Biblion Bible Commentary
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Lifted Up From the Earth
John 12:27-36
27 “Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this time’? But I came to this time for this cause. · WEB
This Gospel's one glimpse of the garden's agony, and a voice from heaven the crowd hears as thunder.
"Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say? 'Father, save me from this time'? But I came to this time for this cause" John 12:27.
This book has no scene in Gethsemane, and these two sentences are what it gives instead. The vocabulary is the same — a soul troubled, a prayer for rescue considered, and the prayer refused because of what the hour is for.
The structure is remarkable. He states the request, puts it in quotation marks, and declines to make it, all in one breath. Nothing here is a man calmly executing a plan; the distress is real and it is overruled by the same person feeling it.
"Father, glorify your name!" John 12:28. What is prayed instead is the one thing that costs him everything, and it asks for nothing for himself.
Then a voice came out of the sky, saying, "I have both glorified it and will glorify it again."
One of three occasions in the Gospels when the Father speaks aloud, and the only one in this book. It is also the only one that answers a prayer rather than making an announcement.
The multitude who stood by and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him" John 12:29.
The crowd's reaction is the most quietly devastating detail in the chapter. God speaks audibly and it is heard as weather. Others do better and reach for an angel; nobody reports the words.
It is the whole problem of the Gospel in miniature. The same event lands as noise, as a rumor of something spiritual, and as revelation, depending on the hearer — which is what the third chapter said judgment is John 3:19.
"This voice hasn't come for my sake, but for your sakes" John 12:30. The sign was given for people who did not catch it.
"Now is the judgment of this world. Now the prince of this world will be cast out" John 12:31.
Two nows, about an event still days away, and both are stated as accomplished. The cross is described as a trial in which the world is judged and its ruler evicted — which is the opposite of how it will look to anyone standing at Golgotha.
"And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." But he said this, signifying by what kind of death he should die John 12:32–33.
The writer explains the phrase for the third and last time John 3:14 John 8:28. Lifted up means hoisted on a stake and exalted at once, and this Gospel will not let the two be separated.
And draw is the verb used in chapter six of the Father drawing people to the Son John 6:44. Here the drawing is done by the crucifixion itself, and the reach is all people — which, in the paragraph where Greeks have just asked for him, means what it says about the barrier between the courts.
"We have heard out of the law that the Christ remains forever. How do you say, 'The Son of Man must be lifted up'?" John 12:34.
The crowd's objection is a real difficulty, honestly stated. Their Scriptures did promise a kingdom without end Isaiah 9:7 Daniel 7:14, and a dying Messiah cannot be squared with it. Nobody had put Isaiah's suffering servant beside Daniel's son of man.
"Yet a little while the light is with you. Walk while you have the light, that darkness doesn't overtake you" John 12:35.
The answer is not an explanation but an urgency. He does not resolve their difficulty; he tells them the window is closing, and the instruction is to walk rather than to work it out.
Jesus said these things, and he departed and hid himself from them John 12:36. The last public words of the ministry, and then he is gone. From here the doors close and the audience is eleven men.
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