I Still Have Many Things to Say to You

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
(John 16:12-15, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

In this week’s reading, Jesus illuminates a key aspect of Quaker faith.

The message comes from Jesus’s last teaching before his arrest and execution, following the Passover meal with his disciples. He wants to prepare them for his imminent death—and he wants them to carry on the work he has begun. “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these,” he assures them. He will remain engaged in the affairs of his friends—those who faithfully follow the instructions he has passed on from God—and, from his Father’s house, he will assist them. “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” (John 14:12-13)

If the disciples undertake this mission, they won’t have an easy time of it. “An hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God,” Jesus warns. “And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me.” (John 16:2-3) Even then, however, the disciples should know that Jesus has not abandoned them. He will send a Spirit of truth, who will speak to them on his behalf—just as they must testify to the world on his behalf, “because you have been with me from the beginning.” (John 15:27)

The early Quakers knew that they had not accompanied Jesus from the beginning of his ministry, but they saw themselves as the spiritual heirs of the disciples who had. So they believed Jesus when he said “I still have many things to say to you,” even after a millennium and a half, and they believed in the Spirit who would convey Jesus’s truth to them.

They believed because it had happened, and continued to happen, to many of them.

Those first generations of Friends understood their experiences through the context of their Christian backgrounds. They acknowledged that people from other cultures had similar spiritual awakenings and encounters with the divine. In the Quakers’ mind, however, those people failed to recognize the spirit guiding them toward salvation as the advocate promised by Jesus.

Today, the Religious Society of Friends makes room for a range of opinions regarding the precise contours of revelation. For many Quakers, nothing has changed: Jesus sends the Spirit, whatever we believe about it, and when we make our way to the Beloved Community, we will find God and Jesus waiting for us with open arms. Other Friends might think Jesus had some great ideas, but don’t see how that makes him the son of God, let alone the exclusive gatekeeper to the Beloved Community. Spirit, they might suggest, doesn’t necessarily come from the Abrahamic God; for that matter, the Abrahamic God doesn’t necessarily reflect the true essence of the Divine.

Some Friends go so far as to propose that Spirit plays no part in continuing revelation. We may think we’ve heard from a heavenly messenger, but the revelations all come from within ourselves, products of our own consciousness. God doesn’t even exist, at least not in the form of a powerful entity taking interest in the affairs of humanity. But a shared belief in something like God—or a shared professed belief, at any rate—gives people a good excuse to form social bonds and work together for their mutual well-being. It makes a solid basis, you might say, for a religious society.

The early Quakers wouldn’t know how to begin to respond to something like that—no, I fib! Of course they had an answer to such assertions. To them, merely professed faith hardly counted as faith at all.

“It is impossible for him that cannot believe for holiness to work holiness,” James Nayler admonished.

Some modern Friends might consider that excessively judgmental—heck, it gives me pause. Surely works, even without faith, must count for something. But Nayler and other early Quakers held firm on this point. Without faith, they warned, we direct our works toward worldly ends, and can only achieve worldly outcomes. Outside the covenant with God, even the best intentions must ultimately fall short of the Beloved Community.

That doesn’t worry every Friend, and perhaps it shouldn’t. Perhaps, given the general state of things, we ought to consider “the best intentions” good enough for this moment. If we settle for good enough, though, will our souls remain ready to receive everything the Spirit of truth, whatever its source, still has to tell us?