Biblion Bible Commentary
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My Peace I Give to You
John 14:25-31
25 “I have said these things to you while still living with you. · WEB
A promise about remembering, a peace unlike the world's, and a hard sentence about the Father being greater.
"The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things, and will remind you of all that I said to you" John 14:26.
The two verbs are teaching and reminding, and the second is the one that concerns this book directly. The men in that room will one day write down conversations from years earlier, and they are promised help with exactly that.
It is also a quiet answer to the question of how a Gospel written decades later can be trusted. The writer's own explanation, given in his own account, is that the remembering was not left to ordinary memory.
"Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, I give to you" John 14:27.
Peace was the ordinary word of parting, said a thousand times a day and meaning about as much as goodbye. He takes the farewell formula and fills it.
Not as the world gives names the difference. The world's peace is the absence of trouble, and it lasts exactly as long as the trouble stays away. This one is offered to men who are hours from watching him arrested, and it is called my peace — his own, the thing that let him wash feet on a night like this.
"Don't let your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful." The chapter's opening line returns as its closing one.
"If you loved me, you would have rejoiced because I said 'I am going to my Father;' for the Father is greater than I" John 14:28.
The rebuke is gentle and it is real: their grief is a form of self-concern. Where he is going is good for him, and love would be able to be glad about that even at cost.
The last clause has been argued over for centuries and the argument is largely answered by the sentence it sits in. He is not comparing natures — this is the same conversation in which he who has seen me has seen the Father John 14:9 — and the reason given is a journey. He is going to the Father, from a condition of humiliation to one of glory, and in that condition the Father is greater. It is the difference between position and being, and this book has already refused to let anyone reduce the second John 1:1 John 10:30.
"Now I have told you before it happens so that when it happens, you may believe" John 14:29. The same reason as for the warning about Judas John 13:19. Nothing in the next twenty-four hours is to be readable as a surprise.
"The prince of the world comes, and he has nothing in me" John 14:30.
The arrest is described as an approach by someone other than the men with torches. And the claim is a legal one: there is nothing in him to get hold of, no claim, no purchase, no complicity — which is why what happens next is not a defeat but a taking.
"But that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father commanded me, even so I do. Arise, let's go from here" John 14:31.
The motive for the cross is stated as love for the Father and obedience to him, addressed to an audience — that the world may know. And then he stands up.
The next three chapters are spoken after that sentence, which has puzzled readers; the likeliest explanation is the simplest, that they got up and the teaching continued on the way out.
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