John 14:26Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

He often mentions the Comforter because of the grief that held them, giving them good hope that He will guide them.

The Comforter will come "in My name." This means that He will teach you nothing alien to My teaching. He will not seek His own glory, but will come in My name, that is, for the glory of My name, not His own. Rival teachers act otherwise, drawing disciples after themselves.

Some understand "in My name" as the name of Christ, "Comforter." For it is said, "We have an Advocate, Jesus Christ" (1 Jn 2:1). Since the Spirit came to the disciples as Comforter and relieved their grief, He came in the name of Christ, for He too is Comforter, as Christ is.

The Apostle Paul also calls the Spirit Christ when he says, "You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in us. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His" (Rom 8:9). Then he adds, "But if Christ is in you" (Rom 8:10).

Do you see how he first said that the Spirit of God dwells in them, and then added, Christ is in you? Clearly the Apostle called the Spirit Christ.

Since the Spirit is named Christ, you should understand the words, "The Father will send Him in My name," to mean that He too will be called Christ. The Holy Spirit both taught and reminded. He "taught" them all that Christ had not told them, because they could not bear it. He "reminded" them of everything the Lord had said, but which the apostles could not retain in memory, either because it was obscurely spoken or because of the weakness of their understanding.

Therefore, as the One who knows the will of the Only-begotten, the Spirit announces all things to us. He possesses knowledge not by instruction, lest He appear to occupy the position of a servant and transmit another’s words.

Rather, as His Spirit, as we have just said, He knows without instruction all that is from Him and in Him. He reveals the divine mysteries to the saints.

Likewise, the human mind, knowing all that is within it, makes outwardly manifest through the spoken word the desires of the soul to which the mind belongs. The mind is contemplated and named as something other, distinct from the soul, yet by nature it is not something other than the soul. Rather, it is in the soul as a completing part of the whole, and is considered as proceeding from it.

But the divine and ineffable Nature is above this. The force of the example is very slight for clarifying the divine persons, even if the comparison has been expressed with subtlety.

Therefore perfect instruction is begotten in the saints through the Spirit. So also the divine Paul writes in one Epistle: “Having heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, making remembrance in my prayers. May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your heart being enlightened. That you may know what is the hope of your calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe. According to the working of the might which He worked in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavens, far above every Principality and Authority and Power and Dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come” (Eph 1:15-21).

In the revelation of such truths, ineffably accomplished in us through the Spirit, we contemplate the depth of the divine economy with the flesh, and the meaning of the hidden mystery.

That His Spirit fulfills the presence of Christ Himself and His power, dwelling in the saints, and teaches all that He has spoken to us, Paul will no less make clear to us in these words: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father. From whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell through faith in your hearts. Being rooted and grounded in love, may you be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:14-19).

Again it must be noted that, in speaking of the revelation of all things to the saints through the Spirit, He does not hand them over to another teacher. Do not think this. Rather, through the Spirit He reserves them for Himself, as One no longer visible to bodily eyes, but contemplated by the spiritual vision of the heart, as befits God.

Hear how the Father speaks in the place you have read: "The Lord said to Me, You are My Son" (Ps 2:7). Hear how He teaches in the place you have read: "Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me" (Jn 6:45).

You have just heard that the Son also speaks, for He said of Himself, "all that I said to you." If you wish to know where He teaches, remember that He calls Himself Teacher: "You have one Teacher, Christ" (Mt 23:10).

Likewise the Holy Spirit instructs. You have just heard that He teaches, when it was said, "He will teach you all things." Hear also that He speaks. You have read in the Acts of the Apostles that the Holy Spirit said to blessed Peter: "Go with them, for I have sent them" (Acts 10:20).

Therefore the whole Trinity both speaks and teaches. Yet if It did not grant us to know Itself in distinct Persons, human weakness could in no way receive It.

Since It is altogether indivisible, it could never be understood that It is Trinity if It were always spoken of without distinction of Persons. For when we name the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we still do not name Them together, although They cannot but be together.

As for His addition, "and He will remind you," we must understand that we are commanded not to forget that saving admonitions belong to the grace entrusted to us by the Spirit.

