John 12:49,50

“ For I have not spoken from myself; but the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what I should say and how I should say it; 50 and I know that his commandment is life eternal; what I say therefore I say even as my Father has said to me. ”

If the word of Jesus is the standard of judgment, it is because it is that of God Himself, both as to substance (τί εἴπω) and as to form (τί λαλήσω). The ἐντολή, the commandment, of which Jesus here speaks is not a mandate received once for all before leaving heaven. This idea is incompatible with John 3:34, John 5:19-20; John 5:30; John 8:16 (see Gess, pp. 542, 543). Jesus receives for each case the commission which He has to fulfill; He hears before speaking, and He hears because He listens. This constant docility arises in Him (John 12:50) from the certainty which he has of the vivifying and regenerating force of that word which the Father intrusts to Him. Whatever may be the objections which it excites, or the doubts which are set in opposition to it, He is conscious of its virtue by means of which it produces in souls eternal life. For this reason (even as, John 12:50 b), He gives it to men just as He receives it, without allowing Himself to make any change in it. Comp. John 5:30; John 7:16-17; John 8:28; then John 6:63; John 6:68.

John formulates very exactly in these few propositions the absolute value which Jesus had constantly attributed to His person and His word. This summary cannot be that of a discourse which the evangelist had the consciousness of having himself composed. It is not possible that he would have drawn up this formidable charge against the unbelief of Israel in the name of discourses which Jesus had never given; still more impossible that he could have founded his indictment, in John 12:37, on miracles which were only inventions of his own. To attribute to him such a mode of proceeding would be to make him a shameless impostor or a madman.

And what is to be thought of the writer who should put into the mouth of Jesus these words: “ I have said nothing from myself; my Father has commanded me what I should say, and how I should say it,” and who should make Him say this, while having the consciousness of having himself made Him speak all along and of making Him still do so at this time? Are there not enough impossibilities here? Let us remark also how this retrospective glance, interrupting the narrative, fails of appropriateness if we suppose it to have been composed in the second century, at a time when the question of the rejection by the Jews was no longer an actuality; on the contrary, how natural it is on the part of a man who was himself an eye-witness of this abnormal and unexpected fact of Jewish unbelief.

Before leaving this second part of the gospel story, let us cast a glance backward over the course of the narrative. We have seen in process of accomplishment before our eyes, through all the vicissitudes so dramatically described, the development of the national unbelief and the progressive separation between a people almost wholly fanaticized by its rulers and a feeble minority of believers. Well! Let us for an instant, by a thought, suppress this entire picture, all these journeys of Jesus to Jerusalem, all these conflicts in the very centre of the theocracy as must be done as soon as we reject the credibility of our Gospel behold, we are in presence of the final catastrophe attested by the Synoptics no less than by St. John: How are we to explain this sudden and tragic denouement? Only by the collisions which took place in a retired province of the Holy Land on occasion of a few Sabbath cures? No: the serious historian, even when accounting for the entrance on Palm-day, can never dispense with this whole series of conflicts in Jerusalem at which we have just been present.