he Sabbath cure is defended because "my Father
worketh even until now" (v. 17), the cures are done "in My Father's name"
(x. 25), "I am the vine, and my Father is the husbandman" (xv. 1). This
mode of expression discloses a consciousness of unique filial relation to
God which is independent of, even as it was antecedent to, the
consciousness of official relation.

269. The full name "the Son of God" was seldom applied by Jesus to
himself, the only recorded instances being found in the fourth gospel (v.
25; ix. 35?; x. 36; xi. 4). He frequently acquiesced in the use of the
title by others in addressing him (for example, John i. 49; Matt. xvi. 16;
xxvi. 63f.; Mark xiv. 61f.; Luke xxii. 70); but for himself he preferred
the simpler phrase "the Son." This mode of expression occurs often in
John, and is found also in the two passages, already noticed, in which the
other gospels give clearest expression to the extraordinary self-assertion
of Jesus (Matt. xi. 27; Luke x. 22; and Mark xiii. 32). In the first of
them his claim to be the only one who can adequately reveal God is founded
on the consciousness that the relation between himself and God is so
intimate that God alone adequately knows him, whom men were so ready to
set at nought, and he alone knows God. This relation, in which he and God
stand together in contrast with all other men, is expressed by the
unqualified names, "the Father" and "the Son." In the second passage Jesus
confessed the limitation of his knowledge, but again in such a way as to
set himself and God in contrast not only with men, but also with "the
angels in heaven." Such assertions as these indicate that he who, knowing
his full humanity, chose the title "the Son of Man" to express his
consciousness that he had been appointed by God to be the Messiah, was yet
aware in his inner heart that his relation to God was even closer than
that in which he stood to men.

270. There is no word in John which goes beyond the two self-declarations
of Jesus which crown the record of the other evangelists, yet in the
fourth gospel the same claim to unique relation to God is more frequently
and frankly avowed. The most unqualified assertion of intimacy--"I and the
Father are one" (x. 30)--states what is clearly implied throughout the
gospel (so xiv. 6-11; xvi. 25; and particularly xvii. 21, "that they may
be one, even as we are one"). It has often been said, and truly, that this
claim to unity with the Father, taken b