Farewell Discourse and Final Prayer of Jesus

An Evangelical Exposition of John 14 -17

D. A. Carson

• Editorial: Baker Books
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493412839
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Theology

In this study D. A. Carson illuminates Jesus's message to his disciples after the Last Supper, in which Jesus proclaims the coming of the Holy Spirit and prays for himself, his followers, and the world. D. A. Carson clearly explains what Jesus taught his disciples the night before his crucifixion. This exposition of John 14-17 helps students of the Bible appreciate Jesus's teaching on the coming and the work of the Holy Spirit, his high priestly prayer, and his commandment to love one another.

1
Prologue

John 13

THE ATMOSPHERE in the large upstairs room was tense, unhappy, uncertain.

The evening had gone badly from the start. The disciples had gathered with Jesus, as arranged, and climbed to the upstairs room where the food was already prepared. They looked around for the traditional servant to wash their feet; but seeing no one, and being too polite to mention it, they stretched out on their pallets around the low eating table without saying a word. Jesus offered the traditional prayer of thanksgiving; and then they noticed that Jesus was pushing himself off his pallet. The talk was stilled. The Master quietly took off his cloak. To their utter consternation, he went over to the washstand, wrapped the towel around his waist, picked up the large basin of water, and headed for the nearest disciple.

Teachers shouldn’t do things like that. Not even equals should wash one another’s feet: it is a job for servants—and the servants with least seniority, at that. The first disciple, too surprised to move, too embarrassed to protest, felt his sandals being slipped off, and then the cool water and the dry towel. The Master proceeded to the second disciple, and to the third; all the while the silence was deafening.

Typically, it was Simon Peter who broke the silence. As Jesus approached to wash his feet, Peter curled up his legs and pointed out the inappropriateness of the Master’s action with what he thought was a tactful question: “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

Jesus straightened his back, looked him straight in the eye, and replied quietly, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

Peter’s voice hardened; someone had to speak out. If the Master could not see that he was demeaning himself, Peter would have to tell him. “No,” he said, “you will never wash my feet.”

Still Jesus looked at him with that unwavering gaze. “Unless I wash you,” he said, “you have no part with me.”

Open confrontation. For a moment the still air was charged with suspense. Did Jesus not recognize that Peter was speaking out of love? But faced with a response like that, Peter was now slow in rising to the occasion. He decided to take advantage of the situation and declare his love in a different way, “Then, Lord,” he replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well.”

That might have relieved the tension; but then Jesus added something more, something that, at the time, was highly enigmatic and restored the gloomy foreboding in the room. He said, “A person who has had a bath needs only to wash his feet; his whole body is clean. And,” he added, looking around the room, “you are clean, though not every one of you.” And in the utter silence that followed, he finished washing their feet.

The disciples watched Jesus wipe his hands, don his cloak, and return to his pallet. Unable to look at each other, embarrassed both for themselves and for their Teacher, they were quietly grateful that the episode was over. And then all of a sudden it was not; for Jesus began speaking again.

“Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked.

They understood well enough; he had washed their feet. But then they began to see that he expected a deeper answer than that. What Jesus had done for them was to provide a model; and as this truth slowly dawned on them, drawn out by the quiet question, they found their groping answers confirmed as Jesus responded to his own question.

“You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’” he said, “and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.”

That was the first embarrassing episode of the evening. Jesus had talked on in vague terms about betrayal and other gloomy subjects; but at the time what he was saying did not seem too coherent. Conversation gradually resumed, and the feast began. Strangely, as the atmosphere improved, Jesus seemed to become more and more despondent, deeply troubled in spirit. Conversation drooped. Encouraged by the lull, Jesus spoke again, this time plainly.

“I tell you the truth,” he said, “one of you is going to betray me.”

The atmosphere instantly became stultifying again. The silence returned, an engulfing blanket, as the disciples stared at each other. This time there was no doubt what the Master meant. The only question was which disciple Jesus had in mind. The stares around the low table were mixed: some curious, some blank, some frightened. Eating came to a standstill.

In a burst of confused questions, several asked incredulously if the Lord had them in mind; and Judas Iscariot joined in their number.

