If Jesus is God, why did he pray to God and say he didn't know the day or hour?
✓Fact-checked & reviewed for Nicene orthodoxyHow we review →Jesus is fully God and fully man, and none of these texts rank him below God - they flow from the incarnation. It is in his real human nature that the Son prays, obeys, is sent, calls the Father “greater,” and accepts human limits like not knowing the day or the hour.
The classical Christian answer turns on the incarnation. Philippians 2 says the Son, being in the form of God, emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. Notice what the Greek does not say: it never says he emptied himself of his deity. There is no of anything in the sentence. It tells us how he emptied himself, by adding a genuine human nature, not by subtracting his divinity. The mystery is concealment, not loss: the one who was fully God veiled that glory beneath a servant's form, remaining what he was while becoming what he was not. So the praying, obeying, and not-knowing belong to his real human life and his freely accepted role as servant, not to an inferiority in the divine nature. This is not the ancient Arian idea that the Son is a lesser god.
And the same Jesus who says the Father is greater also says I and the Father are one. Greater speaks of order and roleOrder of relation — not rank of natureIs sayingA distinction of relation and role: the Son eternally proceeds from the Father and is sent by him, and in the incarnation freely takes the servant's place.Not sayingNot that the Son is lesser in nature, being, or divinity. He is fully God, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father — "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30). This denies both Arianism and any eternal subordination of the Son's essence., not of a better nature. The picture that holds all the texts together is not a demoted deity, but God himself stooping to share our life, our limits, and even our death.