NOTES for Joh 16:25-33
Today we read a passage from Christ’s Last Discourse with His disciples, in which the Lord speaks of what the Apostle Paul would later call adoption through faith. It turns out that God’s purpose is to give people direct access to the Father through Christ’s incarnation, suffering, and resurrection. The Lord, whom the apostle would call the one Mediator between God and humanity, united Himself fully with human beings in everything except sin. Therefore, He tells the disciples that the Father Himself loves them, and that it will no longer be Christ who asks on their behalf, but the Father Himself who will hear them.
Thus, this concerns overcoming the abyss that separates each one of us from God through the Fall. Ask in My name, the Lord commands His disciples. By being united with Christ through faith, we receive the possibility of addressing the Father in Christ’s name. By becoming one Body with Jesus in Communion, we too become children of God, as John the Evangelist writes so clearly in his first epistle. In this, the source of true life is revealed to us. And everything unworthy of God’s children can at last disappear from our lives if we labor toward this.