That You May Believe (John 14:28–31)

John 14

A Link to John 14

That You May Believe (14:28–31)

Jesus tells the disciples he is going away and will come back.

You heard me say to you, “I am going away, and I will come to you.” If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I (14:28).

The one who sends is greater than the one sent, and Jesus has spent thirteen chapters insisting he was sent. Rejoicing at his departure means trusting that his absence has a purpose worth more than his presence. Jesus then gives the reason he is saying any of this before it happens.

And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe (14:29).

Jesus said the same thing the night before, at this same table, right after naming his betrayer:

“I am telling you this now, before it takes place, that when it does take place you may believe that I am he” (13:19).

Jesus predicts his own arrest and death twice in two chapters, in nearly identical words, because what is coming is about to look like total defeat. Faith that survives arrest, trial, and crucifixion has to be built before any of it happens, not assembled afterward from the wreckage.

I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father (14:30–31a).

Jesus had already named this ruler once, in the temple courts:

“Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out” (12:31).

Jesus mentions him a third time two chapters from now (16:11). Throughout the Gospel, he is always the same figure under the same title, and each time Jesus speaks of him, the outcome is settled before the ruler acts.

When the ruler comes, in the person of Judas, the soldiers, and the chief priests, he finds exactly what Jesus promised he would find: he has no claim on Jesus. Pilate says this three times before the trial ends: “I find no guilt in him” (18:38; 19:4, 6). The ruler of this world brings his case to the one court that can kill a man and loses. This matters because what happens to Jesus isn’t the devil’s victory. It’s Jesus’ victory. More specifically, the cross publicly demonstrates his love for the Father. The time has come. The moment is now, and so Jesus says:

Rise, let us go from here. (John 14:31b)

The table talk is over. He gets up and walks toward what the ruler of this world has planned for him, knowing full well that it will be his victory, not the ruler’s.

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Show Us the Father (14:7–14)

At Sinai, Moses asked to see God’s glory face to face.

“Please show me your glory” (Exod 33:18).

God’s answer set the terms for every subsequent encounter between Israel and its God.

“You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (33:20).

Moses hid in the cleft of the rock, covered by God’s hand, as divine goodness passed by. He saw God’s back, never his face (33:21–23). Even the one who spoke with the LORD “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (33:11) was refused a direct vision of glory. What he received instead was a name:

“The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (34:6).

Israel would know its God through his name and his works, never through unmediated sight.

John’s prologue names this tradition and its resolution in a single verse:

“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18).

What Moses could not receive at Sinai, the Son discloses, and in the upper room, Philip makes Moses’s plea again.

“Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us” (14:8).

Jesus replies:

“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (14:9).

There is no cleft of the rock here, no hidden back, no veil. Philip has walked with Jesus, eaten with him, watched him work, and heard him teach, and in all of it he has been looking at the Father’s own face without knowing it. What Moses received in part has arrived fully in a person.

Jesus goes on to promise that his disciples will do his works, and greater works, once he has gone to the Father (14:12). What follows fits the pattern already set at Sinai.

“Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (14:13).

At Sinai, God gave Israel his name so his people could call on him rightly. In the upper room, Jesus gives his own name for the same purpose. The disciples need no mediator standing between them and the divine face. They have seen the Father in the Son, and now they may ask in the Son’s name and be heard.

If you have wanted to see God’s glory before you would trust him, Philip’s question is your question. Jesus does not send you to a rock, a cloud, or a fragment of glory passing by. He points to himself, crucified and risen, and says: Look here.

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Not Orphaned (14:15-27)

The prophet Ezekiel heard God’s promise to a people in exile:

"I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes" (Ezek 36:27).

Isaiah heard the announcement of a future ruler whose reign would be characterized by everlasting peace.

"Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end" (Isa 9:7).

Both promises pointed to the same future age, when God would not just be near his people but living within them, and the chaos of the world would finally give way to shalom. In the Farewell Discourse, Jesus declares that this age has arrived.

The context is one of expected grief. Jesus has told the disciples he is leaving, and the entire atmosphere in the upper room is filled with the weight of what that departure will mean. Amid this shadow, he shares two promises that are connected.

The first gift is the Paraclete. The word παράκλητος, found only in John’s Gospel and 1 John, means someone who comes alongside: advocate, helper, counselor. Jesus calls the Spirit “another advocate” (John 14:16), which suggests he himself is the first. When he leaves, the one who comes will not be a replacement but a continuation. The Spirit will dwell not just beside the disciples but within them (14:17), fulfilling what Ezekiel promised. Jesus makes this clear:

“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (14:18).

The Spirit’s coming is Jesus’s coming, in a new form, for a new era.

The second promise arrives eight verses later:

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (14:27).

The contrast with what “the world gives” is clear. Peace that comes from human arrangements is always temporary, always dependent on circumstances remaining stable. What Jesus offers is fundamentally different, not just in level. The Hebrew term shalom, which underlies the Greek εἰρήνη, meant not only the absence of conflict but also the positive completeness of a life properly ordered under God. That is what Jesus leaves to his disciples on the night of his arrest.

The two promises address the same fear. If he leaves, will they be abandoned? No, the Advocate is coming. Will they find peace? Yes, but not the peace the world offers. The Spirit Ezekiel predicted and the peace Isaiah proclaimed are both promised here, in a borrowed room, the night before the cross. They will come. But first, Jesus must go.

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The New Temple (14:1–6)

I’m going to start with two verses not found in today’s reading.

And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade” (John 2:15–16).

What does Jesus mean when he says here, “My Father’s house”? The answer is (of course) the Jerusalem temple. But then why, in John 14:2, which is the only other place in John’s Gospel where Jesus uses the phrase “my Father’s house,” do we assume he means some heavenly home?

The King James Version, following the Vulgate, originally translated John 14:2 as follows:

^“In my Father’s house are many mansions (Latin: mansiones): if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”

The idea of heavenly mansions waiting for Christians after death has been part of the Christian collective imagination for a long time. But the ESV provides a better rendering.

“In my Father’s house are many rooms (μοναὶ). If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”

The point is not heavenly mansions but dwelling space. The temple symbolizes the place where heaven and earth connect and where God lives with his people. There are many dwelling spaces in the “temple,” meaning there is room for all of God’s people to live with God in the place where heaven and earth meet.

The place where heaven and earth meet is now the community of believers who are filled with the Holy Spirit and the temple of the living God (cf. 2 Cor 6:14). Is it any wonder then that Jesus promises the Holy Spirit in this same chapter (John 14:16, 26)?

Furthermore, the Greek word μονή, which is translated as “rooms” in the ESV, appears in only one other New Testament passage, and it’s (again) in this same chapter. 

Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home (μονὴν) with him” (John 14:23, ESV).

Whatever Jesus means (and I acknowledge it’s difficult to understand fully), he definitely isn’t saying that mansions are waiting for us in the sky. Instead, he seems to be explaining that through the gift of the Holy Spirit in his people—“my Father’s house” understood pneumatically—Jesus is preparing a dwelling place not in heaven later, but within the community of faith now. In John 2, Jesus cleanses the physical temple. In John 14, he promises to dwell within a new temple—his people. And if you want to know how to find this new temple, he is the way (14:6).