Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.
Read Chapter 5
Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
Wherefore, &c. His Father, Greek, πατÎζα ίδιον,. i.e, His own Father, because Christ alone is the peculiar, and by nature, Son of God.
Making Himself equal with God, because He had said that not merely like things, but that the self same things which the Father works, were wrought by Him, and therefore that He in all things co-operated, not as a servant, but as a Song of Solomon , of the same substance with the Father. As Cyril says, "Seeing that He was a Prayer of Manasseh , and not knowing that God dwelt in Him, they could not bear that He should call God His Father in a special manner." The chief priests and scribes therefore wished to kill Jesus, because they feared lest, as His glory increased, their authority should decrease; indeed lest Jesus, persuading the people that He was God, should be preferred by the people to the priests, and should deprive them of their authority, and should bring in His own new priests and pontiffs, which we see He actually did do.
The mind of the Jews is wound up unto cruelty, and whereby they ought to have been healed, they are the more sick, that they may justly hear, How say ye, WE are wise? For when they ought to have been softened in disposition, transformed by suitable reasoning unto piety, they even devise slaughter against Him Who proves by His Deeds, that He hath in no whit transgressed the Divine Law by healing a man on the sabbath. They weave in with their wrath on account of the sabbath, the truth as a charge of blasphemy, snaring themselves in the meshes of their own transgressions unto wrath indissoluble. For they seemed to be pious in their distress that He being a Man, should say that God was His Father. For they knew not yet that He Who was for our sakes made in the form of a servant, is God the Word, the Life gushing forth from God the Father, that is, the Only-Begotten, to Whom Alone God is rightly and truly inscribed and is Father, but to us by no means so: for we are adopted, mounting up to ...
That God was his Father, making himself equal to God. In divers places of the Old Testament, God is called the Father of the Israelites, and they his children: but here, and on several other occasions, the Jews very well saw, that he called God his Father in a quite different sense from that in which he could be said to be their Father; that his words made him equal to God, and that he made himself God. See John x. 33; John xix. 7; Luke xxii. 70; And therefore St. Augustine says on this verse: (Trac. xvii. in Joan.) Behold the Jews understand what the Arians do not. (Witham)
And this he asserted not by words merely, but by deeds, for not in speech alone, but also yet oftener by actions He declared it. Why so? Because they might object to His words and charge Him with arrogance, but when they saw the truth of His actions proved by results, and His power proclaimed by works, after that they could say nothing against Him.
But they who will not receive these words in a right mind assert, that Christ made not Himself equal to God, but that the Jews suspected this. Come then let us go over what has been said from the beginning. Tell me, did the Jews persecute Him, or did they not? It is clear to every one that they did. Did they persecute Him for this or for something else? It is again allowed that it was for this. Did He then break the Sabbath, or did He not? Against the fact that He did, no one can have anything to say. Did He call God His Father, or did He not call Him so? This too is true. Then the rest also follows by the same consequence; for as to call ...
