John 8:28,29

“ Jesus therefore said to them, when you have lifted up the Son of man, then shall you know that I am he and that I do nothing of myself, but that I speak these things to you according to the teachings of my Father, 29 and that he that sent me is with me; the Father has not left me alone, because I do always that which is pleasing to him. ”

The lifting up of the Son of man refers especially to the death on the cross; this appears from the second person: you have lifted up. But Jesus could not hope that the cross would by itself cause the scales to fall from the eyes of the Jews and extort from them the confession: It is He! It could not produce this effect except by becoming for Him the stepping-stone to the throne and the passage to glory. The word to lift up, therefore, contains here the same amphibology as in John 3:14, and the second person of the plural assumes thus a marked tinge of irony: “When by killing me you shall have put me on the throne....” The term Son of man designates that lowly appearance which is now the ground of His rejection. The recognition of Jesus here predicted took place in the conscience of all the Jews without exception when, after the sending of the Holy Spirit, the holy and divine nature of His person, of His work and of His teaching was manifested in Israel by the apostolic preaching, by the appearance of the Church, and then, finally, by the judgment which struck Jerusalem and all the people. At the sight of this, the want of understanding came to its end whether they would or not, and was transformed into faith in some, in others into voluntary hardening. This recognition never ceases to be effected in Israel by reason of the spectacle of the development of the Church; it will end in the final conversion of the nation, when they will cry out with one voice, as if on a new Palm-day: “ Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord ” (Luke 13:35). What calm dignity, what serene majesty, in these words: Then you shall know...! They recall, as Hengstenberg remarks, those grave and menacing declarations of Jehovah: “Mine eye shall not pity thee... and ye shall know that I am the Lord,” Ezekiel 7:4. Comp. the same form of expression, Ezekiel 11:10; Ezekiel 12:20; Exodus 10:2, etc. Weiss compares with this saying the word of Jesus respecting the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12:39 ff.). A still more striking parallel in the Synoptics seems to me to be the word addressed to the Sanhedrim, Matthew 26:64: “ You shall see the Son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven. ” Some interpreters claim that John should have written οὕτως, thus, instead of ταῦτα, these things. But the thought is this: “and that I declare to you these things (ταῦτα) which you hear, according to (καθώς) the teaching which I have received from the Father.” The expression is therefore correct. The whole of the end of the verse depends on γνώσεσθε, you shall know. Jesus here sums up all His preceding affirmations, while presenting them by anticipation as the contents of that future recognition which He announces: “ that I am he; ” comp. John 8:24: “ that I do and teach nothing of myself; ” comp. John 7:16-17. This verse therefore means: “You yourselves will then say amen to all these declarations which you so lightly reject at this hour.”

It appears to me natural to make the first clause of John 8:29 also depend on the verb, You shall know; it sums up the declarations of John 8:16-18. The following clause then reproduces very forcibly (by asyndeton) this last affirmation: is with me. In contrast with the present which escapes Him, Jesus with assured confidence lays hold of the future: “You may reject me if you will, yet the Father remains in inner communion with me, as I have said to you, and He will protect my work.” One might be tempted to understand the words οὐκ ἀφῆκε in this sense. “In sending me, He has not suffered me to come alone here below; He has willed to accompany me Himself.” This indeed would be the most simple sense of the aorist. But in this case, how are we to understand what follows: “ Because I do always that which is pleasing to Him? ” Hengstenberg, who explains thus, has recourse to the divine foreknowledge: “He has not suffered me to come alone, since He well knows that I am faithful to Him in all things.” This sense is evidently forced. We must therefore understand the aorist ἀφῆκε in the sense in which we find it in the passage, Acts 14:17: “ God has not left Himself without witness. ” “God has, in no moment of my career, left me to walk alone, because at every moment He sees me doing that which pleases Him.” An instant therefore, a single one, in which Jesus had acted or spoken of His own impulse would have brought a rupture between Him and God; God would have immediately withdrawn from Jesus Himself, and that in the measure in which this will of His own was fixed within Him.

The voluntary and complete dependence of Christ was the constant condition of the co-operation of the Father; comp. the words of John 10:17 and John 15:10, which express in the main the same thought. Certainly, if the evangelist had written his Gospel to set forth the theory of the Logos, he would never have put this saying into the mouth of Jesus. For it seems directly to contradict it. The communion of the Son and the Father is regarded here as resting upon a purely moral condition. But we see by this how real was the feeling which Jesus had of His truly human existence, and how John himself has taken for granted the humanity of his Master. Τὰ ἀρεστά, that which is pleasing to Him, designates the will of the Father, not from the point of view of the articles of a code, but in that which is most spiritual and inward in it. Indeed, this term does not express the contents only of the doing of Jesus, but its motive. He did not only what was pleasing to the Father, but He did it because it was pleasing to Him. It is proved by this saying that Jesus had the consciousness, not only of not having committed the least positive sin, but also of not having neglected the least good, and that in His feelings as well as in His outward conduct.

Here is one of the passages where we can make palpable the fact that the discourses of Jesus in the fourth Gospel are not compositions of the writer, but real discourses of Christ. 1. The communion with God which Jesus affirms can only be a real historical fact. It cannot have been invented by the author. If it were not in the experience, it would not be in the thought. 2. The allusion to the Jewish law (John 8:17-18), in order to justify a fact of so inward a nature, contains a surprising accommodation, which necessarily implies the historical surroundings in which Jesus taught. 3. The locality indicated with so much precision in John 8:20 testifies of a perfectly accurate historical recollection; otherwise, there would be here a piece of charlatanism, which it would be impossible to reconcile with the seriousness of the whole narrative.