In the previous verse, Jesus
promised the disciples that they would experience peace. He was referring to
the state of rest resulting from being reconciled with the Father. In verse 28,
Jesus then show them how they could be assured of it. If they trust in what He had
said, their cares and fears would disappear and joy would replace their sorrow.
These verses give us the feeling that the disciples were overly occupied with
their own grief and sadness, and were not able to see the joy that Jesus was
about to enter. Had they truly loved Him, they would have greatly rejoiced with
Him, and forget about themselves and their griefs.
The last part of verse 28 where the
Lord said, “…the father is greater than I” had been misconstrued to mean that
Jesus is inferior to the Father. Here Jesus was looking at the soon approaching
state of exaltation being with the Father. In the light of that approaching glorious
moment, His present state was something lesser. Jesus was acknowledging His lowly
role as a servant so as to magnify the Father who had sent Him. Paul, in His letter
to the Philippians, debunk that thought that Jesus was inferior. It’s clear
that Christ was equal to God. But when He became man, He divest of His divine
nature and chose to lean on God, and His strength was provided by the Holy
Spirit. He chose humility and became man, and was found to be obedient even to
the point of choosing to die in the most humbling way.
The reason He told them all these in
advance was so that when they come to pass, they would know that He was indeed
the long awaited Messiah. And in recalling, they would believe that He was
their God-sent Savior. Then they would come to believe all that He had taught
and promised were absolutely true. In a short while, Jesus would be going
through the extreme cruelty ever imagined. He would soon undertake the work He
had come to do and would not be able to speak as freely. He wanted them to ponder
over all that He had said, and come to realize and believe in Him and His
mission.
When He was on earth, Jesus maintained
His holiness. Hence the prince of this world had no part in Him. On the one
hand the prince of this world refers to Caesar and His power. But in a deeper sense, it refers to the dark
power behind the power of Rome that was engineering Jesus’ demise. The point
Jesus is making is this: Satan could not find a weak point in Him to cause Him
to stumble. He was indeed the unblemished sacrificial Lamb of God. He came to
do all these to demonstrate His love for the Father, by His perfect obedience
to Him. This chapter closed with Jesus and His disciples making a move to make their
journey to Gethsemane.
Like them, Jesus wants our courage and
confidence in Him to be sustained by remembering what He had done. What He did demonstrated
to all His love for the Father. He is calling us to follow Him in His steps to
act in ways that will enable people to know that we love Him too.
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