Luke 10:22

Ver. 22. The words, And He turned Him unto His disciples, which are read here by several Mjj., are in vain defended by Tischendorf and Meyer. They are not authentic. How indeed could we understand this στραφείς, having turned Himself? Turned, Meyer explains, turned from His Father, to whom He has been praying, towards men. But would the phrase turn Himself back be suitable in this sense? We have here a gloss occasioned by the κατ᾿ ἰδίαν, privately, of Luke 10:23. The wish has been to establish a difference between this first revelation, made to the disciples in general (Luke 10:22), and the following, more special still, addressed to some of them only (Luke 10:23). Here we have one of the rare instances in which the T. R. (which rejects the words) differs from the third edition of Steph.

The joyful outburst of Luke 10:21 is carried on without interruption into Luke 10:22; only the first impression of adoration gives way to calm meditation. The experience through which Jesus has just passed has transported Him, as it were, into the bosom of His Father. He plunges into it, and His words become an echo of the joys of His eternal generation.

As in the passage which precedes (Luke 10:21), and in that which follows (22b), it is only knowledge which is spoken of, the words, “ All things are delivered to me of my Father,” are often taken as referring to the possession and communication of religious truths, of the knowledge of God. But the work accomplished by the disciples, on occasion of which Jesus uttered those sayings, was not merely a work of teaching there was necessarily involved in it a display of force. To overturn the throne of Satan on the earth, and to put in its place the kingdom of God, was a mission demanding a power of action. But this power was closely connected with the knowledge of God. To know God means to be initiated into His plan; means to think with Him, and consequently to will as He does. Now, to will with God, and to be self-consecrated to Him as an instrument in His service, is the secret of participation in His omnipotence. “The education of souls,” Gess rightly observes, “is the greatest of the works of Omnipotence.” Everything in the universe, accordingly, should be subordinate to it. There is a strong resemblance between this saying of Jesus and that of John the Baptist (John 3:35): “The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hand,” a declaration which is immediately connected with the other relative to the teaching of Jesus: “He whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God. ”

The gift denoted by the aor. παρεδόθη, are delivered to me, is the subject of an eternal decree; but it is realized progressively in time, like everything which is subject to the conditions of human development. The chief periods in its realization are these three: The coming of Jesus into the world, His entrance upon His Messianic ministry, and His restoration to His divine state. Such are the steps by which the new Master took the place of the old (Luke 4:6), and was raised to Omnipotence. “ Delivered,” Gess well observes, “either for salvation or for judgment.” The καί, and, which connects the two parts of the verse, may be thus paraphrased: and that, because...The future conquest of the world by Jesus and His disciples rests on the relation which He sustains to God, and with which He identifies His people. The perfect knowledge of God is, in the end, the sceptre of the universe.

Here there is a remarkable difference in compiling between Luke and Matthew: οὐδεὶς ἐπγινώσκει, no one recognises, or discerns, says Matthew. To the idea of knowing, this επι (to put the finger upon) has the effect of adding the idea of confirming experimentally. The knowledge in question is one de visu. Luke uses the simple verb γινώσκειν, to know, which is weaker and less precise; but he makes up for this deficiency in the notion of the verb by amplifying its regimen, “ What is the Father..., what is the Son;” that is to say, all that God is as a Father to the man who has the happiness of knowing Him as a son, and all that the name son includes for the man who has the happiness of hearing it pronounced by the mouth of the Father, all that the Father and Son are the one to the other. Perhaps Matthew's form of expression is a shade more intellectual or didactic; that of Luke rather moves in the sphere of feeling. How should we explain the two forms, each of which is evidently independent of the other? Jesus must have employed in Aramaic the verb יָדַע, H3359, to know. Now יָדַע, H3359 is construed either with the accusative or with one of the two prepositions בְּ, in, or עַל, upon. The construction with one or other of these prepositions adds something to the notion of the verb. For example, שָׁמַע, H9048, to hear; שָׁמַעלְ, to listen; שָׁמַעבְּ, to listen with acquiescence of heart. There is a similar difference of meaning between יָדַע, H3359 and יָדַע בְּ or יָדַעעַל, a difference analogous to that between the two expressions, rem cognoscere and cognoscere de re, to know a thing and to know of a thing. Thus, in the passage in Job 37:16, where יָדַע, H3359 is construed with עַל, upon, the sense is not, “ Knowest thou balancings of the clouds?”

