Please allow me to add larger context segment from John 14.
John 14
9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me is doing his works.
11 **Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves. **
12 Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these, because I am going to the Father.
I say that Jesus was doing miracles not so much that they needed doing (there were a whole lot of things that needed doing and he couldn’t get to even a good fraction of them in three years) but to demonstrate His authority on earth. If He just said, “hey guys there is this cool way of thinking and acting and loving that can really empower you and you would produce Good Fruit of the spirit even both in times of comfort and in trials,” they’d say yeah set your book over there in the self-help heap. But no He said “get up and walk.” He healed the hand. These were “demonstrations” that ensured they would take him to be more than just a nice guy, a crazy guy, or a happy guy or whatever. That He spoke with more authority than Church leaders, because He was the Living Word, as opposed to Church leaders who were merely applying written scriptures in their own prideful and flawed way.
So anyway He did enough tricks, and ultimately gave the “sign” of rising from the dead, to cement His story in history, and establish the Eucharistic celebration with authority demonstrated beyond the power of death for both Himself, and for Lazarus and the sleeping girl, etc.
So what He is teaching us is how to use our faith. He is showing us how far faith can go, and telling His people that if they want to access the Father, just look at Him and the answer will become clear. That’s kind of like Eucharistic Adoration sort of?
So how can I do “greater” works than those? Well for one, what consitutes “Greater?” Obviously I’m not going to top or recreate His action on the cross, because it was a one-for-all deal. I’m not greater than Him, nor do I have greater faith? But you know what I do have that He didn’t? A keyboard that allows me to do spiritual acts of mercy over the Internet, and immediately plant seeds and receive seeds others plant in us via what we see from them on our screen, to the majority of souls on the planet, within minutes.
Can you imagine the Sermon on the Mound, live streaming from Rome as Breaking News? What would St. Paul have done, if he could have Skyped with his churches on a weekly basis to keep up with him?
We have it easy, compared to Jesus, to do His work. He set the stage, the world expanded its communication so we’re already experience a “hive mind” effect as we all talk directly to each other instead of top-down information that stays local.
Within something like 7 hops from friend contact to contact, almost all Internet users can be reached by almost any other, directly or indirectly. So if someone finds a particular Jesus “meme” comforting, and a few friend comment on it, that’s like an act of mercy right there, that within hours or days might see dozens, hundred, or even millions. It’s like the loaves and the fish were made for this technology. All I have is a keyboard and an Internet connection, but maybe a hundred people all over the planet will read this, and I will have influenced minds, “sharing and preaching love in the intent of living the gospel” for example, on every continent. A few loaves and fish can feed thousands of stomachs. A few keystrokes can feed thousands of souls.
Luke 10
1 After this the Lord appointed seventy-two] others whom he sent ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he intended to visit. 2 He said to them, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest. 3 Go on your way; behold, I am sending you like lambs among wolves. 4 Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals; and greet no one along the way.
With every single post, we are reaching out to all continents and nations, potentially, allowing the Holy Spirit to find fertile ground somewhere on the planet for those seeds of the Word we offer; and if we speak of love from our hearts, then we open ourselves to greater interconnections.
Plus Jesus told people about how we are all one spirit. Well now we are one spirit, and we are all connected by Internet, again. What does this mean? For the first time any generation in the history of Christianity can do this, we can now talk directly human-to-human in any number of individual or group configurations. This allows the hand and the foot, and the eye and the knee or whatever, to communicate directly as if we were one mental “body.” Just like every nerve in our body is ultimately connected to every other and every muscle via an internetwork of neurons. There are processing centers like the brain and the heart, but ultimately every part of the body can feel every other part. So metaphorically, every part can speak directly with each other so they can directly negotiate their interface. So it is here. Any forum post can potentially serve as a distribution center for good seeds, and we are all our own parts of the mystical body of Christ. So now we don’t all have to rely on our “heads” to do the “negotiating” for us and then hand down our assignments. The Holy Spirit could be the spiritual internetwork.
Anyway the harvest has been ready for 2000 years, but now all of a sudden we all have harvesting equipment and can all be harvesters…
I could be totally wrong.
MS
