NOTES for Joh 6:40-44

Continuing His word about salvation and life, the Lord tells us today that the will of God is that everyone who entrusts himself to the Son of God, everyone who, according to the word of the prophet and the apostle, "calls on the name of the Lord," will be saved. And at the end of today's passage the Lord says that the one whom the Father draws can come to Him. Yesterday we heard His word that the Father's will consists in the salvation of all. This is not simply the hope of the world and of humanity. I dare say that these words of Christ are the only hope of the world; everything else is deception. And one cannot help rejoicing in this, because the difficult path to life is still incomparably better than hopelessness.

What do they answer Christ? In essence, the answer of the Jews comes down to a crude formula: "Who are you, anyway?" "Prove that this Jesus of yours is God..." Christians have heard this for centuries. This cannot be proved, if only because He does not belong to us; we belong to Him. But that is not even the main point. Such a protest against Christ's words only means that I am trying to shift onto Him the responsibility for my own distrust. Fortunately, the Gospel gives us an example of the right position, when a person gives Christ not responsibility for the feat of faith, for the act of trust, but asks Him for help in it, saying, "I believe, Lord; help my unbelief."

In this verse there is an answer to a paradox: salvation is received by me through faith in Jesus Christ, that is, as a result of coming to Him as Savior and Lord. In other words, everything happens as a result of my action; I turn out to be at the beginning of my salvation, while Christ is only the means. Jesus puts everything in its place: at the beginning of everything is God. First, if not for Him, I would have no One to come to, since it was the Father who sent the Son into the world. Second, if not for Him, I would not exist at all and there would be no one to come. And third, it is the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father, who directs our heart toward the desire to love, to trust, and to seek the truth (cf. 1 Cor. 12:3).

So, God is at the beginning of my life, God is at the beginning of my conversion, God is at the beginning of my salvation, and God, who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, is at the beginning of my eternal life.

Christ called Himself bread, and that alone was hard for His listeners to understand. But for those who remembered the unusual images characteristic of prophetic speeches, it would not have been hard to take the words about bread as one of those parables. Jesus says that His teaching, and He Himself, are as necessary as daily food - why not agree with this?

Such an understanding cannot be called wrong, and yet it is clearly insufficient. For twenty centuries already, for many people who accept Christ only as a sage and moral teacher, His words about Flesh and Blood have remained closed and incomprehensible - just as they were for many of His listeners then. It is enough to imagine a Jew who had firmly learned that the law of Moses not only forbids the eating of blood, but also regards everything connected with bleeding as defiling and requiring rites of purification. And suddenly he hears about the necessity of drinking blood, and human blood at that, and moreover the Blood of this strange preacher. Even for prophetic allegory such a call sounds excessively scandalous!

For us, reading the Gospel many centuries later, it is easier to see that Christ is speaking here about the Eucharist; but we should not stop there. The meaning of the Eucharist is deep and incomprehensible in its fullness. At times it is useful to remember how shaken the ancient Jews were when they first heard Jesus' call to eat His Flesh and drink His Blood. Perhaps this will help us feel anew what the Last Supper was for the first generation of Christ's disciples. Unlike the other evangelists, John does not mention the disciples' partaking of the Body and Blood at the Last Supper. But the words of the Savior that he has preserved for us are just as important for understanding the essence of what was taking place then.

Today's Gospel reading continues the discussion of how an encounter with Jesus is a mystery hidden in every person's heart. In today's reading Jesus tells us how this happens. “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” Thus it is not only, nor even primarily, the human being who seeks God: it is God who seeks the human being. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “You would not have called to Me unless I had been calling to you.” We come to Jesus after hearing God's voice in our heart. Moreover, Jesus says that the one who comes to Him has “learned from the Father.” Even before a person has come to faith, communion with God may already have begun in that person's heart. The Lord teaches us even when we do not realize it.

This text is harsh, at the very least. On the one hand, the Lord says that He will reject no one who comes to Him, and that the Father's will is to lose nothing but to raise it up. On the other hand, eternal life belongs to everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him. Let us suppose that our faith is in order, but few among those who have lived and are living can report that the Lord appeared to them personally in the flesh.

Now let us look at what surrounds these three verses, and we will find ourselves right in the center of the conversation about the Bread of Life. About the Flesh of Christ, which will become for us the source of eternal life. Our task is to feed on this bread and contemplate God, who humbled Himself to such a helpless state in order to unite Himself with everyone ready to receive Him. If we do this, believing Him, He will raise us up also on the last day, as He promised.

