Divine Presence in Jesus’s Absence

The previous chapter showed how John began to transfer the negative implications of divine absence from believers to unbelievers by depicting Jesus’s absence as divine abandonment of those who rejected Jesus as the enfleshed divine presence. This chapter demonstrates how John completes that transfer by describing how believers retain access to the divine presence through the Spirit-Paraclete in a manner that can be construed to their benefit. I begin by considering three passages (John 9; 11; 12:27–50) that depict Jesus’s absence as a problem for the narrative’s believing characters and clarify the expectations that the authorial audience should have for the provision of a new experience of divine presence. The chapter then examines John 14–20 to show how John presents the Spirit-Paraclete as the provision of divine presence in line with those expectations. I argue that John depicts the Spirit-Paraclete not as Jesus’s Doppelgänger but as one who mediates the divine presence with a Christological-orientation in Jesus’s absence. I then clarify how this understanding of the Spirit-Paraclete affects scholarly debates about John’s alleged sectarian perspective and his eschatology.