In resurrection Christ came to the disciples and breathed Himself as the Holy Spirit into them. “He breathed into them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). We may not think that this was a work, but it was a great work accomplished by Christ in His resurrection. The Holy Spirit is the realization of the resurrected Christ, and the Lord breathed this realization into the disciples.
Before His death and resurrection, the Lord Jesus could not be in His disciples. He could only be among them. In order to come into them, He needed to do the marvelous work of becoming the life-giving Spirit and of breathing this Spirit into the disciples. This great work was accomplished by Christ in His resurrection.
The Gospel of John reveals that Christ is the Word, the eternal God (1:1), who passed through a long process eventually to become the breath, the pneuma, that He might enter into the believers. For the accomplishment of God’s eternal purpose, He took two steps. First, He took the step of incarnation to become a man in the flesh (1:14), to be the Lamb of God to accomplish redemption for man (1:29), to declare God to man (1:18), and to manifest the Father to His believers (14:9-11). Second, He took the step of death and resurrection to be transfigured into the Spirit that He might impart Himself into His believers as their life and their everything for the building of His Body, the church, the habitation of God, to express the Triune God for eternity. The Gospel of John clearly reveals that Christ became flesh to be the Lamb of God and that in resurrection He became the life-giving Spirit. Thus, in the evening of the day of His resurrection He came and breathed Himself as the Spirit into the disciples.
The Holy Spirit in John 20:22 is the Spirit expected in 7:39 and promised in 14:16-17, 26; 15:26; and 16:7-8, 13. This indicates that the Lord’s breathing of the Holy Spirit into the disciples was the fulfillment of His promise of the Holy Spirit as the Comforter. In chapter fourteen the Lord Jesus promised that He would ask the Father to send another Comforter (v. 16). Then in chapter twenty He brought to His disciples this other Comforter, the Spirit of reality. Now the Spirit of reality has come to the disciples to be within them; now the disciples know that the Lord Jesus is in the Father and that the Father is in the Lord; and now they are in the Lord and the Lord is in them. They realize that they are now one with the Triune God. Therefore, all that the Lord Jesus spoke to them in chapters fourteen through sixteen is fulfilled at this very moment. This fulfillment is that the Lord Jesus went by death and resurrection and came to the disciples as the Spirit, coming as another Comforter to be their reality that they might be one with the Triune God.
As the falling into the ground to die and the growing out of the ground transforms a grain of wheat into another new and lively form, so the death and resurrection of Christ transfigured Him from the flesh into the Spirit. As the last Adam in the flesh He became the life-giving Spirit through the process of death and resurrection. As He is the embodiment of the Father, so the Spirit is the realization, the reality, of Him. It is as the Spirit that He was breathed into the disciples. It is as the Spirit that He was received into His believers and flowed out of them as rivers of living water (7:38-39). It is as the Spirit that through His death and resurrection He came back to the disciples, entered into them as their Comforter, and began to abide in them (14:16-17). It is as the Spirit that He can live in the disciples and they can live by Him and with Him (14:19). It is as the Spirit that He can abide in the disciples and they can abide in Him (14:20; 15:4-5). It is as the Spirit that He can come with the Father to the one who loves Him and make an abode with him (14:23). It is as the Spirit that He can make all that He is and has to be fully realized by the disciples (16:13-16). It is as the Spirit that He came to meet with His brothers as the church to declare the Father’s name to them and to praise Him in their midst (Heb. 2:11-12). And it is as the Spirit that He can send His disciples with His commission, with Himself as life and everything to them, in the same way that the Father sent Him (John 20:21).
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