Job could not but have known the fact which falls under our eyes, but “ understandest thou the...?” Now if we suppose that Jesus used the verb יָדַע, H3359 with one of the prepositions בְּ or לְ, the two Greek forms may be explained as two different attempts to render the entire fulness of the Aramaic expression; that of Matthew strengthening the notion of the simple verb by the preposition ἐπί (re cognise) (which would correspond more literally with יָדַעעַל); that of Luke, by giving greater fulness to the idea of the object, by means of the paraphrase τίς ἐστιν, what is.

A remarkable example, Luke 9:3, has already shown how differences of matter and form in the reproduction of the words of Jesus by our evangelists are sometimes explained with the utmost ease by going back to the Hebrew or Aramaic text. What a proof of the authenticity of those discourses! What a proof also of the independence of our several Greek Digests!

That exclusive knowledge which the Father and Son have of one another is evidently not the cause of their paternal and filial relation; on the contrary, it is the effect of it. Jesus is not the Son because He alone perfectly knows the Father, and is fully known only by Him; but He knows Him and is known by Him in this way only because He is the Son. In like manner, God is not the Father because He alone knows the Son, and is known only by Him; but this double knowledge is the effect of that paternal relation which He sustains to the Son.

The article before the two substantives serves to raise this unique relation above the relative temporal order of things, and to put it in the sphere of the absolute, in the very essence of the two Beings. God did not become Father at an hour marked on some earthly dial. If He is a Father to certain beings born in time, it is because He is the Father absolutely, that is to say, in relation to a Being who is not born in time, and who is toward Him the Son as absolutely. Such is the explanation of the difficult verse, Ephesians 3:15. Mark, who has not the passage, gives another wherein the term the Son is used in the same absolute sense, Luke 13:32: “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” After words like these, we cannot admit any radical difference between the Jesus of the Synoptics and that of John. The existence of the Son belonging to the essence of the Father, the pre-existence of the one is implied in the eternity of the other.

Immediate knowledge of the Father is the exclusive privilege of the Son. But it becomes the portion of believers as soon as He initiates them into the contents of His filial consciousness, and consents to share it with them. By this participation in the consciousness of the Son (the work of the Holy Spirit), the believer in his turn attains to the intuitive knowledge of the Father. Comp. John 1:18; John 14:6; John 17:26. With Gess, we ought to remark the importance of the priority given to the knowledge of the Son by the Father over that of the Father by the Son. Were the order inverted, the gift of all things, the παραδίδοναι, would have appeared to rest on the religious instruction which Jesus had been giving to men. The actual order makes it the consequence of the unsearchable relation between Jesus and the Father, in virtue of which He can be to souls everything that the Father Himself is to them.

This passage (Luke 10:21-22) is placed by Matthew, chap. 11, after the denunciation pronounced on the Galilean cities, and immediately following on the deputation of John the Baptist. We cannot comprehend those of our critics, Gess included, who prefer this situation to that of Luke. Gess thinks that the disciples (Luke 10:21) are contrasted with the unbelieving Galilean cities. But the whole passage refers to the disciples as instruments in God's work; and Jesus contrasts them not with the ignorant Galileans, but with the wise of Jerusalem. See Matthew even, Luke 10:25. As to the following sentence, Luke 10:22, Gess thinks that he can paraphrase it thus: “No man, not even John the Baptist, knoweth the Son...,” in order thus to connect it with the account of the forerunner's embassy, which forms the preceding context in Matthew. But in relation to the preceding verse the word no man alludes not to John, but to the wise and learned of Jerusalem, who pretended that they alone had the knowledge of God (Luke 11:52). It is not difficult, then, to perceive the superiority of Luke's context; and we may prove here, as everywhere else, the process of concatenation, in virtue of which we find different elements united together in Matthew 11:7-30 by a simple association of ideas in the mind of the compiler.

With the last words of Luke 10:22, and he to whom the Son will reveal Him, the thought of Jesus reverts to His disciples who surround Him, and in whom there is produced at this very time the beginning of the promised illumination. He now addresses Himself to them. The meditation of Luke 10:22 is the transition between the adoration of Luke 10:21 and the congratulation which follows.