John 12:20-33 And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast:… In the courteous but eager desire of these Greeks we hear the longing of their whole heathen world for a Redeemer. The old rites and superstitions had lost their hold on men's minds. Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, and Venus, had all faded from the imagination of the upper classes; End the worship of these deities was left to the vulgar and ignorant, or was retained only as a matter of policy. The oracles were dumb; the altars cold and deserted; and some tried in vain to satisfy their wants by changing religion into poetry or philosophy, or sought as a last resource to fill with sensual pleasure the intolerable vacuity of their hearts. Regretful of the past, hopeless of the future, suicide was recommended as the only cure for human misery; the darkness of despair giving place to the deeper darkness of death. But even in the utter blankness of such a night, there were men of nobler instincts who could not do without religion — "Memnons waiting for the day." They felt about for the unknown God to whom they might cry for help amid the wreck of every religious system, and the failures and uncertainties of the world around. Some of these "seekers after God," men of the stamp of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, had wandered into Jewish synagogues, which by a providential coincidence at that time were placed in all the chief cities of the world; and there they found to their surprise, in what they had been taught to regard as an "execrable superstition," ledges of faith and hope by which they climbed out of the profound darkness into the happy sunshine. They were irresistibly drawn to the new religion by its unity of the Godhead, its high ideal of domestic and social purity, and above all by the hope which it held out of a coming Messiah who should redress all the evils of the world, dispel its ignorance, and bring in not a cold morality, but a righteousness which should be the offspring of a burning love. Not a few of these went up as pilgrims to the annual festival at Jerusalem; and among them were the Greeks who wished to see Jesus. They expressed the longing of the whole heathen world for Him who was the light to lighten the Gentiles. (H. Macmillan, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast:WEB: Now there were certain Greeks among those that went up to worship at the feast. |
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