"Do You Now Believe?"

Read John 16.1-33

A portrait of the ministry of the Holy Spirit (the Spirit of Truth, the Counselor, the Advocate), the third person in the Trinity, emerges in the words of Jesus in today’s reading. The Spirit would help the disciples remember, understand, interpret, and apply the truth taught to them by Jesus. The Spirit would guide them into all truth, which is not to be confused with “new” truth. The Spirit’s truth would be “new” in that He would reveal the “old” truth within new and constantly-changing contexts.

In his commentary on this chapter, Anthony Casurella writes:

“After teaching about the Spirit of truth, Jesus returned to the theme of His imminent departure and unattainability. This time He also referred to a return. As before, His words caused bewilderment, but His explanation did not do much to clear up the uncertainty. As the suffering of a woman in childbirth gives way to joy when her child is born, He said, so the disciples' mourning when Jesus was taken from them would later turn to permanent joy. When that happened, the nature of prayer would be changed, and Jesus urged them to take advantage of the change. One cannot be sure whether the return Jesus spoke of was His resurrection on Easter Sunday or His reappearance at the Last Day. Both would be appropriate in the context, and we may have here a case of deliberate ambiguity. Either way, the response of the disciple would be the reverse of that of the world: when the disciple sorrowed, the world would rejoice, and vice versa.”

“At this the disciples felt that they finally understood Jesus because they felt He was at last speaking directly. On this basis they expressed confident faith in both His person and His origin. But Jesus knew that their confidence was misplaced and that they would soon desert Him to face His fate without them. He would not be alone, but it would be His Father, not the disciples, who would be with Him. His question, ‘Do you now believe?’ was pregnant with irony.”

“Jesus' final words in this chapter contained a message of comfort. He had already warned the disciples of the animosity of the world, and it was inevitable that they would experience it. But peace was possible because of His triumph. He had overcome the world; in that thought lay the essence of the Gospel.”