The Last Things He Said to Them

It was late at night in a large upstairs room in Jerusalem, and the supper things were still on the table. Eleven men lay around it. The twelfth had gone out into the dark, and only the man at the head of the table knew what he had gone to do. He had just told them that he was going away, somewhere they could not come, and that the bravest of them would say three times before morning that he had never known him. Later that same night he told them that grief had filled their heart. And then he talked to them, longer than he had ever talked to them at once, and it was the last time, and almost all of it was about them and about afterwards.

“Do not let your heart be troubled. Trust in God — and trust in me. In my Father’s house there are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I am going to get a place ready for you? And if I go and get a place ready for you, I am coming back, and I will take you to be with me, so that where I am, you may be too. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. Nobody comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father too. From now on you do know him — you have seen him.” And Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Anybody who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not trust me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not say out of myself. The Father lives in me, and he is doing his own work. Trust me when I say I am in the Father and the Father is in me — and if you cannot do that, then trust because of the things you have watched me do. I tell you the truth: whoever trusts in me will do the things I do, and will do greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, so that the Father may be given glory in the Son.”

Then he told them what he was going to send them, so that they would not be on their own. “If you love me, you will keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever: the Spirit of truth. The world cannot take him in, because it does not see him and does not know him. You know him, because he stays beside you — and he will be in you. I am not going to leave you like orphans. I am coming to you. In a little while the world will not see me any more; but you will see me. Because I live, you will live too. If anybody loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. I have told you these things while I am still here beside you. But the Helper — the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name — he will teach you everything, and he will remind you of everything I have said to you.”

“Peace I leave with you. My own peace I give to you. I do not give it the way the world gives. Do not let your heart be troubled, and do not let it be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me you would be glad that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I am. And I have told you now, before it happens, so that when it does happen you will trust. I will not talk with you much longer. The ruler of this world is coming — and he has nothing in me. But the world has to know that I love the Father, and that I do exactly what the Father told me to do. Get up. Let us go from here.” And they got up. And he went on talking, and the next thing he said begins with a vine — and there were vines on every hillside around that city, and a great golden one carved over the doors of the temple, and every child in the country had been told since it could walk that the vine was a picture of Israel.

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. Every branch in me that bears no fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he trims clean, so that it will bear more fruit. You are clean already, because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I in you. A branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it stays on the vine; and no more can you, unless you remain in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, is the one who bears a great deal of fruit — because apart from me you can do nothing. If anybody does not remain in me, he is thrown out like a broken-off branch, and dries up; and they gather them and throw them on the fire, and they burn. If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask for whatever you want, and it will be done for you. My Father is given glory in this: that you bear a great deal of fruit, and are my followers.”

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commands you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be full to the top. This is my command: that you love one another, as I have loved you. Nobody has greater love than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends. And you are my friends, if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any more, because a servant does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because everything I heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me. I chose you, and I appointed you to go out and bear fruit — fruit that lasts — so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. This is what I command you: love one another.”

And then he told them the hard part, because he was not going to let them find it out for themselves. “If the world hates you, remember that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. But you do not belong to the world — I chose you out of the world — and that is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: a servant is not greater than his master. If they hunted me down, they will hunt you down too. If they kept my word, they will keep yours too. They will put you out of the meeting houses. In fact an hour is coming when anybody who kills you will think he is doing God a service. And they will do it because they never knew the Father, or me. I am telling you now, so that when the hour comes you will remember that I told you. But I am telling you the truth: it is better for you that I go away. If I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you into the whole truth. He will not speak out of himself — he will say what he hears — and he will tell you the things that are coming.”

“In a little while you will not see me; and then in a little while you will see me.” They whispered to one another about that, and could not make it out, and he knew they wanted to ask him. So he said: “Are you asking each other what I meant? I tell you the truth: you are going to weep and mourn, and the world is going to be glad. You will be full of grief — but your grief will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth she has pain, because her hour has come; but when the child is born she does not remember the pain any more, for joy that a person has been born into the world. So you have grief now. But I will see you again, and your heart will be glad, and nobody will be able to take your joy away from you. Ask, and you will be given what you ask for, so that your joy may be full to the top. The Father himself loves you — because you have loved me, and have trusted that I came from God. I came out from the Father and came into the world; now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father.” And his followers said, “Look — now you are talking plainly, and not in pictures. Now we know that you know everything. This is why we trust that you came from God.” “Do you trust me now? Look: an hour is coming, and it has come, when you will be scattered, every one of you to his own place, and you will leave me on my own. And I am not on my own, because the Father is with me. I have told you all this so that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have trouble. But be brave: I have beaten the world.”

And then he stopped talking to them, and looked up, and talked to his Father instead — out loud, in front of them, so that they heard every word of it. This is what he prayed, on the last night, for the men in that room and for everybody who would ever believe them. “Father, the hour has come. Give glory to your Son, so that the Son may give glory to you. And this is everlasting life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent. I have given you glory on the earth. I have finished the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, give me glory at your own side, with the glory I had at your side before the world was made. I have shown your name to the people you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me; and they have kept your word. Everything you gave me came from you — they know that now — because I gave them the words you gave me, and they took them, and they knew for certain that I came from you, and they trusted that you sent me. I am asking for them. I am not asking for the world, but for the ones you have given me, because they are yours; and everything of mine is yours, and everything of yours is mine.

I am not in the world any longer, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them safe in your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one, the way we are one. While I was with them I kept them safe in your name, and I guarded them, and not one of them was lost, except the one who was going to be lost, so that what is written would come true. I am coming to you now, and I say these things out loud, here in the world, so that they may have my own joy filled full in them. I have given them your word, and the world hated them, because they do not belong to the world, any more than I belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world. I am asking you to keep them from the evil one. Make them holy in the truth. Your word is truth. Just as you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”

And then he prayed for people who had not been born yet. “And I am not asking for these only. I am asking for all the people who are going to trust in me because of what these men say — that all of them may be one. Just as you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me. I in them, and you in me, so that they may be finished and made into one, and so that the world may know that you sent me, and that you have loved them just as you loved me. Father, the ones you have given me — I want them to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you gave me, because you loved me before the world was made. Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I know you, and these men know that you sent me. I have made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love you have loved me with may be in them, and I in them.”

And then it was over, and there was nothing left to do but go. A Passover meal always ended with singing — the old psalms that families had sung at that table for hundreds of years, about being brought out of Egypt, about the Lord who hears when a person calls. So the twelve of them sang. Then they got up from the table and went down the stairs and out through the streets, and out of the city gate into the cold, and up the Mount of Olives among the old gray trees.