Sermons on the Gospel of St. John, Chapters 14–16

These sermons on Christ's farewell discourse were preached by Martin Luther in the Wittenberg parish church in 1537 and 1538, while the town pastor Johannes Bugenhagen was away in Denmark organizing the church there and Luther filled his pulpit. Caspar Cruciger took them down, worked them into continuous form, and saw them through the press, and Luther is recorded as holding the published result in unusually high regard among his own books. The setting was not tranquil. Luther had nearly died of illness on the road to Schmalkalden in early 1537, the question of a papal council hung over the evangelical estates, and the Wittenberg congregation was a mixed crowd of students, townspeople and the simply curious. Into that setting Luther read John 14 through 16, where Jesus prepares his disciples for his departure, and he treated the text as addressed to a church that now lives in exactly the condition those disciples feared: Christ bodily gone, the world hostile, and faith left to cling to a word.

The governing move of the sermons is to take the disciples' trouble seriously and then to show how every line of the discourse answers it. Let not your hearts be troubled is not a gentle sentiment for Luther but a command that only the promises which follow make possible. Christ is the way, the truth and the life, which means that the heart must not go looking for God anywhere but in the man who speaks these words, and Luther presses this against every attempt, papal or sectarian, to climb to God by works, visions or speculation. The vine and the branches become an extended treatment of how fruit follows from being in Christ rather than producing that union, and of how the Father's pruning looks, from the inside, like affliction. The long sections on the Paraclete give Luther his doctrine of the Spirit: the Spirit's office is to glorify Christ, to convict the world of sin precisely because it does not believe in him, and to comfort, not to deliver fresh revelations. Throughout, the hatred of the world is treated as the normal weather of the Christian life, and the promise that sorrow will turn to joy is read as a description of how God works, taking away in order to give.

The sermons endure because they show Luther doing what he thought preaching was for, consoling frightened consciences with Christ's own words, at a time when he himself was ill, embattled and aware of his mortality. They contain some of his fullest statements on the Trinity, on prayer in Christ's name, and on the church under the cross, all delivered in plain speech to a congregation rather than in dispute with scholars. The polemic is sharp and frequent, and readers should expect it, but it is always in service of a pastoral aim.

Who should read this: pastors and preachers who want to see a great exegete work through a whole stretch of Scripture for ordinary hearers, and anyone facing fear, loss or the apparent absence of God who wants comfort grounded in a text rather than in mood. It is not a work for readers seeking a brief or systematic Luther; it is long, repetitive in the way living sermons are, and unapologetically sixteenth-century in its enemies.