Catholic Commentary
The Necessity of Jesus's Departure
5But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’6But because I have told you these things, sorrow has filled your heart.7Nevertheless I tell you the truth: It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I don’t go away, the Counselor won’t come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.
John 16:5–7 records Jesus telling His disciples that although they are sorrowful because He is departing, His departure is actually to their advantage because it makes possible the sending of the Holy Spirit (Paraclete). Jesus indicates that without His ascension, the Counselor cannot come to indwell them and provide the help and comfort they will need.
Christ's departure is not abandonment—it is the necessary passage through which the Spirit breaks into history and transforms grief into the capacity to receive Him.
John 16:5 — "But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, 'Where are you going?'"
This verse opens with a striking apparent tension. Earlier in the same discourse, Peter had asked "Lord, where are you going?" (John 13:36) and Thomas had similarly pressed Jesus on the matter (John 14:5). Yet here Jesus says no one is asking. The key is in the phrase "but now" (νῦν δέ, nyn de): the disciples' questioning has dissolved not into theological curiosity but into grief-paralysis. They are no longer asking where He is going — they are no longer looking forward at all. The question "where?" implies expectation, hope, a future worth inhabiting. That forward gaze has been swallowed by dread. Jesus is gently naming the spiritual collapse that grief can produce: an inward turning that forecloses the very questions that would bring consolation.
The phrase "him who sent me" is characteristically Johannine and theologically dense. Jesus habitually identifies Himself in relation to the Father as the One sent (ὁ πέμψας με, ho pempsas me), not merely as a messenger but as the eternal Son whose very identity is constituted by being-from-the-Father (cf. John 5:23, 7:28, 8:16). To go to the Father is therefore not departure into the unknown; it is return to the source of His own being. The disciples cannot yet perceive this because their categories are still earthly.
John 16:6 — "But because I have told you these things, sorrow has filled your heart."
"Sorrow has filled your heart" (ἡ λύπη πεπλήρωκεν ὑμῶν τὴν καρδίαν, hē lypē peplērōken hymōn tēn kardian) — the word peplērōken is the perfect tense of "to fill" and is used elsewhere in John of fullness of joy (15:11, 17:13). The disciples' hearts are full — but of grief, not gladness, at precisely the moment when they should be capable of receiving the fullness Christ came to bring. John's use of kardia (heart) here is not merely sentimental; in the Hebrew and Greek scriptural tradition, the heart is the seat of understanding, will, and love. Sorrow has colonized the very organ of reception. This is a pastoral diagnosis before it is a theological statement.
Jesus does not rebuke the sorrow itself — He acknowledges it as the direct result of His words ("because I have told you these things"). The Passion predictions and departure announcements have done their work in the disciples' emotions. This verse underscores Christ's full awareness of human affective life and His willingness to enter into it before redirecting it.
John 16:7 — "Nevertheless I tell you the truth: It is to your advantage that I go away..."
The adversative ἀλλά ("nevertheless," "but") signals a pivot of revelatory force. What follows is introduced with the same solemn formula used for the most weighty dominical sayings: "I tell you the truth" (amēn legō hymin in its Johannine equivalent). Jesus is about to say something the disciples cannot yet accept emotionally but must hold intellectually as true: His absence is better for them.
Sympherei (συμφέρει) — translated "it is to your advantage" — is a word of genuine utility, almost economic in its directness. It is profitable, expedient, beneficial. This is not consolation language; it is theological precision. The logic that follows is tight: the Paraclete (Paraklētos) — the Advocate, Counselor, Comforter — is conditionally dependent on the Son's departure. "If I don't go away, the Counselor won't come to you." This is among the most remarkable conditional statements in Scripture. The very sending of the Spirit is contingent on the completion of the Son's mission in His death, resurrection, and ascension.
The word Paraklētos (Paraclete) appears only in John's Gospel (14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7) and in 1 John 2:1 (where it refers to the risen Christ as our advocate with the Father). It carries the rich semantic range of one called alongside to help: advocate in a legal context, comforter in a pastoral context, strengthener in a military context. "I will send him to you" — note the personal agency: the Spirit is sent by Jesus, and in 15:26 the Spirit proceeds from the Father, revealing the intra-Trinitarian dynamic that would become the substance of centuries of theological reflection.
This passage is a cornerstone of Catholic Pneumatology — the theology of the Holy Spirit — and touches directly on the Trinitarian relations that the Church has defined with great precision.
The conditional structure of verse 7 — that the Spirit's coming depends on the Son's departure — was understood by the Fathers as revealing the economy of salvation in its inner logic. St. Augustine, in Tractates on the Gospel of John (94.2), argues that Jesus's going away refers specifically to the withdrawal of His bodily, visible presence, so that the disciples might love Him in a more spiritual, interior way. The Spirit cannot dwell in hearts still anchored to external, visible companionship with Christ. The Ascension, on this reading, is a pedagogical act that matures the disciples' love.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae III, q.57, a.6) connects this verse to the Ascension as the efficient cause of the Spirit's Pentecostal outpouring, grounding it in the meritorious sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice. The "going away" encompasses the entire Paschal Mystery — Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension as a single redemptive arc.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§ 243–244, 729–730) draws on this very passage to explain the inseparability of the missions of the Son and the Spirit: "The Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified" (John 7:39). The Spirit's mission is the continuation and interiorization of the Son's mission. The visible, external economy of the Incarnation gives way to the invisible, interior economy of sanctification.
Regarding the Filioque — the Latin addition to the Nicene Creed affirming that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son — this passage is one of the key scriptural warrants: "I will send him to you" directly attributes the Spirit's procession (at least in the economic sense) to the Son. The Council of Florence (1439) and subsequent Magisterial teaching drew on texts precisely like this one.
The Holy Spirit as Paraclete also illuminates the Church's teaching on the indwelling of the Spirit in the baptized (CCC §§ 1265–1266) and the charisms and gifts given for building up the Body of Christ.
Contemporary Catholic life is often haunted by a subtler version of the disciples' paralysis: grief over what the Church was, anxiety over what it might become, a nostalgia that functions as spiritual inertia. Jesus's words in verse 6 name this precisely — sorrow can fill the heart so completely that we stop asking the forward-looking question: where is the Lord going? And if we stop asking, we stop following.
The passage invites a concrete examination of conscience: Am I grieving over forms of religious life, liturgical expressions, or ecclesial structures in ways that have made me passive or bitter? Is sorrow blocking the question — and therefore blocking the movement?
More positively, verse 7 is a call to trust the Paschal pattern in every apparent loss. When something good is taken — a spiritual director, a faith community, a cherished devotion, even a sense of God's nearness — the Christian is invited to ask whether a new, more interior presence of the Spirit is being prepared. The Paraclete comes into the space left by absence. This is not a call to forced optimism, but to a theologically informed hope: God's better gifts often arrive through the door of apparent deprivation.