NOTES for Joh 6:60-69

Most of us have moments when an “inner voice” says: “I am tired; I cannot pray. I have many problems; I have no time to go to church. I am tired; I cannot read the Bible today...” We think that we will rest, and then we will commune with God. In reality, the opposite is true. “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is of no avail,” the Lord tells us today. Failing to pray will not make my life any easier. But if, at a difficult moment, I bring everything to God in prayer, He will enter my situation and give His life, His light.

Jesus understands perfectly well that what He says cannot be understood by human reason alone. The point here is not any special complexity in what is being discussed, but that such things cannot be explained purely theoretically. The matter is a new life, about which it is almost useless to speak if a person has no practical experience at all of this life. In essence, everything Jesus said to His disciples during His earthly ministry was said in advance. So to speak, for growth.

With their further spiritual growth in view. For the time being they could only accept what was said on trust. But this is a voluntary matter, and therefore Jesus invites those who wish to leave to leave Him. He knows that He will be able to prove nothing to anyone. To show, yes, in due time. And then those who see will see something quite different from what they might have expected. And that will be the best proof. But that is in the future; for now there is only trust.

Still, not on empty ground. Peter does not speak of "words of eternal life" by chance. The disciples of Jesus had already seen something. They had seen clear signs of the presence of the Kingdom and the action of God's power. Signs that neither they nor anyone else had ever had to see before. And now their Teacher says something that cannot fit into consciousness at all. And each disciple finds himself before a choice: accept the Teacher as He is, or leave.

He speaks impossible, unbelievable words, sometimes sounding almost blasphemous. But the power of God is with Him, and the Kingdom too is with Him. One has to choose. To choose between God and the familiar boundaries and limits of human nature, human reason, human religiosity. Believing the impossible is always a matter of choice. And only readiness to follow God no matter what makes it possible to believe. That is why Jesus says that unless the Father draws a person, he cannot set out on such a path by himself.

Only God gives a person strength and confidence on the path along which faith in the impossible leads. Human nature is powerless here. But this was a necessary lesson, because one will have to enter the Kingdom in the same way. In an absolutely impossible way. Following the Risen One, and that is still less possible. On the way to the Kingdom everything around is constantly impossible, unbelievable, unable to fit into consciousness. And it is better to get used to this beforehand, so that later it will be easier to walk.

Christ's word about Himself as the Bread of Heaven, given by the Father, is so incredible that even some of the disciples choose to leave the Teacher. There is nothing surprising in this: when we look at ourselves and at the history of humanity, we see that we very often turn away from Christ precisely because His Word surpasses our understanding. Learning to be faithful to God, whose ways and thoughts infinitely surpass our ways and thoughts, is not simple at all.

And therefore the words of the apostle Peter at the end of today's passage sound like such a victory, such a bright flash of truth: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." We may prefer a God who is more understandable, rational, and, dare I say, primitive, but there is no other. So our choice is the one the Lord Himself spoke of in Deuteronomy 30: "I have set before you today life and death, blessing and curse." What matters, however, is that without these mysterious and difficult words of Christ, we would not have had a choice, but only a curse.

What do the Savior's words mean about the impossibility of coming to Him unless the Father draws a person? Absolute predestination? The futility of any human effort when it comes to the Christian life? Or something else?

Of course, there is no question of absolute predestination when it comes to a person's destiny. After all, Jesus tells us nothing about what guides the Father when He brings one person or another to Jesus, or how far He takes that person's intentions and desires into account. And the whole biblical context compels us to think that God still takes a person's free choice into account, so that He will not drag anyone to Christ or after Christ by force. But He can certainly make use of the sincere desire of a seeker to find the living truth.

But the point may not be at all what criteria guide God as He directs a person along one spiritual path or another. Jesus Himself appears to be speaking about something else. People do not understand Him; many leave, troubled by His words. A minority remains. These people cannot leave because they have nowhere to go. In Christ they have found that very living truth, the very meaning of their own life without which this life is no longer needed by them, without which it is simply unthinkable for them.

This vividly felt and experienced uniqueness of the only possible spiritual path, this impossibility of leaving not because someone or something is holding them from outside, but because spiritually there is nowhere else to go - this is the action of God. Such a result cannot be achieved by human effort; human nature is not inclined to drive itself into a trap, into a psychological dead end from which there is only one exit. By nature, a person always tries to leave an alternative open. When it disappears, we are almost always facing the result of an external spiritual influence on the situation or on the human soul. A dark influence, if the absence of alternatives becomes hopelessness that dooms to death. A light-filled influence, if it points to the only path leading into the Kingdom.

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.