John 15:22 - Exposition

If I had not come, as the incarnate Word of God, if I had not fulfilled the promises and come forth from God into the world to reveal the Father, and spoken to them , made known to them the thought and Spirit of God, made it possible for them to know the essence of the only true God, they had had £ no sin ; they would not have resisted the highest love, their alienation in this respect would not have been a violation of the most solemn and gracious demands of the Father. The greatest sin is the refusal of the most complete revelation, and by the side of this all other sin becomes comparatively trivial. Our Lord could not have spoken of the hatred of himself or his disciples (so Lucke and Meyer) as this sin, because it would have been obviously impossible to hate a non-existent revelation or revealer. It is the deeper fall which is consequent upon a deliberate rejection of the highest love. Formerly, they would have been in the condition of those whose sins of ignorance God overlooks ( Acts 17:30 ), and to whose ἁμαρτήματα in the past God has exercised πάρεσις , in anticipation of the coming grace. But now (Luke in numerous places uses this expression to form a strong contrast) they have no excuse or pretext for their sin , or concerning their sin. They can plead no justification. The word πρόφασις is an λεγόμενον , and is not "cloak or covering," but " palliation or excuse" for manifest sin. So long as men have seen no deeper into the nature of God than they can go with the aid of mere phenomena or ratiocination on the details of creation, their fears and even their hatreds formulated into grim legend, or uncouth idols, or repellent hypothesis, are a natural outcome of a nature so corrupt; but they ought to have found in Christ a deeper revelation, a summons to service and adoring love. In rejecting the idea of God which I have set before them they have no excuse. St. Paul ( Romans 1:20 ) declares that those who have defamed the great characteristic of God which may be learned from nature are without excuse. Certainly our Lord does not say this here.