rather the community’s own experience of Jesus, dwelling in them as the Spirit, was a source of living memory.

Jesus also promises peace. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.” It is not obvious in the English text, but Jesus is referring to a standard way of bidding farewell. To “give peace” may seem to suggest the transfer of a metaphysical substance of some kind, but the well-known function of the phrase as a farewell greeting helps us get the point here. Jesus has been talking all this time about his departure; so, given that an ancient person leaving (or arriving) might well say “peace be with you,” this means “I am saying my own kind of good-bye.” Or we could rephrase the second sentence above: “This is not the usual kind of farewell.”

So this is a pithy summation of the puzzle elaborated through this whole farewell discourse; Jesus is going away, but will be present with them nevertheless. While his presence will have a different form from his familiar friendship, the coming of the Spirit and the dwelling in them of the Father, and of Jesus himself, are not a weak second best but the fulfillment of a promise.

This fulfillment is the same as that peace. The “peace” is distinctive; Jesus says as much, and lots of ink has been spilt on its nature (often with reference to the Hebrew equivalent, shalom). Peace is not just absence of conflict, and includes inner as well as social well-being. Early Christian epitaphs often described the state of blessedness for the departed as “peace,” faithfully claiming that the peace Jesus offered is future hope as well as current state. As Jesus says here of himself, the absence of those no longer seen is not all it appears.

Parts of this discourse have thus often been read to remind those who have experienced loss and grief of that same point about presence and absence; to remind them that those no longer in our midst do remain in that peace, which in turn reassures and reestablishes that peace in us. The more immediate point though is about Jesus’ own presence. Modern readers have not experienced the loss of his personal friendship in that way, but here all are assured that the presence of Jesus through the Paraclete offers a peace which is more than well-being. Those who receive this peace—that is, who accept his farewell— are participants in a love that is the fulfillment not just of our own hopes but of his. And this practice of love, his remaining peace, is now the way Jesus shows himself to the world.

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*The RCL offers two Gospels this week without any clear rationale (though John 5 does not otherwise feature in the lectionary). That from John 14 is found in the Roman lectionary and in the original 1979 version of the TEC BCP lectionary, so I have commented on that first option.