Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.
John 14:12 (NIV)
Greater Because He Left
A woman clocks in before the store opens, and there is a pallet of cereal waiting for her in aisle four. Before she puts the phone away she reads the promise about greater things, and it lands on her like one more thing to get through. The next nine hours are other people’s groceries, and she can already tell how much of that truck she will finish.
The words belong to the last night. Jesus has told his friends he is going away, and they are taking it badly enough that he tells them their hearts don’t have to be troubled. Then he says that whoever believes in him will do the works he has been doing, and greater things than these, because he is going to the Father.
All of it hangs on his leaving, and nobody at that table wanted him to go. Greater, as far as I can read it, means wider. While he was here, the work happened wherever his body happened to be, one town at a time. After he went, it turned up in places he had never walked, done by men who had followed him around one country.
Jesus says the same about his own works. The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. The men hearing that had watched those works happen from a few feet away.
The anxious question, whether my work is large enough and my reasons clean enough, has no good answer, because it is a question about the wrong person. Jesus says whoever believes in him will do these works, and he ties the greater ones to his going to the Father.
By nine the pallet is down to the last two layers, and the promise she read at six was made to her as much as to any of them.
A Prayer to Remember
Jesus, I’ve been measuring my days by what got done in them, and calling that faithfulness. You promised greater things to men who had nothing but you, and then you went. Do today whatever you meant by greater, and do it in the hours I actually have.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
