John 12:27-28

Vv. 27, 28 a. “ Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? But for this cause came I unto this hour. 28a. Father, glorify thy name.”

The soul, ψυχή, is the seat of the natural emotions, as the spirit, πνεῦμα, is that of the religious emotions. Weiss disputes this distinction by appealing to the altogether similar emotion described in John 11:33. But it is precisely this expression, especially when compared with John 13:21, which confirms it. In these two passages the question is of a shuddering of a religious and moral nature at the evil which is approaching Him in the most hateful form. Here, on the contrary, it is the prospect of personal griefs and of death which so violently agitates Him.

The term ψυχή, soul, is therefore perfectly in its place. I do not understand the import of the explanation of Weiss, which is intended to identify ψυχή and πνεῦμα : “The spirit becomes the soul in man” (see Keil). The perfect τετάρακται, is troubled, indicates a state in which the Lord feels Himself entirely overwhelmed. And this extraordinary trouble reveals itself especially to His consciousness by the hesitation which He feels, at the moment when He is seeking to pour out His emotion in prayer. Ordinarily, He has a distinct view of that which He should ask of His Father; now, this clearness fails Him. Like the believer in the state which St. Paul describes in Romans 8:26, He knows not how He should pray. He is obliged to lay before Himself for a moment the question: What shall I say? This question He does not address, properly speaking, to God, nor to man, but to Himself. The sacrifice of His own life is in itself a free act; He could still, if He saw fit, ask of God to release Him from it. And the Father would hear him, as always, even should it be necessary to send Him twelve legions of angels. But would not this prayer, while delivering Him, destroy mankind? Jesus does not feel Himself free to pray thus. He is already too far advanced on the path on which He is to realize the salvation of the world, to stop so near the end. The word now, which begins the sentence, characterizes this distress as an anticipation of that which awaits Him in the presence of the cross: already now, although the terrible hour has not yet struck. After the question: What shall I say? how are we to understand the words: Father, save me from this hour? Is this the real prayer wherein this moment of uncertainty through which He has just passed, terminates?

This is what is supposed by Lucke, Meyer, Hengstenberg, Ebrard, Luthardt, Westcott. What would be its meaning? “Release me from the necessity of dying,” as when He offers the prayer in Gethsemane: “ Let this cup pass from me ”? This is held by the first three. But there he adds: if it is possible, and by the πλήν which follows, He commits it immediately to the Father's will (Matthew 26:39). And how can we explain the sudden change of impression in the following clause? After having uttered seriously and without restriction the petition: “Save me from this hour!” could He add, as it were in a single breath: “But for this hour am I come”? Luthardt, Ebrard, and Westcott perceive this clearly. So they propose to understand the σῶσόν με, save me, not in the sense: “Deliver me from death,” but in the sense: “Bring me victoriously out of this present inward struggle,” either by shortening it or by giving it a happy issue. But how are we to explain the following adversative particle ἀλλά, but? Here Westcott proposes an absolute tour de force. “But to what purpose say this?

The favorable issue is not doubtful.” This sense of but is altogether forced; and there is no more opposition between: to come forth from the struggle, and: to have come for it. However we may turn this phrase, we are always brought back to see in it a hypothetical prayer. It is the voice of nature which at first makes itself heard in answer to the question: What shall I say? Then, in the following words Jesus represses this voice. To address this petition to God would be to deny all that He has done and endured until now. And finally, giving vent to the voice of the spirit, He definitely stays Himself in the prayer which alone remains, when once this moment of trouble is past: Glorify thy name! that is to say: “Derive from me Thy glory, by doing with me what Thou wilt. Nothing for me, everything for Thee!” What more instructive than this conflict between these two factors which solicit the will of Jesus? It allows us to penetrate into the inmost recess of His heart. What do we there discover? Precisely the opposite of that impassive Jesus whom our critics assert the Christ of John to be.

