<p>14:12- see on Mk. 11:24; Jn. 17:20.</p><p><i>Truly, truly, I say to you: He that believes in me, the works that I do, shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do, because I go to the Father</i>- As noted on :10 and :11, &quot;the works&quot; of the Lord refer not only to His miracles but to all that He was. His going to the Father on the cross would release the gift of the Spirit (7:39). This was and is fundamentally a gift of internal strengthening in the heart, although it had issue in miraculous works for the disciples in the first century context.</p><p>It may be the Lord had in mind that the disciples through having the miraculous gifts of the Spirit would do greater works than He had done. But this raises the question of what is meant by &quot;greater&quot;. It could mean &quot;more&quot;, numerically. But the Greek word specifically carries the idea of being older, more mature- e.g. &quot;Are you greater than our father Abraham?&quot; (Jn. 8:53) in the context means 'Are you older than Abraham?'. So He could be saying that the disciples would do greater works&quot; in the sense that collectively between us we would reveal to an even greater or mature extent the works of God. Because there must be a connection in His thought with Jn. 5:20, where alone elsewhere we meet the phrase &quot;greater works&quot;: &quot;For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth: and greater works than these will he shew him, that ye may marvel&quot;. The greater works that the Father showed the Son were the works which the believers in Christ were to perform subsequent to the Lord's resurrection. The &quot;works&quot; are the works of God Himself. The community of believers in Christ are doing His works, acting as God would do if He were a human being living on planet earth, and in this sense we are doing greater works than what Jesus personally did; for He was 'only' one person, and we are many. And Jesus was aware of this. He explained repeatedly that the works He did were the works which God did (Jn. 5:36; 10:25,32,37,38; 14:10,11). As God showed Him the works He was to do, so He showed those works to the world in which He lived (Jn. 10:32). Paul therefore states that there are good works which are prepared in Heaven for us to fulfil: &quot;We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them&quot; (Eph. 2:10). In a sense, all the works were finished from the foundation of the world, it's for us to go out there today and perform them (Heb. 4:3). Practically this means that as we contemplate &quot;good works&quot;, we can be assured that somehow God will provide all that's needed for them to be performed. Our little faith so often stops us from performing them because we doubt whether we have the resources, the time, the money, the ability... whereas instead the need should be the call, and we should approach them in confidence that this is indeed God's will for us to do His works here on earth. For He has prepared both them and us to fulfil them. &nbsp;</p><p>The works of the Father and Son are defined in 6:29 as believing on the Son whom the Father sent. This is what it means to do the works of God. We could therefore read these promises as John's version of the great commission- to take the Gospel into all the world, and to trust that we shall be empowered by the Spirit to do this.</p><p>Another take on all this is that the potential enabled by the Spirit was never fully lived up to by the disciples, just as it is not with us. The Lord&rsquo;s promise that whatever the disciples asked, they would be given seems never to have been fully realized in them (Jn. 15:16). Likewise the &lsquo;prophecy&rsquo; here that they would do greater works than done by the Lord, once they received the Comforter, and possibly the promise that they would be taught &ldquo;all the truth&rdquo; about &ldquo;things to come&rdquo; (Jn. 16:13), were all likewise promises / prophecies whose potential it seems the disciples never fully rose up to.</p>