NOTES for Joh 7:1-13
For an ordinary person, the path that the Lord Jesus' relatives suggest to Him is completely natural and understandable. In their own way they are right: if He wants to be a spiritual leader, He should seek human renown. And that is why today's Gospel passage shows so vividly how different God's plan is from human thoughts.
The Lord refuses what they offer Him. This means that the matter is not leadership; the Savior did not come in order to become the spiritual leader of the people. The Lord Himself says that the world hates Him because He testifies that its works are evil. This is testimony that each person accepts or does not accept personally, in full independence before God.
From this we can conclude that the purpose of Christ's coming is not to lead the people after Himself as a single whole. On the contrary, each individual person, when confronted with Christ's testimony, is singled out from the human groups and ties in which we are entangled and becomes precisely individual. Let me recall that the idea of being separate, or set apart, is expressed in biblical language by the word "holiness." Only on the basis of this separateness, this setting apart of each person from his social and national environment, does the Lord build the new unity of the Church, which is rooted in His uniqueness.