The expressions: for this cause, and: for this hour, seem to constitute a pleonasm. We might make this clause a question: “Is it then for this that I am come to this hour?” that is, to try to put it off indefinitely? Or we may make the words for this hour an explanatory apposition to for this: “It is for this that I am come, that is, for this hour.” These two meanings are forced, the first, because of the two questions which already precede; the second, because the εἰς is not the natural resuming of the διά, but rather the direct objective word to ἦλθον and the antithesis of σῶσον ἐκ. Hengstenberg explains: “It is that my soul may be troubled that I am come...,” which is still more forced.Lucke and Meyer make the words for this bear upon the idea of the following prayer (John 12:28): Father, glorify thy name. This is to do violence to the sentence beyond measure. Is it not quite simple to see in the neuter this the expression, in a slight degree mysterious, of that something which has just brought trouble upon His soul, and which He is tempted to seek to remove by His prayer, the dark and unutterable contents of the hour which is approaching? “It is because of this death which I am to undergo, that I have persevered in this path until this hour.” All that he has done and suffered in view of the cross does not permit Him to give way at the moment when the hour of this terrible punishment is about to strike. Comp. John 3:14

The pronoun thy (John 12:28), by reason of the place which it occupies, is emphasized. It is opposed, as Weiss says, to the personal character of the preceding prayer which Jesus has set aside.

Colani, in his criticism of the Vie de Jesus by Renan, by a strange inadvertence makes Jesus say: “Father, glorify my name,” an expression which, he says, “has no meaning except from the standpoint of the Logos- doctrine.” The more involuntary this alteration is, the better is it fitted to make us see the difference between the profoundly human Jesus of John and the fantastic Christ whom criticism ascribes to the evangelist. That, after this, Colani sees in this scene only “an emblematic, almost simulated, agony” is easy to understand; to whom does the fault belong? Reuss, who claims that the silence of John respecting the scene of Gethsemane arises from the fact that “even a passing weakness would have been a feature incompatible with the portrait of the Johannean Christ,” finds himself greatly embarrassed by the narrative which occupies us. The following is the way in which he escapes from the difficulty. “The emotion of Jesus is not that of a momentary and touching weakness..., it is that of a great soul, of a divine heroism...whose resolution is rather strengthened than shaken in the presence of the supreme catastrophe.” We leave the reader to judge whether this exegesis reproduces or contradicts the true tone of the text to be explained, particularly of these words: “Now is my soul troubled.” What we admire in this passage, is the perfectly human character of the struggle which, at the thought of His approaching death, takes place in the heart of Jesus between nature and spirit. And then it is the sincerity, the candor, shall we say, with which He expresses His inmost feelings, His weakness (Hebrews 5:2), before all this company of people, not hesitating to make them acquainted with the perplexity into which the prospect of His approaching sufferings plunges Him.

This scene is, as has always been acknowledged, the prelude to the one in Gethsemane. Only in the latter, Jesus, at the highest point of His distress, really utters the cry: Save me from this hour! while at the moment which we have now reached, He only asks whether He shall pray thus. This delicate shade is suited to the difference of the two situations and proves the strictly historical character of each of them. The opinion that John suppressed the scene of Gethsemane as incompatible with the divine character of the Logos, falls of itself before this passage. Finally, let us establish the remarkable gradation in the three analogous scenes, Luke 12:49-50, John 12:27 and the one in Gethsemane. This comparison makes us understand the increasing emotion with which Jesus was slowly approaching the cross. These three features borrowed from the four narratives easily unite in one single picture. How can Reville express himself as follows, in the Revue de theologie, 1865, III., p. 316, “The fourth Gospel makes Jesus an exalted being, as to His moral life, above temptation and internal conflict, and it removes from its narrative all the traditional statements which might suggest a contrary idea.” Renan, on the contrary, observes with reference to this passage: “Here are verses which have an indubitable historical stamp. They are the obscure and isolated episode of the Greeks who address themselves to Philip.”