Then answered Jesus and said unto them,
Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he sees the Father do: for whatsoever things he does, these also does the Son likewise.
All Commentaries on John 5:19 Go To John 5
Hilary of Poitiers
AD 368
He refers to the charge of violating the sabbath, brought against Him. My Father works hitherto, and I work; meaning that He had a precedent for claiming the right He did; and that what He did was in reality His Father’s doing, who acted in the Son. And to quiet the jealousy which had been raised, because by the use of His Father’s name He had made Himself equal with God, and to assert the excellency of His birth and nature, He says, Verily, verily, I say to you, The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do.
Lest then that assertion of His equality, which must belong to Him, as by Name and Nature the Son, might throw doubt upon His Nativity , He says that the Son can do nothing of Himself.
That the wholesome order of our confession, i.e. that we believe in the Father and the Son, might remain, He shows the nature of His birth; viz. that He derived the power of acting not from au accessible of strength supplied for each work, but by His own knowledge in the first instance. And this knowledge He derived not from any particular visible precedents, as if what the Father had done, the Son could do afterwards; but that the Son being born of the Father, and consequently conscious of the Father’s virtue and nature within Him, could do nothing but what He saw the Father do: as he here testifies; God does not see by bodily organs, but by the virtue of His nature.
Or thus; All things and the same, He says, to show the virtue of His nature, its being the same with God’s. That is the same nature, which can do all the same things. And as the Son does all the same things in alike way, the likeness of the works excludes the notion of the worker existing alone g. Thus we come to a true idea of the Nativity, as our faith receives it: the likeness of the works bearing witness to the Nativity, their sameness to the Nature.
It must not be supposed that the Only Begotten God needed such showing on account of ignorance. For the showing here is only the doctrine of the nativity; the self-existing Son, from the self-existing Father.
Nor did the heavenly discourse lack the caution, to guard against our inferring from these words any difference in the nature of the Son and the Father. For He says that the works of the Father were shown to Him, not that strength was supplied Him for the doing of them, in order to teach that this showing is substantially nothing else than His birth; for that simultaneously with the Son Himself is born the Son’s knowledge of the works the Father will do through Him.
