NOTES for Joh 7:1-13
Jesus' answer to His brothers sounds somewhat ironic: it is always the right time for you, He says, but My time has not yet come. The meaning is clear: My path is determined, whereas you have no path, so you have no need to discern the times either. Nevertheless, Jesus does go secretly to the feast He refused to attend openly.
Evidently, this is the same concealment of His messiahship that the other Evangelists describe. The reasons are understandable: popular expectations required the Messiah immediately to launch an uprising against Rome and summon an angelic army to assist the rebels. Clearly, none of this formed part of Jesus' mission. But there was more to it. It is no accident that the Evangelist mentions that Jesus' brothers did not believe in Him. They wanted plain proof of His messiahship.
They urged Him on: here is a great feast, they said, just the time to begin, if You really are the Messiah… But He understands that there is no point in proving His messiahship. If, as Messiah, He really had been meant to do what the people expected of Him, then, of course, something could have been proved. Yet He faced quite different tasks. No one can be dragged by force into the Kingdom He brought to earth—not by superior force, nor by superior arguments.
It makes no difference here whether someone submits to external force or to the force of an argument: either way, that person enters the Kingdom not through inward acceptance but because there is nowhere else to go. Yet such proofs usually prove nothing. Until someone inwardly accepts the reality before them, no proof will satisfy them. It is no accident that solipsism proves to be the most 'unassailable' worldview: the person simply does not believe that anything exists beyond their own consciousness.
This disbelief outweighs every argument: nothing can be proved to such a person. Not everyone, of course, is a solipsist, but many people have a boundary beyond which lies a realm of disbelief. Or distrust. Even God cannot change the character of that realm. Only the person has authority there, for it is the realm of their freedom—a freedom Jesus does not invade, for He guards human freedom as carefully as His Father does.