The Lord reverts to thoughts of His approaching death. There is no avoidance of contemplating that which it was part of His perfection to feel, as no man ever did. He estimates it rightly and fully as before, instead of braving it as men do who cannot escape. To Him it was no inevitable doom, but divine love, that God might be glorified in a guilty world, that sinners might be saved righteously, that the entire creation in heaven and earth (I say not τὰ καταχθονί, the infernal beings) might be reconciled and blessed forever. He, and He only, had authority to lay down His life (ψυχήν), as He had authority to take it again. As He is the Resurrection and the Life (ζωή), so no one takes the life He had in this world from Him, but He lays it down of Himself, though also in obedience of His Father, and to the everlasting glory of God, as the fullness of His person enabled Him to do. Nonetheless, but the more, did He feel the gravity, humiliation, and suffering of what was before Him. There was the deepest sense of death, not only as man and Messiah, but of its import from man's hand, and from God's judgment. Not an element of grief, and pain, and shame, and horror was absent from His heart, compatible with the perfection of His person and relationship to God.
"Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour; but on account of this came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name.” (Vers. 27, 28.) He was the Life, yet came to die; was light and love, yet rejected and hated as man never knew before, nor will again. The reality of His manhood, the glory of His Godhead, in no way hindered His sorrow: His being who and what He was, and perfect in all, only gave Him infinite capacity to feel and fathom what He endured, none the less because He came to endure it all, and had now before Him in immediate prospect, though none of men saw it but Himself. He had not been perfect man if His soul had not been troubled, so as to feel, “What am I to say?” He had not been Son of God as man, had He not in His soul-trouble prayed, “Father, save me from this hour,” and quite as little, “but on this account came I unto this hour,” crowned with, “Father, glorify thy name.” To have felt and expressed the first petition perfectly suited Him who was man in such circumstances; to have added the second was worthy of Him who is God no less than man in one undivided person; to have said both was perfection in both, in sorrow as in joy, as to death no less than life.
The Father appreciates and answers accordingly. “Then came there a voice out of heaven, I both have glorified and will glorify [it] again. The crowd then that stood and heard said that it thundered; others said, An angel hath spoken to him.” (Vers. 28, 29.) Augustine and Jerome confound this with chapter 17:5, from which it is wholly and demonstrably distinct, but we must never expect spiritual intelligence, sometimes not even common orthodoxy, from the Fathers, so-called. The later passage in our Gospel is the Son requesting the Father that He as the risen Man should be glorified, on the completion of His work, as well as consonantly with the rights of His person, along with the Father Himself in the glory which the Son had along with Him before the world.
The passage before us refers to what had just been, and what was going to be, done in this world; for as the Father had glorified His name in the resurrection of Lazarus, so yet more infinitely would He in the rising from the dead of His own Son. The moderns, such as Dean Alford, fail, in meager, vague, and even erroneous thought, to reach the mark as much, or more, than the ancients. For how poor it is to tell us that διὰ τοῦτο= ἴνα σωθῶ ἐκ τἠς ὥρας ταλυτης, that I might be safe from this hour, that is, the going into and exhausting this hour, this cup, is the appointed way of My glorification; or, as Meyer says, that Thy name may be glorified, which is to anticipate what follows. It was really to die, though undoubtedly the glory of the Father by the Son. So again, ἐδόξασα points to something much more definite than “in the manifestation hitherto made of the Son of God, imperfect as it was (see Matt. 16:16, 17); in all Old Testament type and prophecy; in creation, and indeed (Aug. in John 3:4) antequam facerem mundum.” Lastly, it is losing the exact force to treat πάλιν as a mere intensification of the δοξάζειν, instead of seeing a distinct and higher display of that resurrection power which marked out the Son of God.
As to the question why some said the voice from heaven was thunder, others the speaking of an angel to the Lord, it seems vain to speculate. It was really speculation on the part of the crowd, who all fell short of the truth. Unbelief of Him can weaken or get rid of all testimony till He come in judgment. Yet was it really in grace to them, for “Jesus answered and said, Not on men's account hath this voice come, but on yours. Now is [the] judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out: and I, if I be lifted up out of the earth, will draw all to me. But this he said signifying by what death he was about to die. The crowd [then] answered him, We have heard out of the law that the Christ is to abide forever; and how sayest thou that the Son of man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of man? Jesus then said to them, Yet a little time the light is among you. Walk while ye have the light, that the darkness may not overtake you; and he that walketh in darkness knoweth not where he goeth. While ye have the light, believe in the light, that ye may become sons of light.” (Vers. 30-36.)
These words, if any, are surely of the most solemn import, and the more, as Christendom now, as ever, ignores their truth. For men, Christian men, believe nothing less than that “now in the judgment of this world,” even while some of them look for the casting out of its prince in due time. The glory of the Son of man is founded on death. The rejection of the Messiah gives occasion for what is thus incomparably larger and more profound; and thus is God's glory immutably secured, and much fruit borne, even the blessing of those otherwise lost, now blessed, not merely by, but with, Christ. But if heaven be thereby opened (for the cross and heaven answers to each other), the world is judged. Before God and to faith now is its judgment, and not only when execution takes place publicly and in power. But now it is judged for him who has the mind of Christ, who shares His rejection and awaits glory with Him on high. A living Messiah should have gathered the twelve tribes of Israel round Himself as their Chief, raised up of God according to promise; but He was to be lifted up out of the earth, crucified, Satan's seeming victory to be but real and everlasting defeat, and so known to faith, while we wait for the day which shall declare it beyond contradiction. Christ on the cross is a very different object from reigning over His people in grace, and abiding forever; yet they should here read it also out of the law, for there it is dimly. But grace makes Him manifest thus lifted up, the attractive center for all, Gentile or Jew, spite of their sins, which He then bore in His own body. A suffering Son of man was, and is, no article of Jewish faith, though certainly revealed in their scriptures. To their expression of ignorance the Lord replies by telling them how brief was the stay of the light, by warning them of the darkness about to seize on them, and by exhorting them to faith in the light, if they would escape the darkness and have the light to characterize themselves.