John 5:17-47 - Exposition

(3) The reply of Jesus to the hostile Jews. The discourse of the Lord Jesus, in reply to the persecuting spirit and deadly purpose of the Jewish authorities, is now given at length. There is a fulness and order and progress observable throughout of immense importance as establishing the sacred origin of the words. The simplicity of the style, quite Hebraic in its freedom from conjunctive forms, discriminates it from the Philonic presentation of certain analogous but different ideas. If, as Godet has remarked, we venture on the hazardous speculation that the prologue to the Gospel merely places before us the Philonic conception of θεοσ and λογοσ , making God to be the inconceivable, unapproachable, impersonal Essence, coming into activity in the λογο who is self-dependent, but who exhausts all the vitality and activity of the supreme θεος , we may, with Reuss, find hero what is contrary to both the prologue and to the views of the Divine Being, which repudiate the correlative subordination of the Son of God. But the prologue is based on the identity of nature between θεοσ and λογοσ , and the subordinate and yet eternal relation of the latter to the former. There is an infinite fulness of being and activity in the Father, who yet is and loves and energizes in all things through the λογοσ , the ΄ονογενησ . It appears to us that precisely the same truth is taught here, but it is taught in terms derived from the consciousness of the Logos incarnate, and with reference to a part only of the operations of the Logos, viz. in the providential, redeeming, and quickening work of the Son. This narrative shows how actual revelations of the Logos were made through the human consciousness of him who was lifted up into the being of the Son of God, and who became the Interpreter of the Son to men. The prologue is built upon the discourse—is an inspired and transcendental generalization of the truths here and elsewhere announced. The discourse is the basis of the prologue in the thought of the evangelist. The originality of the discourse is conspicuous. Its theme shows it to be closely allied with the discussions which shortly after this created such fierce animosities in the synagogues of Galilee, whither his Jerusalem enemies pursued him. We shall find that there Jesus declared that "the Son of man was Lord of the sabbath," and was competent in that capacity to assert what was contained and involved in the sabbath. On another occasion he vindicated for his disciples the right to food on the sabbath ( Mark 2:23-28 ),