Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I.
Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I. This is one of the passages which have in all ages been most confidently appealed to by these who deny the supreme divinity of Christ, in proof that our Lord claimed no proper equality with the Father: here, they say, He explicitly disclaims it. But let us see whether, on their principles, it would yield any intelligible sense at all. Were some holy man on his deathbed to say as he beheld his friends in tears at the prospect of losing him, 'Ye ought rather to rejoice than weep for me, and if ye loved me ye would'-the speech would be quite natural and what many dying saints have said. But should these weeping bystanders ask why joy was more suitable than sorrow, and the dying man reply, "because my Father is greater than I," would they not start back with astonishment, if not with horror? Does not this strange speech, then, from Christ's lips presuppose such teaching on His part as would make it hard to believe that He could gain anything by departing to the Father, and render it needful to say expressly that there was a sense in which He could and would do so? Thus this startling saying, when closely looked at, seems plainly intended to correct such misapprehensions as might arise from the emphatic and reiterated teaching of His proper equality with the Father-as if joy at the prospect of heavenly bliss were inapplicable to Him-as if so Exalted a Person were incapable of any accession at all, by transition from this dismal scene tea cloudless heaven and the very bosom of the Father, and, by assuring them that it was just the reverse, to make them forget their own sorrow in His approaching joy.
The Fathers of the Church in repelling the false interpretation put upon this verse by the Arians, were little more satisfactory than their opponents; some of them saying it referred to the Sonship of Christ, in which respect He was inferior to the Father, others that it referred to His Human Nature. But the human nature of the Son of God is not less real in heaven than it was upon earth. Plainly, the inferiority of which Christ here speaks is not anything which would be the same whether He went or stayed, but something which would be removed by His going to the Father-on which account He says that if they loved Him they would rather rejoice on His account than sorrow at His departure. With this key to the sense of the words, they involve no real difficulty; and in this view of them all the most judicious interpreters, from Calvin downward, substantially concur.