Why did Christ leave things unsaid before the Ascension?
Christ told the Apostles they were not yet ready for the whole truth—and promised the Holy Ghost would guide them step by step into it.
Christ told the Apostles they were not yet ready for the whole truth—and promised the Holy Ghost would guide them step by step into it.
Editor’s Notes
Some Context
This Gospel passage is read on the Fourth Sunday after Easter. They are taken from Christ’s final words to the Apostles in the Cenacle, on the night of Maundy Thursday, immediately before leaving for Gethsemane. Intriguingly, this passage precedes the passage read on the previous Sunday.
In this text, Christ unveils the coming role of the Holy Ghost, who will perfect the Apostles’ understanding, glorify the Son, and lead the Church into all truth after his Ascension.
He teaches that revelation is given gradually, with divine reverence for human weakness, and that the Paraclete will inwardly illuminate what the Apostles could not yet bear—deepening their knowledge, recalling Christ’s words, and guiding the Church into the full mystery of redemption. This text grounds Catholic doctrine on the divine origin of tradition, the unity of revelation, and the Holy Ghost’s role in glorifying Christ across the ages.
In Part I, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ promised the Holy Ghost would continue and complete his teaching in the Apostles.
That divine truth is always given according to man’s capacity, and deepened by the Holy Ghost’s silent illumination.
Why the brevity of Christ’s earlier words may reflect the grief he felt at the failure of many to cooperate with the Holy Ghost.
He shows us that the Holy Ghost teaches nothing new, but reveals in fullness what Christ already gave.
The Holy Ghost and Our Lord
Passiontide, Part III, Chapter V
Chapter VI
St. John xvi. 12-15, Story of the Gospels, § 156
Burns and Oates, London, 1886
Fourth Sunday after Easter
Brevity of our Lord's teaching on the action of the Holy Ghost
It is not the least remarkable feature about this part of the discourse of our Lord, as we have it reported by St. John, that the great teaching about the action of the Holy Ghost in the reproval, or confutation, or conviction of the world, should be summed up in the three short and somewhat enigmatic sentences which have been considered in the last chapter.
It is very possible that our Lord used no more words on the subject than those which the Evangelist has recorded. If the case was so, we may reasonably infer that this conviction of the world, which was the effect of the presence of the Paraclete on the enemies of God, was not considered by Him a subject which it was His business to draw out with any great fulness of detail to the Apostles, although indeed it included incidentally the great display of the beautiful works and fruits of the Holy Ghost in the Church and in the Saints of which we have spoken.
But such subjects as the judgment of the prince of the world were not commonly chosen by our Lord, although there is much in the history of the Christian centuries which may be said to illustrate the glory of God in the destruction of the kingdom of Satan. Perhaps also our Lord had other reasons for leaving the subject aside after the few pregnant words which He had spoken—perhaps He might foresee that there were to be some flaws in the picture, not of course in the work of the Holy Ghost, which could not but be perfect in its kind, but in the want of human co-operation, and consequently He might know that the history of the use of the magnificent powers set in operation by the mission of the third Divine Person, if the result of that mission were to be completely related, might contain some elements of disappointment on which it would not be well to dwell.
The Passion itself was now close at hand, and the near prospect and detailed consideration of the Passion was to include the bitter Agony, which was to afflict His Heart so much that He was to allow Himself to frame the prayer that the chalice might pass from Him untasted.
It seems the most probable explanation of this that He was to foresee how comparatively fruitless His Sacrifice was to be for the large mass of mankind. For a reason of the same sort He may not have chosen to speak at full length of the wonders worked for His glory by the Holy Ghost, Who was to be so often grieved by the unfaithfulness of Christians. For whatever reason, this history, which as soon as it began to be worked out in fact on earth, was the delight and admiration of the blessed citizens of Heaven, was to be contained in our Lord’s own words in the three sentences of which we have been speaking. But it must be remembered that one of the convictions mentioned could have given no pain or dissatisfaction to the Heart of our Lord—that, namely, in which He might have spoken of the fruits of the faith of the believers who were to reflect so much of glory on His work in the world, and it is perhaps more probable that the silence in this case was occasioned by some other motive.
