Christ's Departure as the Disciples' Greatest Gain

Maclaren invites us to strip away nineteen centuries of Christendom and stand with eleven terrified men in an upper room. They possessed nothing—no influence, no numbers, no world support. 'Outside these four walls there was scarcely a creature in the whole world that had the least belief either in Him or in them.' Their own hearts worked against them. Sorrow had dimmed their eyes so thoroughly that they could not perceive the truth Christ had labored to teach them. His departure appeared only as desolation, a wound that could not be healed.

Yet Christ speaks the impossible: 'It is expedient for you that I go away.' Not consolation for their loss, but gain—sumpherei in its truest sense. His physical absence would become their spiritual abundance. The departing Christ would send the Paraclete, the Great Comforter, who would work through their instrumentality upon a world that knew neither them nor Him. These sheep, destined to walk amid wolves, would become judges and accusers of that very world through the indwelling Spirit.

Maclaren captures the scandal of this promise: weakness transformed into authority, loss into dominion. The disciples needed not a Master walking beside them on earthly roads, but a Spirit inhabiting their very beings, making them agents of divine conviction. Christ's ascension was no external rapture like Elijah's chariot of fire, but the voluntary return of the God-Man to His native throne, His own 'exuberant power' bearing Him upward. In that departure lay the foundation of their unstoppable witness.