Peter recovered first; but remembering how his last outburst earned him a rather sharp rebuke, he was loathe to plunge ahead with the obvious question. He caught John’s eye and mouthed the question now gathering in everyone’s mind. “Ask him which one he means,” he mimed, nodding toward John who lay on the pallet next to Jesus.

John, leaning on his left arm, slowly twisted backward so that he could talk to Jesus. John’s head fell back on Jesus’s breast; and then John asked quietly, “Lord, who is it?”

Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I will give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.”

Everyone stared at Jesus. No one spoke. Slowly Jesus dipped his bread in the dish, shook off the excess, and held the bread out to Judas Iscariot.

Now everyone stared at Judas. It did not seem possible that he could be a traitor. Had he not been with them from the beginning, preaching and performing miracles with the best of them? Had he not been trusted and respected enough to serve as treasurer? It was hard to believe that Judas could become a turncoat. When would this happen? Or was Jesus simply offering a warning, and hoping that a dangerous tendency could be nipped in the bud by a slicing thrust, by public exposure?

Still Jesus held out the bread to Judas. Judas felt the stares. Shamed and sullen, he said nothing while his racing mind searched out what he should do next. He had already made arrangements to betray Jesus; and now he had to come to a final decision. He had found the foot-washing episode so humiliating, so unfitting for any would-be Messiah, that he had found his decision to betray Jesus greatly reinforced. And now this! The temerity of this Jesus! But what was Jesus up to? Was he warning him? Or pleading with him to refuse to take the bread? Or calling his bluff? Or trying to shame him out of it? Just look at the stunned and stupid stares of these people—they can’t seem to recognize that their vitality and independence are being emasculated by this Teacher who is curiously captivating yet too meek and too weak to provide the leadership the nation needs.

Firmly, decisively, Judas reached out and took the dipped bread. The challenge was accepted, or the bluff called. Judas crossed some personal Rubicon, and Satan took hold of him.

Then Jesus spoke again, addressing Judas directly: “What you are about to do, do quickly.” Judas answered with stony silence; but he pushed himself off his pallet and slowly rose to his feet. The others looked on, stunned, uncertain. It did not occur to them that Jesus was actually telling Judas to get on with the betrayal, to betray him quickly: for what sane man would say that? They could not imagine such a thing, because they still could not believe their Master was willingly and steadfastly taking all the steps that would lead to his own grim execution. Unable at this point to grasp the necessity of the cross in the plan of God, and Jesus’s voluntary submission to that plan, they had no mental category in which they could place Jesus’s comments, or by which they could make sense of Jesus’s charge to Judas. Perhaps, they speculated, Jesus was moving on to some new subject. Perhaps Jesus was satisfied with the warning he had given, and was now showing Judas that in some sense he still trusted him to discharge his responsibilities as treasurer. It really was not very clear.

Judas opened the door and walked out; and it was night. Not till much later would John remember that blackness through the open door, and judge it fitting. The true light that gives light to every man had come into the world (1:9); but those who do evil hate the light and will not come into the light for fear their deeds may be exposed (3:20). Jesus claimed to be the light of the world (9:5): how appropriate that the betrayer of the light should walk out into the darkness.

No sooner had Judas gone than Jesus began to speak to the remaining disciples of his own departure. He spoke somewhat enigmatically in terms of being glorified, in terms of leaving them behind. He reminded them to love one another, and spoke consolingly about their future witness.

But most of what he said was puzzling. It was impressive in a way, and dramatic; but it was not very comprehensible. What the disciples did understand, and what alarmed them, was this talk of Jesus’s departure. Finally Peter could take it no longer. He wanted plain answers to plain questions, and he wanted them now. He phrased his question bluntly, and asked it firmly: “Lord, where are you going?”

That was how the third embarrassing and distressing episode began that evening. Jesus would not be pushed; and he replied calmly but still enigmatically, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

Peter responded with another question: “Lord, why can’t I follow you now?” Then, fearing that perhaps his own allegiance was being impugned, he protested vigorously, “I will lay down my life for you.”