The time was running on, and the hour of the betrayal was not far distant. The discourse, as we gather from the Evangelist, had already occupied much time. Our Lord had yet some things more to tell them, and He may have shortened other topics for the sake of dealing with those which were the most necessary.
Many things yet to be told
‘I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will teach you all truth. For He shall not speak of Himself, but whatsoever things He shall hear, He shall speak, and the things that are to come He shall show you.
‘He shall glorify Me, because He shall receive of Mine, and shall show it to you. All things whatsoever the Father hath are Mine. Therefore I said that He shall receive of Mine and show it to you.’
This passage seems to conclude and to sum up the instruction which our Lord now gives to the Apostles concerning the office of the Holy Ghost.
It is, in the first place, an additional reason for them to long for and to welcome the coming of the Paraclete, that He will supply many things which they had not been able to receive from our Lord Himself. He says that He had many things to tell them, but that at that time and occasion they were not able to bear them. It seems, therefore, that they were able to bear certain things at one time and certain other things at another time, and that it was a part of that exquisite prudence and consideration which belonged to our Blessed Lord that He taught them what He had to teach, just at the time when their minds were fit to receive certain truths, and that He forbore to press certain other things until the time when they were fit.
This beautiful prudence and, as the Wise Man calls it, ‘reverence,’ of our Lord for His poor and feeble creatures, may be traced all through His dealings with man from the first beginnings of the revelation of the promise in the Garden of Eden to the end, and it is also reflected in the careful reserve of the Church and in her gentle wisdom in bringing forth into the full light the doctrines which she has to define, from time to time, in consequence of the opposition of heretics, which renders such definitions necessary for the protection of the faith.
The Apostles and the teachings of the Holy Ghost
The Apostles could hardly realize what must have been very plain to their Divine Master, that the difference between the facility and rapidity and perfection of instruction received by them from our Lord Himself in the days of their familiar converse with Him as man like themselves, and the characteristic qualities of the teaching they were now to begin to receive from the Blessed Paraclete, was to be immense, and their new method of learning was to be in many respects a very great advance upon the privileges they had hitherto enjoyed, great as those privileges had been.
It had been a great thing to live with our Lord, to see Him and to hear Him, to be able to ask Him a question, and to hear from His own lips the solution of what they had not understood. But the instruction of the Holy Spirit would be something more—a light in their intelligence continually elevating them to higher truths, which did not require the statement of their difficulties or perplexities, bringing out to their minds what He had said and what they had not comprehended at the time, deepening every line of the teaching and placing each separate portion of it in a fuller and clearer light, while at the same time the relation of one portion of the truth to every other portion became clear, and the harmonies and right proportions of all shone out in their own brilliancy.
How they had been taught by Our Lord
It may very well be the case that the Apostles may have been wonderfully enlightened on many points at the time when they received the teaching of our Lord from His own blessed lips, but there are many places in the Gospels from which it seems more natural to conclude that they failed to follow Him fully up to the last.
They seem often to have been unable to comprehend Him, and indeed the Sacred Text seems here to tell us this in our Lord’s own words, for He says to them:
‘I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.’
He does not say that the time presses, though that was probably so, but that they cannot bear them.
But when the Holy Ghost came all things were changed. His method of instruction is without words or voice, but entirely spiritual, by means of lights and motions communicated to the intelligence and the will, and it is impossible for Him not to help the souls with which He deals according to His own wonderful power and life. He breatheth where He wills, there is no slowness or imperfection about His breathings, He can illuminate a thousand hearts instantaneously as well as one.
Nor can there be any difficulty about His teaching, because He is the Creator Spirit, and His motions bear with them the light that they require as well as the force which the will needs to close with what He suggests. The whole of the Divine plan for the redemption of the world, and, as a part of it, the instruction and training of the Apostles for their part of the work of the conversion of the world, was clearly and fully possessed by Him, both that part of that instruction which had been performed by our Lord, as well as that part of which He had just said that they were not yet able to receive it.
