‘If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. But if I do do them, then believe the works even though you do not believe me, so that you may know and go on knowing that the Father is in me, and I am in the Father'.
Look at what I have done, He said, and think about it. Ask yourselves where I have received this power from, and why I am doing what no one else has ever done. Jesus knew all along that to blatantly claim to be God would be futile. He would have been ridiculed, arrested and stoned to death, or treated as a madman. First He had to demonstrate Who He was by His acts of power and His depth of teaching. Then He had to wait for it to dawn on them little by little.
So let them think again over all He had said and done. Then let them recognise that this could only mean one thing, that the Father was in Him and He was in the Father. That there is indeed an essential unity between Him and His Father which can be expressed in no other way. They are one. Thus having disarmed them by using their own exegetical methods, He now reaffirmed His uniqueness.
So He has declared, “I and my Father are one”, and that He was the One Whom His Father ‘sanctified (set apart for a holy purpose) and sent into the world', and that the Father was in Him and He is in the Father, and that He had power to lay down His life and take it again. Had He not therefore done what they asked, revealing clearly that He was the Messiah, even if not the type they were wanting? And revealing even more, that He was the true Son of God.
‘Know and go on knowing.' This is the aorist and present tense of ginosko - ‘that you may come to know and go on knowing'. However, in place of the latter the verb ‘and believe' has fairly strong support in the manuscripts. The point, however, is the same. He wants their complete response.
His words have succeeded in their purpose. They have puzzled the Judaisers sufficiently for them to calm down a little. But that does not mean that they believed Him, for they once more tried to arrange for His arrest.