John 14:17Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

"The Spirit of truth," the Lord says, "whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him and does not know Him." By world He means a corrupt and shameful life. Do you see that a soul given over to the world cannot have the Spirit?

Much zeal is needed on our part so that He may remain with us, order all our deeds, and keep us in safety and perfect peace.

A ship sailing with a favorable wind meets no obstacles and does not sink while it uses a favorable and constant wind. After the voyage it also wins glory for itself among pilots and travelers. To the former it gave rest and freed them from the hard labor of the oars. The latter it delivered from every fear, and by its very course it afforded them the most pleasant sight.

So also the soul guided by the divine Spirit stands above all the waves of life and travels the path leading to heaven more swiftly than any ship. For its sails are pure and are filled not by wind, but by the Comforter Himself. It casts out from its thoughts everything slackening and destructive.

As the wind, striking a loosely stretched sail, cannot act, so the Spirit cannot abide in a slack soul, but requires great tension and effort. Therefore we must have a mind aflame and always perform our actions with strength and exertion.

For example, when we pray, we must do so with great care, stretching the soul toward heaven, not with ropes, but with strong zeal.

Likewise, when we perform works of mercy, we must act with exertion, so that neither care for the household, nor concern for children, nor pleasing a wife, nor fear of falling into poverty may slacken our sail.

If we stretch this sail on all sides by hope for future blessings, it will receive the action of the Spirit well. Nothing corruptible and passing will enter it. If something does enter, it will do it no harm, but will immediately be repelled by its firmness and thrown off.

Thus we need great exertion, because we too are crossing a great and broad sea, full of many beasts and many rocks. It presents us with many waves and, even in clear weather, raises a most violent storm.

Again, the "world" cannot receive Him, that is, wicked people and those who think in a worldly way, because they do not see Him. This means that His essence is incomprehensible. By sight here He means contemplation by the mind, and therefore He added, "and does not know Him."

Clearly, by the phrase "does not see," He expressed "does not know." Thus He comforts the apostles when He says that the world cannot receive Him, but that this excellent gift will be given to you and will abide "with you." What is still greater, He will abide "in you."

By "with you" He indicates external help through nearness. By "in you" He indicates inward indwelling and strengthening. This also shows that He is God. For God says, "I will dwell in you and walk among you" (Lev 26:12).

Therefore the world cannot receive the Spirit because it does not know Him, but you know Him. Why? Because you are not of the world. Therefore you are able to receive Him, and He now abides "with you" and will always be "in you."

Must not everyone acknowledge, and quite rightly, and even be firmly convinced, that the Son, being by essence a sharer in the Father's natural goods, possesses the Spirit in the same manner as the Father is understood to possess Him?

He does not possess Him as alien and external to Himself. It is foolish, indeed mad, to think this.

Rather, He possesses Him as each of us contains his own spirit within himself and pours it outward from his inmost depths.

For this reason Christ also breathed Him forth bodily. He showed that, as breath proceeds bodily from human mouths, so the Spirit is poured forth from the divine essence in a manner proper to the Godhead.

He is the Spirit who proceeds from Him. Since the Spirit Himself belongs both to God the Father and to the Son, how can They not certainly have one essence, both distinctly and together in union?

For the Father is Father, and not Son. The Son is Son, and not Father. Yet the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father.

The Father does not give the Advocate, or the Holy Spirit, separately, nor does the Son give Him separately. He is communicated to the saints from the Father through the Son.

Therefore, when the Father is said to give Him, the One through whom He gives all things is the Son.

And when the Son is said to give Him, the One from whom He gives all things is the Father.

That the Spirit is divine and not of a different essence from either the Father or the Son is, I suppose, beyond doubt for anyone rightly minded. A necessary reason will persuade us of this.

If, as some think, He is not from the essence of God, how could a creature that has received the Spirit become a partaker of God?

How can we be called and truly be temples of God (1 Cor 3:16), if we receive a created or foreign spirit and not the Spirit of God?

