“I came out from the Father and am come into the world. Again I leave the world and go to the Father.”

Jesus reiterates what He has said again and again, but this time it will strike home with more force. Firstly that He has come from the Father into the world (sent by the Father), having left behind the glory which had been His before the world was (John 17:5) and secondly that He is about to leave the world and go to His Father to once again experience that glory. This is His summing up of His life on earth, a parenthesis between two eternities. He Who was the Lord of glory had divested Himself of His glory and humbled Himself for a time, entering servitude and becoming man (Philippians 2:6). He had taken the lower place, made lower than the angels (Hebrews 2:9). In status He had demeaned Himself so that for that period He could say, ‘My Father is greater than I'. Now He goes to be restored to His former glory. What the disciples do not realise at this time is that it will be by way of humiliation and the cross, and to enjoy new and greater glory as a result of what He will do.

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