John 10:37-38

“ If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not; 38 but if I do them, though you believe not me, believe my works, to the end that you may know and may understand that my Father is in me and I am in him. ”

There is much of gentleness in the manner in which Jesus here expresses Himself and reasons. He appeals with calmness from passion to sound reason. He consents that they should not believe on the ground of the word, although the testimony of a being like Himself ought to carry its proof in itself. But to His testimony there are united the works which the Father has accomplished through Him. If they have not ears, they have eyes; and what they do not infer from His words, they should, at least, infer from such works. The words: “If you do not believe me,” mean: “If you do not accord belief to my personal affirmations.” The reading of some Alexandrian authorities: ἵνα γνῶτε καὶ γινώσκητε, seems to me the best one: “To the end that you may learn to know (γνῶτε) and at last may understand (γινώσκητε).” These two terms taken together express the long and painful labor of that discovery which might have resulted from the first glance: “ Come and see ” (John 1:47). The apparently pleonastic sense of this reading not having been understood by the copyists, they gave to the text the more common form which we find in the received reading: to the end that you may understand and believe. The words: the Father in me, and I in the Father, which indicate the contents of this obtained knowledge, recall the declaration of John 10:30 (we are one), but it does not follow from this, that, as Weiss will have it, it exhausts the sense of that declaration. It must not be forgotten that John 10:30; John 10:36 are the immediate expression of the contents of the consciousness of Jesus Himself, while John 10:38 formulates these contents only in the measure in which they can and should become the object of the moral apperception of believers. By beholding with the eye of faith, they will discover more and more clearly two things: the full communication which God makes of His riches to this human being, His organ on the earth (the Father in me); and the complete self- divesting by which Jesus, renouncing His own life, draws everything solely from the fullness of the Father and His gifts (I in him). This is the form in which faith can apprehend here below the unity of the Father and the Son. This relation is the manifestation of their essential unity, which Jesus had affirmed as the contents of His own consciousness.