In today's Gospel reading Jesus says, "This is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up on the last day." These words are an answer to the classic question asked by people outside the Church: "What will happen to my friend if she died unbaptized?" The will of the Heavenly Father is that no one should perish. But there is one important qualification: "of all He has given Me." What is this that the Father has given Jesus? It is those who have received Him into their hearts, those who believe in Him.

Does that mean, then, that all unbelievers are doomed? There is no single clear answer here, but we know one thing: the meeting with God takes place in the deepest part of the human heart. No one will ever be able to determine what this particular person's relationship with God truly is, no one except God, who sees hearts. Only the Lord, who knows hearts, can say how close a person was to God. And the will of the Father is that no one should perish, and so we can hope that even the smallest spark of faith, the smallest openness, may be enough for Him to raise a person on the last day.

People rushed to find Christ because they had eaten bread and wanted more of it rather than miracles. Yet many of them also regard miracles less as signs that bear witness to a higher truth than as spectacular displays. That is why the words about the bread of life that comes down from heaven and, unlike manna, satisfies more than bodily hunger remain misunderstood.

It is difficult for His listeners to understand Christ, but He continues speaking to them. If so, why does He preach? Is He not sowing His seed to the wind?

No, not to the wind. He is sowing for the future, and days will come when what has been sown begins to sprout in those very hearts that still seem unreceptive. To the age-old question, “What should we do?” Christ gives an unexpected answer, one that many people still find hard to grasp: believe. Not because He rejects deeds, but because, amid our bustle and our attempts to put contrived plans of our own devising into practice, it is all too easy to lose sight of whether what we have planned should be built at all.

Faith, however, gives us a point of reference that helps us act.

Is it not strange that the One who comes from heaven takes care to feed crowds of His listeners and followers with bread? Is that what He came for? And yet the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves for five thousand people is the only miracle described by all the evangelists, and that means it is especially important. It is this miracle that serves as the starting point for the conversation about the true bread by which a person truly lives, the bread of life.

We have heard since childhood that a person does not live by bread alone. But if we try to understand what makes up our spiritual diet, will we find in it what can truly satisfy the heart, rather than a substitute that leaves only a hangover and nausea?

The Lord offers us this kind of bread. It is not teaching, not commandments, not faith in God - the Jews already had all this, and it exists in many spiritual schools and religions. Jesus speaks of the bread that truly comes down from heaven and gives real, eternal life. It is He Himself.

Today's reading helps us better understand what is usually called Jesus' "messianic secret." In speaking of it, people mean the fact that Jesus Himself, until the last days of His earthly ministry, almost never spoke directly about His messiahship, at least not openly. The evangelist's account takes us back to the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves (vv. 1-14). And the reaction to it, as we can see, was an attempt to proclaim Jesus "king," to make Him the leader of a new messianic movement (v. 15). This is no surprise: according to the commonly accepted ideas of that time, the Messiah was to become king, restore an independent Jewish state, and introduce in it laws corresponding to the Torah. But Jesus, of course, was not going to become the leader of any religious-political movement.

But Jesus had another, more important reason to conceal His messiahship. He Himself speaks of it directly to those who went looking for Him in Galilee: most of the people seeking a meeting with Him did so not because they thirsted for the Kingdom, but because they wanted, in time of need, always to be able to receive free bread (v. 26). Jesus, however, speaks with them about eternal life and about the main thing without which one cannot partake of it: trust in the One whom God sent into the world to give people the Kingdom (vv. 27-29).

But they do not understand Him. They ask Him: where are the proofs that Your words are true (v. 30)? And at once they give an example of what proofs would convince them: manna from heaven, as in the days of Moses in the wilderness (v. 31). Jesus again tells them that the Kingdom is greater than any miracle, and that the bread of the Kingdom is more important than manna (vv. 32-33). And again they do not understand Him.

His listeners cannot grasp that with the Savior's coming into the world a new era has begun, and that what happened to them on the shore of Lake Gennesaret was not a miracle in the sense in which manna was a miracle. Simply by being with Jesus, they found themselves in the Kingdom and lived for a while according to its laws, but, as we can see, they did not understand fully what had happened to them. That is why they ask Jesus for bread and expect to receive it just as their fathers once received manna from God (v. 34). And Jesus again and again tries to explain to them that the point is not bread, but the Kingdom and that fullness of God's life which is given there to everyone, so that no manna will be needed there anymore.

A miracle is the Kingdom's invasion of our world, the manifestation of its laws where completely different rules usually operate. But now the Kingdom is entering the world, transforming it, and the times of miracles are passing. The time of the Kingdom is beginning - open to everyone who seeks it and wants to enter.