John 13:3 - Exposition

£ Knowing —a significant hint of the complex wonder of the Lord's Person. John felt at this moment that the consciousness of Jesus was receding into the eternal self-consciousness of the Logos when he thus ventures to speak— that the Father —in the great act of his generation— gave £ all things into his hands, and that he came forth ( ἀπὸ ) from God, and was going back ( or, away ) to God, in the glory of his incarnation and the mystery of his death and resurrection. The whole of the incarnate ministry of Jesus was a separation, to some extent, from God, just as the close of it, in the death and resurrection, was a return to the glory which he had with the Father before all worlds. We must admit the extraordinary quality of the evangelist's assertion. He here throws back into the majestic manner of the Christ the hints which the subsequent discourse of our Lord must have given him of the Divine greatness which flashed at times from his sacred Person, and conferred a boundless significance on the subsequent act of humiliation. Christ gave the highest proof of his Divine self-consciousness in this display of his condescending love, this voluntary abasement to the lowest place in the household of faith. The use of εἰδὼς twice ever (verses 1 and 3) is contrasted with the γνώσῃ of verse 7. The vast confessions here made are declared to be matters of absolute intuitive knowledge, not the results of long experience. Christ did not "come to know;" he "knew" all these facts about himself. It must not be supposed that this was a theological idea which came into the writer's mind afterwards. St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Philippians ( Philippians 2:6-8 ), had adequately grasped the same thought long before St. John penned this Gospel (el. 2 Corinthians 8:9 ).