How can partakers of the Spirit be sharers in the divine nature, according to the word of the saints (2 Pet 1:4), if He is numbered among creatures?

How can this be, if He does not come to us from the divine nature itself?

He does not pass through it to us as something alien to it. Rather, one might say, He appears in us as a certain quality of the Godhead.

He dwells in the saints and always abides, if they preserve grace within themselves. They do this by cleansing the eyes of their soul with every fitting discipline and tireless zeal for every virtue.

Christ says that He is inaccessible and invisible to those who are in the world, that is, to those who think worldly things and desire to love earthly things. But He is accessible and easily seen by the saints.

For what reason? Those who have indelible uncleanness and have filled their mind as with some mud do not perceive the beauty of the divine nature.

They do not receive the law of the Spirit, because they are wholly subject to fleshly passions.

But the good and sober, having a heart free from worldly evils, willingly receive the Advocate to dwell within them. Having received Him, they preserve Him.

As far as is accessible to human beings, they contemplate Him spiritually, and from this receive a great and enviable reward.

For He will sanctify them and show them to be doers of every good. He will also remove from them the shame of the slavery proper to humanity and clothe them with the dignity of adoption.

Paul bore witness to this in the words: "And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father!" (Gal 4:6).

The world cannot receive Him because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. For worldly love does not have the invisible eyes by which alone the Holy Spirit can be invisibly seen.

"But you," He says, "know Him, for He abides with you and will be in you." He will be in them in order to abide. He does not abide in order to come into being, since before anything begins to abide somewhere, it must have being.

But lest they think that "He abides with you" was said of a guest who visibly lives with someone, He explained what He meant by "He abides with you" by adding and saying, "and will be in you" (Jn 14:17).

Therefore He is seen invisibly. If He is not in us, we cannot comprehend Him. In the same way we see our conscience within ourselves. Indeed, we see another person's face and cannot see our own, but we see our own conscience and do not see another's.

But conscience exists only within ourselves, whereas the Holy Spirit can exist even without us. Yet He is given to us so as also to be in us. If He is not in us, we can neither see Him nor know Him in the way we ought to see and know Him.

Therefore "the world cannot receive Him, because it does not see Him. But you know Him, because He abides in you." Isaiah says the same: "He who establishes the earth and the things in it, who gives breath to the people upon it, and Spirit to those who walk upon it" (Isa 42:5).

The prophet testifies that those who trample earthly things underfoot and have risen above them are worthy of the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, what must we confess Him to be, who cannot be contained by the world and is contemplated only by the saints because of the purity of their heart? Or what honors are fitting for Him? See also v. 16.

"But you know Him." You know Him in part. A little later the Holy Spirit will descend upon you and teach you. Or, you know the Holy Spirit because you know Me.

Just as the one who has known Me has known the Father, so, on the other hand, the one who has known Me has already known the Holy Spirit. For all of Us have one essence, nature, power, and dignity.

"Because He abides with you." As the Father is with Me, so also is the Holy Spirit, because the blessed Trinity is indivisible.

"And will be in you." He will not die as I do, because He has not become incarnate like Me.

Although Jesus Christ had already said much, He had not dispelled the disciples' despondency. They were still troubled and sorrowful at the thought that they would remain orphans. Therefore He turns to this sorrowful thought of theirs.

You now know that the Holy Spirit both abides and dwells in the saints unto the ages of ages. For when our Lord says, "that He may be with you forever," He shows that the Holy Spirit always, unceasingly and endlessly, is and will be inseparably with them, both in the present life and in the life to come.

That the divine apostles and all others who were counted worthy to receive the Holy Spirit saw Him, listen to what Christ says after the words just cited: "The Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, because He abides with you and will be in you" (Jn 14:17).

That those who love Christ and keep His commandments also see Christ, listen again to Christ Himself, who says: "He who has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father; and I will love him and will manifest Myself to him" (Jn 14:21).

The Holy Spirit will be their Comforter and will teach them everything they need to know for their preaching activity. He will also remind them of everything Christ told them, which they could not understand at the time.

