John 12:44-50 - Exposition

7. The summation of the supreme conflict between our Lord and the world . The portion of the chapter which follows is regarded by most commentators, Lucke, Meyer, Godet, Olshausen, and Westcott, as a summary of our Lord's teaching, as a reiteration by the evangelist of those salient points of the Lord's ministry which, while they are the life of the world, are nevertheless the grounds on which blinded eyes and hardened hearts rejected him. John 12:44-46 characterize the believer; John 12:47 , John 12:48 emphasize Christ's relation to the unbeliever; John 12:49 , John 12:50 the principle upon which both deliverances turn and will continue to turn. There are those who think that these were special private addresses to the disciples, uttered after our Lord ( ἐκρύβη ) was hidden, but the word ( ἔκραξε ) "cried aloud," would not then have been used, as it was used for the most public expressions of his doctrine, when given once for all (here comp. John 7:28 , John 7:37 , with Luke 18:39 ). Keim, De Wette, Baur, and Hilgenfeld think that, because there is no fresh departure here, it is proof that all the discourses of Christ in John are similarly put together with no historical basis. But if it be so, this differs strangely from all the rest of our Lord's discourses recorded by John in that it has no occasion, or persons, or opportunity to which it seems to fit. Certain aorists suggest the idea that John has here given specimens of our Lord's appeals which had ended in his being rejected by the nation as a whole. Luthardt takes the view of these words being spoken totidem verbis on our Lord's departure, and with him Hengstenberg also agrees. These critics suppose that they form the closing words of our Lord's public ministry, delayed by the intercalary remarks of the evangelist, and really belong to the close of the thirty-sixth verse. Though the expressions flint follow are built upon the discourses elsewhere uttered, we admit, with Hengstenberg, that there is no verbal parallel that is at all close, and that therefore the evangelist must not be quoting from what he had already reported, but giving the substance of a threefold class of observations found from one end of the Gospel to the other, and in words that he had heard the Master use.