Mid-century illustration of an oil lamp and an open scroll on a table, disciples talking by the sea of Galilee

John 14:19 · World English Bible

John 14:19 Meaning Yet a Little While

Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more; but you will see me. Because I live, you will live also.

What does John 14:19 mean?

The world sees only bodies, and so it sees only what can be lost. What the eyes were made to find is the story of separation ending in death, and by that measure love disappears when the body does.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

John 14:19 through 2 lenses

The same verse, read by 2 traditions.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

The world sees only bodies, and so it sees only what can be lost. What the eyes were made to find is the story of separation ending in death, and by that measure love disappears when the body does. But there is another kind of seeing that looks past the form to the changeless life within, and to that vision nothing is ever gone.

What lives in you is not the body that seems to come and go. It is the one Self that fear cannot end, and when the mind recognizes that life in another, it remembers the same life is its own.

The world: the way of seeing that knows only bodies, and so knows only loss.

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MANIFESTATION

Manifestation

The world here is outward sight, the mind that knows only what the senses report, and to that mind the creative power goes invisible. It cannot be found by looking outward, because it is the very awareness doing the looking. What the eye of the senses loses, the inner eye recovers.

The I AM within, your own imagination, is what lives and cannot die, and its life is the source of yours. Because it lives, you live; its being is your being wearing your face. The little while is the short interval before the state assumed within stops being a private feeling and shows itself in your world. The world will miss it, and you will see it, because the life that raises the state into fact is your own life, seen at last as yourself.

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Christian Psychology lens

Live John 14:19 today

  1. Looking in the mirror today, see past the aging and the tiredness. Something in there has not changed since you were six.
  2. At dinner or on a video call, look at the person long enough to see more than their face and their role. There is a life in there the same age as yours.
  3. When you are reminded of someone you lost, let the grief come, and also let yourself wonder whether what you loved in them is actually gone.

What do you see in someone when you stop seeing only their body?

The same truth in other traditions

Bhagavad Gita 2

What is truly you was never born and does not die. Bodies are clothing, put on and set down, while the wearer remains.

Stoicism · Epictetus

You are not the little heap of flesh you drag around. Mistake the shell for yourself and every loss looks final.

Zen

Look for the face you had before your parents were born. It is not a thing the eyes can locate, and nothing can take it away.

Mid-century illustration of Jesus teaching the crowd on a hillside above the sea

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