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[Arise, let us go hence.'] These words seem to indicate a change of position, and probably mean tliat oui Lord at tliis point rose from tlie table where He had been speaking, and walked out towards the garden of Getbsemane. The rest of His discourse He seems to have delivered in the act of walking, without a single interruption from any of the disciples, until the end of the sixteenth chapter.; and then, at some point un- known to us, He probably paused and offered up the prayer of the seventeenth chapter.
This is the view of Cyril and Augustine, and most commen- tators. Yet Jansenius, Maldonatus, Alford, and some others, think that our Lord never left the house, and only rose from table at this point, and went on with His discourse standing !
Lightfoot, almost alone, maintains the strange and improba- ble notion that the place where this discourse was delivered was Bethany, that the interval of a week comes into the narra- tive here, that at the end of this week the paschal supper and the institution of the Lord's Supper took place, and then came the discourse of the fifteenth chapter.
No commentator perhaps can leave this chapter without deeply feeling how little he knows and understands of the full meaning of much of its contents. May we not however fairly reflect that one great cause of the chapter's difficulty is man's entire inability to grasp the great mystery of the union of the Father, the Son and the Spirit in the Trinity ? We are contin- ually handling matters which we cannot fully comprehend, and cannot therefore fully explain, and must be content hum- bly to believe.