For no one who wants to be known publicly acts in secret. Since You are doing these things, show Yourself to the world.”
4. If thou dost these things; that is, if thou aspirest to such greatness that all may applaud thee, direct towards thee the eyes of all. And they add, show thyself to the world, using the word world, as contrasted with the small number of persons among whom he was spending his time without honor. We might also draw from it another meaning.
We have here, I. The reason given why Christ spent more of his time in Galilee than in Judea (Joh 7:1): because the Jews, the people in Judea and Jerusalem, sought to kill him, for curing the impotent man on the sabbath day, Joh 5:16.
Commenting on John 7:1-13
For there is no man that doeth anything in secret,.... For so they reckoned his doing miracles in such a corner of the land, and in so obscure a place as Galilee: and he himself seeketh to be known openly; suggesting hereby, that Christ was an ambitious person, and sought popular applause, and honour and glory from men, when nothing was more foreign from him; see Joh 5:41.