Jesus seems to make an extraordinary promise: "whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater than these, he will do". On reading these words, we may well wonder how we, mere mortal human beings, can do greater things than the Son of God.

Perhaps Jesus is implicitly reminding us that, by putting our faith in him, we will also be living and acting in the period after his resurrection. So, what we do in faith will always be blessed by the grace of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And we become vehicles of the grace of the resurrection. Not only that, what we do will be "greater" than what Jesus did in his earthly life.

"Greater" then would not mean "more extraordinary" or "wonderful" but more "significant", more redolent of the grace Jesus won for us on the cross.