From the book of the Acts of the Apostles it is known that ten days after the Ascension of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles. He communicated to them the knowledge of everything necessary for them, the knowledge of the languages of the peoples to whom they had to go in preaching, and also the understanding of everything they had heard and seen while following Christ, but had not then understood.

Thus this whole discourse of Jesus contains the promise to send the Holy Spirit to the apostles and, in His person, to appear to them with the Father.

But since this discourse is broken and contains repetitions of what has been said, partly explained by the state of Jesus' own spirit, one may conclude from certain words in it, such as "I will come to you" and "you will see Me," that Jesus also spoke to the apostles about His coming appearances to them after His Resurrection.

See my booklet The Descent of the Holy Spirit, which contains a detailed study of the greatest miracle that transformed the apostles from men of little faith and doubt into such convinced preachers of the risen Christ that not even all the united powers of Hades could shake them.

"Whom the world cannot receive," and so on. The world is those who do not believe in Christ, Jn 12:31, the opponents of Christ and His work, or those who do not know Him at all and are not enlightened by His teaching. They are "evil people" (Chrysostom).

They cannot receive this Comforter because they have no inward capacity for knowing and contemplating Him. He is for them something wholly unknown and alien to them, cf. Basil the Great.

Such are the representatives of this world, the Jews, who said of Christ that He had a demon and that He performed miracles by demonic power, Mt 12:24, 32.

"But you know Him." Their knowledge of the Spirit rests on the fact that He abides with them and will be in them. This expression denotes two periods of the Spirit's relation to them, one present and the other future.

The present period is preparatory, when the Spirit abides with them. The future is perfecting, when He will be in them.

From the Lord's teaching they came to know the Holy Spirit. From the Lord's dealings with them, they experienced upon themselves the actions of the Holy Spirit through the Lord's word, which worked in them for their moral purification, Jn 15:3, and was still acting preparatorily, Jn 7:39.

Finally, after the Lord's glorification, the Holy Spirit will descend upon them in the full abundance of His gifts and will abide with them forever. The fulfillment of this promise followed after the Lord's Ascension, on the day of Pentecost, as the Acts of the Apostles reports, Acts 2:1-4.

This is the Jewish world, v. 19, portraying people hostile to Christ and His teaching, 1 Cor 2:6-8. It cannot receive the Spirit. It has stifled within itself the capacity to receive Him by stubbornly remaining in the spirit of falsehood and malice, 1 Cor 2:14.

Why can it not receive Him? "Because it neither sees Him nor knows Him." It is blind to receiving Him. It does not see and does not recognize Him.

It has receptivity only for the earthly, the sensory, and what flatters the passions and earthly attachments. For such things it has both intelligence and cleverness, sometimes even astonishing cleverness.

The world could see the Holy Spirit in His visible actions, but it did not look and did not pay attention. With contempt and malice it attributed these actions to Beelzebul, Mt 12:24.

It does not know or recognize the Spirit from the Savior's instructions. When He acts upon the conscience, it does not acknowledge His voice and rejects it, Acts 7:51; 1 Cor 2:14.

"The mind set on the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can it be," Rom 8:7.

"But you know Him." The apostles already knew the Spirit, at least to such a degree that their knowledge surpassed the revelations of flesh and blood, Mt 16:17. It surpassed even the knowledge of the disciples of the Baptist, Acts 19:1, and still more the knowledge of those who sat on Moses' seat, Mt 11:25.

"Because He abides in you." The disciples of the Lord Jesus were acquainted with the Spirit of grace because He lived in their hearts. He strengthened them with the firmness by which, despite the malice of enemies, they followed Jesus everywhere, and thereby He revealed His abiding in them.

"And will be in you." He will live as constantly as the glory of the Lord dwelt in the temple of Jehovah, Rom 8:11; 1 Cor 3:16. And as to him who has, more will be given and he will have abundance, Mt 13:12, so in the disciples of Christ He will reveal Himself in higher and most wondrous gifts.