Not to be ministered unto. — The words found a symbolic illustration when our Lord, a few days afterwards, washed the feet of the disciples who were still contending about their claims to greatness (John 13:3-4); and the manner in which St. John connects the act with our Lord’s manifested consciousness of His supreme greatness, seems to show that the words which we find here were then present to his thoughts. The Son of Man seemed to the beloved disciple never to have shown Himself so truly king like and divine as when engaged in that menial act. But that act, we must remember, was only an illustration; and the words found their true meaning in His whole life, in His poverty and humiliation, in the obedience of childhood, in service rendered, naturally or super-naturally, to the bodies or the souls of others.
To give his life a ransom for many. — The word rightly rendered “ransom,” is primarily “a price made for deliverance,” and in this sense it is found in the Greek version of the Old Testament for “the ransom” which is accepted instead of a man’s life in Exodus 21:30, for the “price of redemption” accepted as an equivalent for an unexpired term of service in Leviticus 25:50, for riches as the “ransom of a man’s life” in Proverbs 13:8. No shade of doubt accordingly rests on the meaning of the word. Those who heard could attach no other meaning to it than that He who spake them was about to offer up His life that others might be delivered. Seldom, perhaps, has a truth of such profound import been spoken, as it were, so incidentally. It is as if the words had been drawn from Him by the contrast between the disputes of the disciples and the work which had occupied His own thoughts as He walked on in silent solitude in advance of them. It is the first distinct utterance, we may note, of the plan and method of His work. He had spoken before of “saving” the lost (Matthew 18:11): now He declares that the work of “salvation” was to be also one of “redemption.” It could only be accomplished by the payment of a price, and that price was His own life. The language of the Epistles as to the “redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” our being “bought with a price” (Romans 3:24; 1 Corinthians 6:20), “redeemed by His precious blood” (1 Peter 1:19), the language of all Christendom in speaking of the Christ as our Redeemer, are the natural developments of that one pregnant word. The extent of the redemptive work, “for many,” is here indefinite rather than universal, but “the ransom for all” of 1 Timothy 2:6 shows in what sense it was received by those whom the Spirit of God was guiding into all truth. Even the preposition in, “for many” has a more distinct import than is given in the English version. It was, strictly speaking, a “ransom” instead of, in the place of, (ἀντὶ not ὑπὲρ) “many.” Without stating a theory of the atonement, it implied that our Lord’s death was, in some way, representative and vicarious; and the same thought is expressed by St. Paul’s choice of the compound substantive ἀντίλυτρον, when, using a different preposition, he speaks of it as a ransom for (ὑπὲρ, i.e., on behalf of) all men (1 Timothy 2:6).