Thursday in the Third Week of Easter, April 30, 2020

John 6:44-51

Jesus said to the crowds: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: “They shall all be taught by God.”Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.”

In the preceding verses, Jesus has spoken of the desire of the Father for the salvation of the human race, and of the Jews in particular.  In saying that, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him”, Jesus asserts that a person receives this salvation as a personal call from God.  We might rewrite this verse in this way: Everyone who comes to me is drawn by the Father.  First Jesus arouses the crowd’s hunger for the Bread that “comes down from heaven” and “gives life to the world”, and then he says that the person who comes to this Bread, to Jesus, is drawn to It by the Father.  The “hunger”, then, comes from the Father, just as the satisfaction for that hunger, Jesus, comes from heaven, from the Father.  Jesus is not offering himself as a mere teacher in the way the Pharisees did or even as John the Baptist had.  The crowd knows this, and many become restless.  To show them how much more he is, the Lord adds, “And I will raise him on the last day.”

I think that Jesus must have paused here before continuing, letting the people absorb what he has told them.  When he resumes, he elaborates on what he has already told them about those who come to him.  John tells us that he said, “It is written in the prophets: They shall all be taught by God.”  Evidently Jesus is quoting Isaiah 54, 13, in which the Prophet says, literally, as I translate it, “All your sons the taught of the Lord”.  There is no verb in the verse, as is often the case in Hebrew sentences.  Since the prophet is speaking of a future time in the context, the verb to-be in the future tense could be understood here.  It isn’t merely that the sons will be taught but that they will have been educated — they would have accepted the teaching and would then be “disciples”.  It would be worthwhile at this point to read Isaiah 54.  The Lord may have quoted the whole of it to the crowd, and John gives us the shorthand version, assuming his first readers knew the reference.  Isaiah 54 is in the last part of the book and it describes the time of the Messiah and the time of the judgment of the nations.  What Jesus is saying here in quoting these words, is that the time of the Messiah has indeed come, and that those who follow him are the “taught of God”.  He reiterates with, “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.”  We might rewrite this sentence as, “He who does not come to me does not listen to my Father.”  Jesus speaks of the Father as his own, not as “our” Father, but as “my” Father.  To show what he means when he says this, he explains, “Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father.”  God is his Father in a significantly distinct way than he is their Father.  Later, at the time of the Resurrection, he will tell Mary Magdalene, “Go to my brethren and say to them: I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God” (John 20, 17).  God is our Father as our Creator, and by adoption, in baptism; but Jesus is his natural Son, co-eternal from all the ages.

Because he is the Son of God who has seen the Father, he is able to solemnly declare to the crowd, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes [in me] has eternal life.  Knowing that the people before him are struggling with the immensity of what he is telling them and demanding from them, the Lord reminds them of the miracle of the loaves and fishes in which they participated and he goes back over what he has already explained about the manna of Moses: “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the Bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die.”  I have always imagined that at the point where Jesus says, “This is the Bread of heaven” that he pounded his chest or grabbed his arm in order to ensure that the people knew that the “this” was himself.  

He says, as a sort of summary, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven”, which he had already said before.  But then he adds this: “Whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.”  Now, he had said a little earlier that, “I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall not hunger.”  But there was no mention of “eating”, let alone of him giving this flesh of his for the life of the world.  The people had listened to him, had tried to follow him, had tried to reconcile his claims and miracles with his ordinary human appearance.  We see this in their earlier words, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How then does he say: I came down from heaven?” (John 6, 42, inexplicably left out of this reading). This, however, is too much, and they will object, argue, ridicule, and many will walk away.  The Lord could not be more clear in what he was telling them, and the crowd knew very well what he was saying.  If they thought he was speaking symbolically or in parables, or even in the prophetic mode, they would not have been outraged as they were.

 “The Bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.”  He has said that the manna preserved the Hebrews in the wilderness; he has said that his Flesh will confer eternal life; now he says that his Flesh will be offered up as a Sacrifice.  His Flesh will be eaten in the way that the sacrifices in the temple were eaten, once they were offered to God.  It was this sacrificed Flesh that would be eaten.  What is said would certainly be outrageous if the One who said it had not shown that he was God himself.