What is it about Jesus that makes him speak like no other? Of course, there isn’t a single answer to this question. Countless volumes have been written, and Jesus’s uniqueness still hasn’t been exhausted.

“No one ever spoke like this man.” There is a brief, tense conversation recorded in John’s Gospel that encapsulates, in certain ways, the last two thousand years of Jesus’s confounding impact on world history.

Given Jesus’s troubling and growing influence on the Jewish public, the chief priests and Pharisees decided to send officers to arrest Jesus (John 7:32). The officers, however, returned empty-handed. When the furious Pharisees asked why, the officers responded, “No one ever spoke like this man” (John 7:46). This dumbfounded them. Even the officers were infatuated with Jesus! You can hear the religious leaders’ exasperation:

Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed. (John 7:47–49)

This pattern has recurred over and over, throughout history, with what Jesus of Nazareth said and did.

His Confounding Words

Leaders and scholars have repeatedly and relentlessly tried to bring charges against Jesus, to expose him as a heretic, or a lunatic, or a fraud, or a misunderstood political revolutionary, or an opiate of the masses, or a vassal of imperialism, or as his disconsolate disciples’ legendary wish-projection upon the cosmos. But despite all their best efforts, Jesus repeatedly resists arrest, confounding crowd after crowd, and generation after generation: No one ever spoke like this man.

What is it about Jesus that makes him speak like no other? Of course, there isn’t a single answer to this question. Countless volumes have been written, and Jesus’s uniqueness still hasn’t been exhausted. But in John 7, Jesus himself clues us in on one crucial truth that governed all he said (and didn’t say):

The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and in him there is no falsehood. (John 7:18)

Key to understanding the unique power of Jesus’s words is understanding why he spoke them.

Why He Said Everything He Said

In a previous discussion with Jewish leaders, Jesus told them, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39–40). In other words, one can look long in the right place and still miss the most important truths.

It is possible to spend a lifetime theorizing and debating why Jesus said what he did and miss what he actually said about what made his words unique and unforgettable. Here’s a sampling:

• “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise” (John 5:19).
• “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 5:30).
• “I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (John 5:43–44).
• “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me” (John 7:16).
• “The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and in him there is no falsehood” (John 7:18).
• “I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me” (John 8:28).

All of these statements (and more) reveal what motivated everything Jesus said and did. His one great goal in life, his one all-consuming passion, was to glorify his Father by speaking only what the Father told him to speak and doing only what the Father directed him to do. We hear this clearly in his priestly prayer just hours before his trial and crucifixion:

I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. (John 17:4–5)

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