The same Spirit is called Comforter because, preparing the hope of forgiveness for those who mourn over committed sin, He relieves the soul from the torment of grief.

It is rightly promised of Him, "He will teach you all things." For if this same Spirit is not in the heart of the hearer, the word of the teacher is in vain.

Therefore no one should attribute to the human teacher what he understands from the teacher’s lips. If the One who teaches inwardly is absent, the teacher’s tongue labors outwardly in vain.

Behold, all of you hear the same voice speaking, yet you do not all understand the meaning of the word you hear in the same way. If the spoken word is the same, why is understanding of it different in your hearts?

Is it not because the speaker’s word admonishes all alike, while there is an inward Teacher who privately teaches each one to understand the word? Concerning this anointing of the Spirit it is again said through John: "His anointing teaches you about all things" (1 Jn 2:27).

Thus the word gives no instruction when the mind lacks the anointing of the Spirit. But why do we say this about human teaching, when even the Creator Himself does not speak for a man’s instruction unless the Spirit speaks to that same man through anointing?

It is known that before Cain committed fratricide in deed, he heard: "If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it" (Gen 4:7).

Yet because, through the working of his guilt, he was admonished by the word and not by the anointing of the Spirit, he could hear God’s words but despised them in practice.

We must ask why it is said of this same Spirit, "He will remind you of all things," since reminding is usually the work of one who is lesser. Since in ordinary speech "to remind" sometimes means "to communicate," the invisible Spirit is called the One who reminds, not because He communicates meaning to us from below, but secretly.

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

From 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 gave them knowledge of everything necessary for them, including knowledge of the languages of the peoples to whom they had to go and preach.

He also gave them understanding of everything they had heard and seen while following Christ, and which at that time they had not 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 already been said, partly because of the state of Jesus’ own spirit, particular words in it may also refer to His coming appearances after His Resurrection. Examples are: "I will come to you," and "You will see Me."

We see in them complete impartiality toward themselves and total detachment from every thought of their personal “I.” The Apostle Peter, for example, in his Gospel accounts given to the evangelist Mark who recorded them. Was so attentive to the smallest movements of his personal human feeling that he passed over all events which, in one way or another, set him personally forward.

Then the event was expressed by them in a form of thought and speech strictly corresponding to it. Yet in the Gospels we find a precious indication that this correspondence does not consist in a detailed, minute, documentary description of what happened, or in a stenographically literal transmission of what was said.

No. Penetrating into the spiritual foundations of the events from the Lord’s life, the evangelists treated freely the incidental particulars that clothed and surrounded those events.

The evangelists describe the same event, each somewhat differently from the other, having in view either different moments in the event or its different aspects. The freedom with which they regarded the letter of description is clear from the fact that, for example, the same evangelist Luke recounts the Lord’s Ascension twice, in his Gospel and in Acts.

Each time he gives it in different features and words, supplementing one narrative with the other. Evidently he saw nothing in this that could cast even a shadow of doubt on the reliability of what he was reporting.

For them, what mattered was not that all moments and features of an event should be numbered in words. They recognized the utter impossibility of exhausting any reality in full. This was all the more true of a reality with such infinite inner content and meaning as passed before their eyes.

Indeed, for them this would have been entirely useless. Their aim was not a dead bookish entry of what had happened on this or that page of parchment.

Their spirit had before it an infinite, divine, and living task. They had to mark the event, perhaps with even one feature, but in such a way that it would tremble with life in the reader’s soul and draw his inner powers to the source of regeneration, Christ.

The thought of the evangelists was wholly directed toward fulfilling this task. They achieved it by uniting their will with the will of God, who desires only one thing in relation to man: to regenerate him in Christ and thereby save him.

The evangelist John says that everything written by him was written so that those who read might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing they might have life in His name (Jn 20:31).

Thus the writer is only an organ of the divine will, a conduit of the activity of the divine Spirit. He does not intend to write about himself, nor does he wish to be a chronicler.

He is only the expression of the same saving power of God that created the events themselves about which he reports. He seems to merge with that power and to continue its living work, reproducing in narrative what had previously been accomplished in reality.

