¹⁶ “A little while, and you will no longer see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me.”

Again Jesus tells them of His departure. This is certainly not a new thought (John 7:33); in fact, this subject dominated the Upper Room conversation (see 14:18-19 and so on). It bears repeating. Jesus never came into this world with the intention of living to a ripe old age. He had an carefully planned exit strategy, and now He is letting the disciples in on it.

So often, within a movement, few have the capacity to see beyond or above the movement. In our contemporary world, you often have Christian entities that enjoy phenomenal growth under the founding leader, yet with no thought given to life after the founder dies. Often those entities or movements buckle and flounder under their own weight. In a somewhat contrarian manner, Jesus began a movement that was dependent on His leaving the movement!

It was better for the “movement,” that is Christianity, that the founder vacate His visible presence—and this is true on a number of counts. First, His departure speaks initially of His death. And of course Christianity is nothing without the death of Christ. That was the whole reason God sent Him into this world: “This Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death” (Acts 2:23). But, as Jesus spoke just previously, His departure would make way for the Holy Spirit’s universal and ever present role. And this would be much better than the physical body of Jesus being present.

Additionally, just as God placed Adam and Eve in the garden to tend it on His behalf, as His image-bearers, God has now left believers in this world to be His ambassadors (2 Cor 5:21) and image bearers to reach the lost world of non-believers. As in the Garden, so now also, God desires to work in and through His people.

But there is good news for the human soul. Despite it being better that Jesus is not physically with us now, He left this promise, “You will see Me.” While this could possibly refer to seeing Him now with spiritual eyesight, Jesus was saying that we would physically see Him at some point. True, the disciples physically saw Him again: “He also presented Himself alive after His suffering, by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days” (Acts 1:3). But praise God there is coming a day when we will see Him again: “Beloved … we know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is” (1 John 3:2).

“Amen, come Lord Jesus” (Rev 22:20)