Now, as it were, they were to become His scholars, and with ineffable love and wisdom He was to set about the work of their formation. He could remind them of anything they might have forgotten, He could most perfectly supply what was yet wanting, He could light up in their minds the sayings and doings of their dear Master in a manner which made them glow with new beauty and force, He could bring out meanings in them which before were hidden, and He could abundantly add the portions of sacred truth which up to that time had been kept back.
We think that our Blessed Lady had all along had a wonderful and singular intelligence of the full meaning and import of the mysteries of our Lord’s life as they passed in succession under her eyes, and that she was wonderfully helped in this by her own habit of ‘pondering these things in her heart,’ as St. Luke says. The illumination of the minds of the blessed Apostles for their great work in the Kingdom of God may have been something which issued in the same kind of intelligence, though it may have been more immediate, and have been independent of their own industry, and extending to all the subjects which it belonged to them to know with the perfect comprehension which their great office required.
Difficulty about His former words
But these words of our Lord seem to be in some way at variance with those others which He had spoken to the Apostles not long before in this discourse, when He had said:
‘I have called you friends, because all things whatsoever I have heard of My Father, I have made known to you.’1
It seems that then He had said that He had told them all things which He had heard from His Father, that is, especially, the truths, and doctrines, and precepts which He had received as Man and as Redeemer, to reveal and commit to them as the ministers of the Church. Whereas He now speaks of many things which they are not able to bear, that is, unable, not from any want of will, but from want of robust spiritual perception, saying that when they have been strengthened by the light and power of the Holy Ghost, they will be able to bear these things, and the Paraclete will then reveal them.
The fact seems to be, that the truths and precepts which our Lord received from the Father, for the purpose of revelation in time to mankind through the Church, may be considered in various lights. Our Lord received and receives from His Father throughout all eternity the whole Divine substance and Nature, and there can never have been, or can be, a time at which He does not perfectly have them. As Man, also, He has the perfect knowledge of all that is bestowed on Him in His Human Nature, and when this complete knowledge was given to Him at the first, it was in a measure and degree which know no limitation or possibility of increase.
And the office of Mediator and Redeemer in which He is our Light and Life, involves a commission and precept to Him to impart to us all that knowledge of the truths of God which He intends us to receive, and which we are capable of receiving. And when in time it was the will of God that this or that truth, in due order, should be made known to us, the precept of revealing it to us became, as it were, actual, for the purpose of the revelation, and what it was before ordered that we should receive, was then and there ordered to be revealed to us.
Different stages in their enlightenment
We may well understand from these considerations that our Blessed Lord, Whose will as God is the same as the will of the Father, and Whose will as Man is perfectly conformed and obedient to that of the Father, might say at one time that He had told the Apostles all that He had received from the Father to tell them, and yet at another time that He had still many things to tell them, for which they were not yet fit, and which, therefore, had not yet come under the precept of the Father to be told to them, being kept back by their weakness, until they were made clear by the teaching of the Holy Ghost, Who, as He receives all the substance of the Divinity from the Son and the Father, so, also, teaches nothing to men but what He has received from the Father and the Son.
Nor does our Lord say that He Himself will not reveal these things to them, even while with them upon earth, at a future time. For after the Resurrection He must, as we cannot doubt, have been both able and willing to tell them many things which related to the Church in particular, and of which the Gospels speak, as when He explained to the two disciples who walked with Him to Emmaus, ‘beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, the things that were concerning Him.’
Again, we are told by St. Luke that before the Ascension He opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures, and that after the Passion ‘He showed Himself alive by many proofs, appearing unto them and speaking of the Kingdom of God.’ In the few words which follow in this place, it appears as if our Lord were taking pains, out of a tender consideration for them, to make it plain that the teaching of the Paraclete was not to be different from that which they had received from Him, as indeed it could not be.
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The Holy Ghost and Our Lord
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St. John xv. 15.