John 16:28

Ver. 28. “ I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; and again I leave the world and go to the Father. ”

What the disciples had the most difficulty in understanding was that Jesus should leave the world where, in their thought, the Messianic kingdom was to be realized. They had, moreover, no clear idea of the place to which He was going. Jesus starts from what is more clear, in order to explain to them what is less so. They have believed and understood that His origin is divine, that He has not, like the rest of men, behind His earthly existence, nothingness, but the bosom of the Father (John 16:27).

Hence it follows that this world is for Him only a place of passage, that He has come to it, and come only to do a work in it, not to establish Himself here. What more natural, then, than that, when once this work is accomplished, He should leave the world, in which He found Himself only for a special purpose, and should return to God His true home? The ascension is the natural counterpart of the incarnation, and the divine future derives its light from the divine past. The symmetry of the four clauses of this verse throws an unexpected light on the history of Jesus and on each of the four great phases in which it is summed up: self-renunciation, incarnation, death, ascension. The expression come forth from God indicates the renouncing of the divine state, the divesting Himself of the μορφὴ θεοῦ (the form of God) according to the language of Paul (Php 2:6); the: come into the world, the entrance into the human state and into the earthly existence, the: being made flesh (John 1:14), or the: taking the form of a servant (Php 2:7). The leaving the world does not indicate the abandoning of the human nature, but the rupture of the earthly form of human existence. For Stephen also beholds Jesus glorified in the form of the Son of man (Acts 7:56), and it is as Son of man that Jesus reigns and comes again (Matthew 26:64; Luke 18:8).

Finally, the going to the Father designates the exaltation of Jesus, in His human nature, to the divine state which He enjoyed as Logos before the incarnation.

The Alexandrian reading ἐκ, out of, has, as Lucke himself has remarked, a dogmatic savor which is of too pronounced a character to be the true one (comp. John 1:18). Παρά, from, in the Sinaitic MS. and the other Mjj. includes, as in John 16:27, the two ideas of the origin and the mission.

Jesus here says the Father, instead of God (John 16:27). The question is no longer, indeed, of the contents of the apostolic faith, as in John 16:27. All the tenderness of His filial relation to the Father, which He has renounced, pictures itself to His thought. The term πάλιν, again, which might be translated by: in return, indicates the correlation between the coming and the departure; it is as it were a: consequently; for the one justifies the other. The apostles understand that if He goes away, it is because He has come; and that if He goes to God, it is because He has come from God.