O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me.
O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me - or, preserving the strict sense of the tenses, 'the world knew Thee not, but I knew Thee, and these knew that Thou didst send Me;' all this being regarded as past. 'The world knew Thee not.' Clearly this refers to its whole treatment of "Him whom He had sent." Accordingly, in a previous chapter, He says, "He that hateth Me hateth My Father also;" "Now have they both seen and hated both Me and My Father;" "All these things will they do unto you for My name's sake, because they know not Him that sent Me" (John 15:23-24; John 15:21): for, "had they known it," says the apostle, "they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory" (1 Corinthians 2:8). Our Lord, it will be perceived, utters this with a certain tender mournfulness, which is rendered doubly affecting when He falls back, in the next words, upon the very different treatment which the Father had received from Himself - "The world knew Thee not, O righteous Father: but I knew Thee!" 'While the world was showing its disregard of Thee in its treatment of Him whom Thou hadst sent, from Me Thou gatest ever the glory due unto Thy name, O Lord, Thou knowest.' But Jesus has another source of consolation in the recognition of His divine mission by "THESE" Eleven that were in that upper room with Him, in whom doubtless His eye beheld a multitude that no man could number of kindred spirits to the end of time; just as in "the world" that knew Him not He must have seen the same blinded world in every age: "I knew Thee, and these knew that Thou didst send Me." Once and again had He said the same thing in this prayer.
But here He introduces it for the last time in bright and cheering contrast with the dark and dismal rejection of Him, and of the Father in Him, by the world. One other thing deserves notice in this verse. As before He had said "HOLY Father," when desiring the display of that perfection on His disciples (John 17:11), so here He styles him "RIGHTEOUS Father," because He is appealing to his righteousness or justice, to make a distinction between those two diametrically opposite classes - "the world," on the one hand, which would not know the Father, though brought so nigh to it in the Son of His love, and, on the other, Himself, who recognized and owned Him, and along with Him His disciples, who owned His mission from the Father.