For this reason, the verbally reproduced event bears within itself the same living divine power that was present in the actual event. The evangelist’s will is like a small stream that has joined its waters to the mighty current of the Holy Spirit’s action upon the world.

This free and complete surrender of one’s will to the will of God, and this identification of one’s aims in narrating the event with the divine aims in its very accomplishment, make it possible for the writer to surrender himself completely to the contemplation of the event.

He does this without any indirect thought about himself. He depicts the event with the same freedom of words and outlines with which, in the details themselves, it could have taken place, while remaining just as real and saving for man.

From this it becomes clear what the “reminding by the Holy Spirit” consists in. The God-inspired power of the Gospel is in no way documentary precision in describing the remembered events. It is not the detail of particulars in their depiction.

Rather, it consists in this: they are transmitted to the reader’s spirit vitally, that is, by the Holy Spirit, and therefore just as effectively as they were in reality with respect to the writer himself.

Thus in the Gospel we have before us not dead descriptions of events, but the living events themselves, breathing upon us with their grace-filled influence. They are not passing human recollections, which always bear a personal imprint.

They are eternal reminders of God to the coming ages, of what was accomplished only once on earth and reflected forever in heaven, in His divine contemplation. They are the constant living reproduction, in the depth of the spirit, of what once took place in the flesh and in man’s material setting.

Now the living divine effectiveness of the Gospel upon human souls becomes understandable. In its narratives there lives the same divine power of the Holy Spirit that was present in the very events of the Lord’s earthly life.

They are not mere words and not simply stories. In them speaks the creative power that saves us. The narratives are only means by which the living Lord acts upon us, He who abides constantly with us, though He is invisible to us.

Therefore it is the incorruptible seed from which our spiritual regeneration arises (1 Pet 1:23). The reminders of the Holy Spirit, communicated to us by the evangelists, creatively penetrate our spirit and beget in it a new life, full of joy and consolation from the good tidings brought to us by the Lord.

"He will remind you of all things," and so forth. The whole teaching of the Lord, spoken not only now but throughout His ministry, will become clear to them and be remembered. Some of it may have been misunderstood by them or forgotten; cf. Theophylact.

Consequently, this teaching of the Holy Spirit will not be some teaching different from His own. It will be the same teaching, only fuller and clearer for them, because they themselves will then be fully capable of understanding it.

This is an incontrovertible testimony to the divine inspiration of the New Testament Scriptures, in which the apostles set forth and explained the teaching of Christ.

What does this mean: "The Comforter, whom the Father will send in My name"? The Savior said of Himself, "I have come in My Father’s name, and you do not receive Me" (Jn 5:43). That is, He came as sent by God the Father.

In accordance with this, the words about the Paraclete, "whom the Father will send in My name," mean that the Holy Spirit will appear on earth as sent by Christ Jesus. Thus the Lord also said of the Paraclete, "whom I shall send to you from the Father" (Jn 15:26).

"He will teach you all things," that is, He will instruct you in everything that the disciples of Christ Jesus can and must know. Then what was not understood in the words of Jesus will be explained to them. What was understood imperfectly or mistakenly will be understood exactly.

"And He will remind you of all things that I have said to you." This means that all the words of the Lord Jesus will not merely be restored to memory. They will be restored in the deep and broad meaning they had in the divine mind of the Son of God.

The Lord said only a few words about certain subjects, yet their meaning in principles and consequences is very broad. This meaning was unfolded in the minds of the apostles by the Comforter Spirit.

For this reason we so often see explanations of the Lord’s words in John’s Gospel. These are not John’s opinions, but the utterances of the Spirit of truth.

My hearers, in earthly life there is much that is strange, obscure, and offensive. Even the apostles of Christ were in perplexity. But the Lord Jesus told us how the light of God descends into darkened hearts and minds.

Let us fulfill His instruction, and everything necessary for our salvation will be intelligible to us. Questions of idleness and curiosity will no longer trouble the mind. Everything on which the soul’s eternal well-being depends will be easily learned by us. Amen.