In John 20 Christ is revealed as the resurrected One who brought His believers into God the Father and breathed the Holy Spirit into His believers.
Christ, as the resurrected One, brings His believers into God the Father, making His Father their Father and His God their God, and making them His brothers. In 20:17, after resurrection early in the morning, the Lord Jesus told Mary, “Go to My brothers.” The Lord’s word to Mary indicated that in resurrection His disciples had become the same as He insofar as they also were sons of God. Previously, the most intimate term the Lord used in reference to His disciples was friends (15:14-15). But after His resurrection He began to call them brothers, for through His resurrection His disciples were regenerated (1 Pet. 1:3) with the divine life, which had been released by His life-imparting death, as indicated in 12:24. It was through His resurrection that the Lord imparted Himself as the Spirit into His disciples. By receiving His life they were reborn, regenerated, and became His brothers, having the same life as the Lord. He was the one grain of wheat that fell into the ground and died and grew up to bring forth many grains for the producing of the one bread, which is His Body (1 Cor. 10:17). He was the Father’s only Son, the Father’s individual expression. Through His death and resurrection the Father’s only Begotten became the Firstborn among many brothers (Rom. 8:29). His many brothers are the many sons of God and are the church (Heb. 2:10-12), a corporate expression of God the Father in the Son. This is God’s ultimate intention. The many brothers are the propagation of the Father’s life and the multiplication of the Son in the divine life. Hence, in the Lord’s resurrection God’s eternal purpose is fulfilled.
In John 20:17 the Lord Jesus also said to Mary, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.” Through His life-imparting death and resurrection, the Lord made His disciples one with Him. Therefore, His Father is the Father of His disciples, and His God is the God of His disciples. In His resurrection they have the Father’s life and God’s divine nature, just as He has. In making them His brothers, He has imparted the Father’s life and God’s divine nature into them. By making His Father and His God theirs, He has brought them into His position—the position of the Son—before the Father and God. Thus, in life and nature inwardly and in position outwardly they are the same as the Lord, with whom they have been united.
Christ as the resurrected One also breathed the Holy Spirit into His believers, as the pneumatic Christ—the Christ who is the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45b). Through this process He entered into His believers to be with them forever (John 14:16-20). John 20:22 says, “He breathed into them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit here is actually the resurrected Christ Himself because the Spirit is His breath. The Holy Spirit is thus the breath of the Son. The Greek word for Spirit in this verse is pneuma, a word that is used for breath, spirit, and wind. Therefore, this verse can be translated, “Receive the holy breath.” On the day of His resurrection the Lord Jesus breathed Himself into His disciples as the holy breath.
The Christ who breathed Himself into the disciples is the life-giving Spirit, and the resurrected Christ as the life-giving Spirit is breath. Some theologians use the term “the pneumatic Christ” to refer to the Christ who is the Spirit, the breath. After the Lord Jesus accomplished all of His processes, He became the life-giving Spirit, and the life-giving Spirit is the pneumatic Christ. Such a One, the pneumatic Christ as the Spirit, came to His disciples and breathed Himself as the Spirit into them. From that time onward, He was truly one with His disciples, for He became the intrinsic being of His disciples essentially. In John 20:22 the resurrected Christ, the pneumatic Christ, Christ as the Spirit, entered into His believers to be the divine essence of their spiritual life and being.
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 (v. 14), to be the Lamb of God to accomplish redemption for man (v. 29), to declare God to man (v. 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 up 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 (14:16). 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; 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 through 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 (v. 19). It is also as the Spirit that He can abide in the disciples and they can abide in Him (v. 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 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).