How can Jesus be co-equal to God when He said the Father is greater?

John 14:28 (NKJV)

You have heard Me say to you, ‘I am going away and coming back to you.’ If you loved Me, you would rejoice because I said, ‘I am going to the Father,’ for My Father is greater than I.

The first thing worth noticing is that the same Gospel writer, recording the same speaker, also wrote this down:

John 10:30 (NKJV)

I and My Father are one.

John saw no difficulty in putting both sentences in one book, and neither did the early Christians who read it.

So look at what Jesus is actually doing when He says it. He is not lecturing on His nature. He is comforting frightened men. It is His last evening with them, He has just told them He is leaving, and they are heartbroken. Then He says something that must have sounded strange: if you loved Me, you would rejoice. Rejoice at losing Him? Yes — because of where He is going.

Think about where Jesus is standing as He speaks. He was born in a borrowed stable and He will be buried in a borrowed tomb. He has been hungry, exhausted, spat at, called a drunkard and a demoniac. Within hours He will be arrested, flogged and executed. The Father is not in any of that. The Father is in unveiled glory, where the Son Himself was before the world began. That is the comparison Jesus is drawing — not between two kinds of God, but between where He is now and where He is going. Measured that way, of course the Father is greater. Jesus is at the bottom of a descent He chose, and He is telling His friends to be glad He is going home.

The word He uses points the same way. In English and in the Greek behind it, “greater” can describe two different things. It can mean greater in worth — a person is greater than an animal. Or it can mean greater in position — a president is greater than a vice president. That second sense says nothing about worth: both men are equally human, equally valuable. Jesus never says the Father is better than He is, or more truly God. He says greater, and He says it about a position He has voluntarily stepped out of.

Paul explains how that stepping down worked.

Philippians 2:5–8 (NKJV)

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.

Jesus made Himself of no reputation by taking the form of a servant. He did not put down His deity in order to pick up humanity. He remained everything He had always been and added to Himself a real human nature — a human body, a human mind, and a human will, like ours in every way except sin. The word “emptied” describes the humiliation of taking a servant's place, not the surrender of anything that made Him God.

The tiredness, the hunger, the growing, the praying, the dying — these are real, and they belong to the human nature He took. They are not evidence that the divine nature shrank. God cannot become less than God, not even temporarily, not even by choice.

The same applies to His obedience. Jesus prayed not My will, but Yours in the garden, and He meant it. But that submission is the submission of His human will to His Father, freely and perfectly given, which is what obedience is for a man. There has never been a moment when the Father wanted one thing and the Son wanted something else.

So when Jesus says the Father is greater, He is telling the truth about where He stands that evening — a man on the eve of the cross, at the lowest point of a journey He undertook on purpose. He is not telling us that He is less than God. He is telling us how far God was willing to come down.