⁴ “But these things I have spoken to you, so that when their hour comes, you may remember that I told you of them. These things I did not say to you at the beginning, because I was with you.”

No one wrote down what Jesus said while He spoke. Yet they needed to remember it all, and they would—without handwritten notes. The entire Christian enterprise depends upon their testimony. Jesus would declare them to be His official representatives (ambassadors, if you will) just before He ascended to heaven after His resurrection (Acts 1:8). The early church was devoted to the apostles’ teachings (Acts 2:42).

The message of Christ was to extend far beyond His physical presence and His own audible voice. He now speaks through the writings of the apostles and those writings were collected by the early church into what we now know as the New Testament. Much has been written elsewhere on how that came to be, which goes beyond the scope of our purposes here (see, “The Formation of the New Testament,” by Chuck Gianotti, ECS Publishing).

John, being one of the apostles and Upper Room participants, writing around 60 years hence penned these very words of Jesus’ Upper Room discourse. Memory for most people, especially as they age, is suspect, but memories that are precious are well preserved, etched in our minds and unchangeable. But more significantly, as we have noted earlier, Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would give the apostles perfect recall of everything He taught (John 14:26). So John recalls for us the details and the nuances of Jesus’ words at the last supper before His death.

The memory of Jesus’ words would be especially precious and valuable when their commitment to the Kingdom of God, as presented in the person of Jesus Christ, would be tested to the max. In a few short hours, Jesus, the One for whom they had left all, and in whom they were risking tirades of the rabbinical interpretation of the Law of Moses, would be arrested and executed with the most merciless, painful, shaming kind of death known to the Romans. By all counts, they were about to experience what was assuredly a complete failure of Jesus’ mission. All they had, in the face of everything to the contrary, was Jesus’ words. And this was the reason Jesus spoke in the Upper Room as He did. They would need those words when He was taken from them, when God became silent and all seemed lost. We also need these words from the Upper Room so we too have strength to carry on when God is silent and all seems lost.

Lord, Your words and promises are precious to my soul. They sustain me in the darkest times of my life and I actively seek to meditate on them every day.