What are we to make of those places in the New Testament when it’s clear that Jesus is on the same level as the Father and then, in other places, is not as great as the Father? Is it fair to just toss up our hands and pronounce the charge of inconsistency within the text?
The Athanasian Creed can be of help to us with exactly this situation when it says:equal to the Father as regards divinity, less than the Father as regards humanity.
Equality and inferiority: the creed says that Jesus has both of them when it comes to his relationship with the Father. Specifically, when it comes to his incarnaterelationship with the Father.
When we’re talking about his divinity—that which makes him God (his Godness) he is equal to the Father, because he and the Father are God. Remember that the creed says that Jesus is God from the essence of his Father. That being said, when it comes to his humanity, he is lesser than the Father, because the Father is God and did not become a human being. Paul speaks of Jesus’s incarnation by using the words emptying and humility. Something happened to Jesus as he took humanity onto himself by becoming a human being.
The creed is certainly helpful here, but what is of more help is what the Scriptures say on their own about Jesus. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is recorded as saying two seemingly contradictory things within just a few chapters of each other. In John 10, Jesus says, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:31, ESV). Now, this could be taken as Jesus saying that he and Father are the same person, but this sort of interpretation fails quickly as we consider that Jesus prays to the Father and the Father guides, leads, and speaks to him. Considering those realities, Jesus must be speaking toward his status in relationship to the Father. There is a real sense in which there is no difference between the Father and the Son in relation to their divinity.
In the opposite (but just as true) direction, Jesus says, in John 14, “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28b, ESV). Did Jesus forget what he said previously? Did he change his mind in that short time? Was he schizophrenic in his understanding of who he was and is? I think it’s clearly a no to all of those questions. Jesus can, at one time, speak to his equality to the Father as God and, then at another time, speak to his inferiority to the Father as a human being.