Jesus answered, “Will you really lay down your life for me? I tell you the truth, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”

Embarrassment, grief, and tension all can heighten the senses and imprint details indelibly onto one’s memory. That incredible night was forever vivid to the disciples, not least after the resurrection when they could put it into the proper perspective and appreciate fully what had happened and what Jesus had said. That was the evening Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper: but it’s significance awaited the events of the next three days. The fullest implications of the foot-washing, too, became clear in retrospect. Then the disciples could better understand that Jesus’s washing his disciple’s feet provided not only a moral example (13:15) but also a sign of the redemption and purification he was about to accomplish on their behalf (13:10f.). He not only washed their feet with water; much more, by his mission that weekend he would wash them completely. Again, he himself was the “living water” that quenches all thirst (4:10; 7:37), and he would provide the Spirit as a continuous fount of “living water” within each believer (7:38).

That night Jesus took advantage of the disciples’ heightened senses to discourse one last time on many themes. No doubt he returned to many of the same themes after his resurrection (cf. Acts 1:3); but to explain some of these things, even in enigmatic fashion, before the cross, would ultimately assure his disciples that he was not himself caught off guard. The cross was neither a mistake nor a second thought but part of his mission—indeed, the central part. “I have told you now before it happens,” he said, “so that when it does happen you will believe” (14:29).

Perhaps one of the most amazing features of this “Farewell Discourse,” as it has come to be called, is its beginning. It is Jesus who is going to the agony of the cross; it is Jesus who is troubled in spirit. Yet on this night when of all nights it would have been appropriate for his disciples to encourage him and support him, we discover that they can see only their loss. Jesus therefore must encourage them. On the very night he is to taste death on their behalf, he speaks to their confused bewilderment, fickle faith, dim vision, and self-absorption; and he says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. . . .”

2
An Introduction to Triumphant Faith

John 14:1–14

1“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. 2In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. 3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4You know the way to the place where I am going.”

5Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

6Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him, and have seen him.”

8Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

9Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. 11Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. 12I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. 14You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”

AGAINST THE BACKGROUND of the disciples’ confusion and anxiety, Jesus talks about serene faith, about spiritual tranquility: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me” (14:1). To demand untroubled hearts (14:1a) would be but cruel taunt or empty counsel, were it not that Jesus also teaches the only basis on which his people could ever accomplish such a feat: faith, faith in the Father, and faith in Jesus himself (14:1b).

Whether the text should be translated, “Trust in God; trust also in me” or “You trust in God; trust also in me” is in one sense incidental; for in either case Jesus is linking himself directly with God. Every first-century Jew knew it was his duty to trust God; but for a man to exhort others to trust in him in the same way that they should trust in God must be taken, now as then, as a claim to deity. For a man to say, “Trust in me” in so absolute a context is either sublime or ridiculous: there is no middle ground. A man who is only a man is not deserving of such trust, and must in time disappoint it; a man who is also God not only deserves such trust but cannot possibly betray it.

On the basis of trust in God and in Jesus, the disciples are not to be troubled. Presupposed are both the sovereignty and the goodness of God and of Jesus. They have the power to accomplish what they will, and they have the welfare of the disciples at heart: otherwise they could not be thought trustworthy in so absolute a sense.

No doubt such an exhortation could be profitably applied to Christians in every age who face staggering anxieties and troubles. Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul generalizes the exhortation when he writes, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:6, 7). In the context of the Farewell Discourse, however, Jesus’s encouragement to the disciples is designed to meet a specific situation. Not only have the painful incidents of the Last Supper—the footwashing, the departure of Judas, the prediction of Peter’s cowardice—caused malaise in these men; worse, Jesus has specifically told them he is about to go away and leave them. “My children,” he said, “I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come” (13:33).

Unable to grasp that Jesus’s departure from them is his return to the glory rightly his, by way of the cross and the tomb, the disciples wallow in their misery, fearing they are about to be abandoned. We, too, may sometimes slither around in the slough of despond and feel abandoned; but the situation in John 13 and 14 is unique. The sense of abandonment experienced by the disciples was prompted by an unrepeatable event in the history of redemption: the physical departure of Jesus Christ by way of the cross. Therefore, although the disciples needed th...