If I had not done among them the works which no other one has done, they had not had sin; but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father.
The Lord is telling His disciples why the world will hate them. He traces that hatred back to its source. People had watched Him do what no one else had ever done — and they hated Him for it. The verse raises a hard question — how can seeing more of God leave people worse off rather than better?
The Lord has just spoken of His words. Here He adds what His hands had done. Commentators note that words and works reach people differently.
And there was this further aggravation of their sin — the works He had done. Fitting words have a strong effect on some people. Works reach others even more deeply — works that express not only power, but goodness, holiness and love. Here they had words and works in perfect harmony, each confirming the other, such as were never seen except in Jesus the Son of God.
Older translations read "they had not had sin." Either way, the words do not mean these people would have been innocent. They mean their sin had not yet come out into the open.
It is not that they would not have been sinners. No — but "they had not had sin." So He says in another place, "If you were blind, you would have no guilt" (John 9:41). God came near to man in the Person of His Son. Man was able to say, "This is the heir" — yet he also said, "Come, let us kill him." So, "they have no excuse for their sin." Those who say they see have no excuse. Confessed blindness is not the difficulty; professed sight is. Sin stays where there is only a claim to see. A man who is blind, and knows it, can have his eyes opened. But what can be done for someone who thinks he sees, when he really does not?
The works were not just impressive. They showed who He was.
Every page of the Gospels tells us He was the God-man. On one side, He was a homeless stranger, a weary Man sitting at Samaria's well. He was hungry in the desert and slept in the boat. He groaned and wept tears of sorrow and sympathy. On the other side, He worked miracles, cleansed lepers, opened blind eyes, raised the dead to life, and showed His power over the winds and the waves. In a word, He declared by His mighty acts that though He was a man, He was also God.
Why does the Lord move from "hated me" to "hated... my Father"? Because the works were not His alone; they carried the Father's glory into plain view.
The Father's glory shone out in the works — the Son at work, the voice and the works together. It was no longer only the Son's voice, with the Father still behind. Now the works that witnessed to the Father were added. They saw, and they hated. Their alienation was total: they were cut off from the blessedness they had seen, the whole revelation of the Father and the Son in Him.
They had no excuse left.
If the Lord had not done among them the works no other man had done, they might have stayed as they were. They might have refused to believe in Him and not been guilty before God. They would still have been the object of God's patience. But in fact they had seen and hated both the Son and the Father. The Father had been fully revealed in the Son. If, when God was revealed in full and in grace, they rejected Him, what else could be done but to leave them in sin, far from God? If He had been revealed only in part, they would have had an excuse. They might have said, "Ah, if He had shown grace, if we had known Him as He is, we would not have rejected Him." They could not say that now.
One writer sets this rejection beside the worst sins recorded earlier in Scripture.
"If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin," said the Lord Jesus. It is as though the sin of Cain, of the world before the flood, of Babel, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Tyre and Sidon, of Pharaoh, of Jeroboam, of Ahab, could not be put in the same scale or measured by the same measure. It is as though every earlier act of transgression, disobedience and blasphemy were now eclipsed.
The Lord's own grief is in these words.
How sharp His sorrow must have been — not only because they hated Him with such violence, but because they hated His Father too.
- Seen. The works were not hidden; the Father's glory was on public display in what the Son did.
- Unique. No one else had done them, so no one could claim the evidence was ordinary or ambiguous.
- Exposed. Without His words and works, their sin would have stayed hidden — that does not mean they were innocent.
- Hated. Rejecting the Son was not a partial refusal; the hatred fell on the Father whom He revealed.
- Eclipsed. Beside the rejection of the One who had shown them grace, every earlier sin in Scripture weighs less.
But that the word written in their law might be fulfilled, They hated me without a cause.
Jesus has just shown that His words and works left the world without excuse for hating Him. Now He points to Israel's own Scriptures, which foretold that hatred and called it hatred without a cause.
The words He quotes are not from the five books of Moses, yet He calls them "their law." The New Testament often uses "law" that broadly.
The New Testament sometimes uses the term "law" for other parts of the Old Testament besides the five books of Moses. The Lord said, "Is it not written in your Law, 'I said, you are gods'?" — yet that quotation came from the Psalms (John 10:34). First Corinthians 14:21 does the same.
So their own law condemned them. Their hostility did not derail God's plan; it carried it out.
Yet God was in perfect control. He had foretold this in "their law," where the psalm presents the Messiah saying, "They hated Me without a cause" (Ps. 35:19). So the Jews unknowingly fulfilled their own Scriptures by their hatred and rejection of Christ. Nothing can thwart the fulfilment of the word of God.
"Without a cause" does not mean the hatred had no source. It means the reason cannot be found in the One they hated.
The world as a whole had no hope left, for by their own law they hated Christ without a cause. So the world's hatred is no longer ignorance: it is sin. It is a causeless hatred. Sadly, we, even as Christians, may at times give the world cause for hatred, but in Christ there was no cause. There is indeed a cause for the hatred, but it lies not in the One who is hated, but in the hearts of those who hate.
The hatred was not merely failure to keep rules. Something worse was exposed when God came near in kindness.
That is how causeless man's hatred was, right in the presence of divine grace. A full display of grace can end no other way. The mind of the flesh is hostile to God. Not only is there refusal to submit to His law, but hatred of His love; and this was now proved. Only Jesus, present in this way, speaking and working among men as He did, could prove it fully. They had seen Him, and the Father in Him — and they had hated both! Hatred of the Father and the Son is in itself irreparable, complete, and final.
The love was given freely, and the hatred came back just as freely.
The love was freely given, and here was the desperate evil. "They hated Me" — the state foretold — freely, "without a cause." What a word! It is sad and awful, and it humbles us about man's evil nature and corruption. They hated the blessed perfection of Jesus, freely and without a cause. They hated the Lord freely — evil moving of itself, with nothing to cause it.
He did not merely quote the psalm. He felt its words to the full.
On the cross the Lord felt to the full the hatred of the Jewish nation towards the godly remnant. His infinite perfection let Him say in an absolute way that they hated Him "without a cause." Those who sought to destroy Him were His enemies for no just reason. His enemies were many and strong. He had to meet not just the hostility of one man, but at the cross the hatred of a whole nation, led by its powerful leaders.
The same expression has a bright side. God's own act toward the believer is also without a cause.
"All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift" — freely, without a cause — "through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Of the Lord it is said that they hated Him "without a cause." God justifies the believer "without a cause." What wonderful grace!
He warned His followers to expect the same.
Was He fiercely opposed and hated? He was — so much so that the Scripture came true: "They hated me without a cause" (John 15:25). He warns us too, with His own lips, "Because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you" (John 15:19).
- Their law. "Law" here covers the wider Old Testament, including the Psalms. The words that condemn them come from the very book they boasted in.
- Their cause. The hatred had no cause in Christ. Its cause sat in the hearts of those who hated, which makes it sin and not ignorance.
- Their proof. Perfect love on display drew out more than law-breaking. It drew out hatred of that love — the fullest test the human heart has ever faced.
- Their fulfilment. By rejecting Him they carried out the Scripture they claimed to keep, without knowing it. Nothing can stop God's word from coming true.
- Our gift. The same "without a cause" describes how God justifies the believer: freely, with no cause in us. It also explains why the world still hates those Christ has chosen out of it.