John 16:25

“I have spoken these things to you in parables. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in parables, but will tell you plainly of the Father.”

By ‘parables' or ‘sayings with a hidden meaning', Jesus is necessarily referring to what He has been revealing to them, for until He has been crucified and raised from the dead how can they begin to understand? They are dealing with the unknown and the inconceivable.

His words are looking from their viewpoint. It is they who see all He has said to them as a mystery, not the fact that He has not spoken plainly. It has all been so new and so revolutionary that they have not been able to grasp it. However, He says, they may be puzzled now but one day soon all will be made plain to them. The Holy Spirit will illuminate their minds. They will learn the Father's plans and understand His ways, in so far as it is possible for man. A glance at the sermons in Acts and the teachings of the epistles immediately brings out the truth of these sayings. Their whole thinking had been turned upside down. Thus the revelation by the Spirit interpreting the coming events are here described as ‘I will tell you plainly'. Once again Jesus and the Spirit work as one.

‘These things' may refer to the whole of Jesus' teaching, or just to the words in the Upper Room. As we know, using specific parables was a favourite method of teaching for Him, and these hid as well as revealing. To those whose hearts were open and sought humbly to know more they provided light, but to those who were only casually interested their true message was veiled. They enjoyed the story but did not grasp the message. And indeed much of Jesus' teaching, even when not strictly parabolic, had to be in picture form, for He was speaking of things which were not of this world, and He was speaking to veiled minds.

Furthermore, even the disciples after a number of years of Jesus' ministry were still bound by prejudices, confidence in the rightness of their own cherished beliefs, and an unreadiness to accept that what they had come to believe in the past was wrong. And they saw things in that light. Their minds were veiled. We know from their response when Jesus spoke plainly how difficult it was for them to move from their old ideas (e.g. Mark 8:31; Mark 9:31; Mark 10:32). And He often had to rebuke them gently because they could not shake off those old ideas. We must remember that much of what He was teaching turned their own ideas upside down. We sometimes begin to wonder how the disciples could have been so dim, but that is because centuries of exposition of Scripture have made more clear what would otherwise have been difficult to understand. Had we been in their shoes we would have been even more puzzled than they.

We have only to read the early church fathers to see how difficult they found it to understand the teaching of Jesus and Paul. They interpreted them in the light of their own ideas and regularly missed the point. To move from the New Testament writings to the teachings of early church literature is like a backward step into the semi-dark. We may think that we are not like that, but we are. How much of modern popular belief among Christians is really the result of our own environment and our current philosophies. We interpret Scripture in the light of these. It is just that we have the advantage of centuries of men of God meditating on the Scriptures and opening them to us, and their multitude of books, which help to correct us.

When Jesus came to His disciples and breathed the Holy Spirit into them (John 20:22) He was preparing them to recover from the most shattering period of their lives when everything that they thought that they knew was torn apart. They were in for the most severe period of rethinking of their lives. They had experienced Gethsemane, they had watched what happened to Jesus in His trial and on the cross, they had stood before an empty tomb and they were totally bewildered. Their whole belief pattern had to be transformed. Everything had to be rethought. Whatever they had learned to expect of the future, as interpreted by themselves, it was not like this. None of what Jesus had taught them had fully prepared them for this, not because He had not told them but because their minds had not been willing to accept it. Even His plainest words had been a mystery to them. But when the Holy Spirit came He brought back to them lessons that Jesus had spoken which they had put to one side or misunderstood and it all began to make sense. It was a miracle of rethinking and transformation of understanding. It heralded a new beginning. Now He could tell them plainly of the Father because their prejudices had been utterly broken down and they were at last open to receive it.