19th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B
John 6: 41-51
ATTRACTED BY THE FATHER TOWARD JESUS
by José Antonio Pagola
According to John’s story, Jesus repeats each time more openly that he comes from God to offer everyone a food that gives life eternal. The people can’t keep listening to something so scandalous without reacting. They know his parents. How can he say he comes from God?
None of us should be surprised at their reaction. Does it make sense to believe in Jesus Christ? How can we believe that in that specific person, born shortly before Herod the Great died and known for his prophetic activity in Galilee during the 30s AD, the unfathomable Mystery of God has been incarnate?
Jesus doesn’t respond to their objections. He goes straight to the root of their unbelief: «Stop complaining to each other». It’s wrong to resist the radical novelty of his person by sticking to the thought that they already know everything about his true identity. He will show them the way to go forward.
Jesus proposes that no one can believe in him if they don’t feel themselves attracted by his person. It’s true. Maybe in our culture we understand it better today. It’s not easy for us to believe in doctrines or ideologies. Faith and trust get awakened in us when we feel ourselves attracted by someone who does good to us and helps us live.
But Jesus warns them about something very important: «No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me». Attraction toward Jesus is a result of God and no one else. The Father who has sent him to the world awakens our heart so that we draw near to Jesus with joy and trust, overcoming doubt and resistance.
That’s why we need to listen to God’s voice in our heart and let ourselves be led by God toward Jesus. We need to let ourselves be taught humbly by that Father, Creator of life and Friend of humanity: «Everyone who has listened to the Father, and learnt from him, comes to me».
Jesus’ affirmation ends up revolutionary for those Jews. The biblical tradition said that human beings hear God’s call in their hearts in order to faithfully fulfill the Law. The prophet Jeremiah had proclaimed God’s promise thus: «I will put my Law within you and will write it on your heart».
Jesus’ words invite us to live a different experience. The conscience isn’t just the hidden and privileged place where we can hear God’s Law. If in the intimacy of our being we feel attracted by the good, the beautiful, the noble, what does good to the human being, what builds a better world, then easily we’ll feel ourselves invited by God to be in harmony with Jesus.
From a carpenter’s son the bread from heaven
by Fernando Armellini
In the last part of last Sunday’ passage, we heard Jesus declare, “I am the bread of life.” He is the “bread” as the wisdom of God. Anyone who assimilates his proposal will satisfy the hunger and thirst for happiness and love (Jn 6:35).
Faced with this unprecedented demand, the Jews react in the strongest possible terms. They are convinced that they already have the “bread” that satisfies: the Torah, the word of God contained in the holy scriptures. Sirach has clearly indicated the food and drink offered by God to the righteous: “She will feed him with the bread of understanding and give him the water of wisdom to drink” (Sir 15:3). Israel does not need other bread and cannot admit that a man who proposes himself as the “bread of life.”
Baffled, the Jews did not speak directly to Jesus, but they murmur among themselves: “This man is the son of Joseph, isn’t he? We know his father and mother. How can he say that he has come from heaven?” (vv. 41-42).
To murmur does not mean to raise some reservations, but to challenge, reject the provocative and scandalous affirmation that they have heard. It is unacceptable that Jesus claims to embody the wisdom of God, to reproduce in his own person the Lord thrice holy.
We will clarify the identity of these interlocutors, described by John as “Jews,” but first we have to understand the meaning of their objection. How can Jesus be the bread of wisdom of God come down from heaven?
“No one has ever seen God” (Jn 1:18) and cannot even be seen, many books of the Bible report (Ex 33:20; 1 Tim 6:16). Yet, over the centuries, humans have always had a burning desire to meet him, to know his will and his plans for the world (Ex 33:18).
They began to see some portion of his face when, looking up they contemplated “the fire, wind, the sphere of the stars, rushing water and the lights in the sky” (Wis 13:2). They are amazed by their beauty and have come to discover the author. “For everything that could have been known about God was clear to them. God himself made it plain. Because of his invisible attributes—his everlasting power and divinity—are made visible to reason” (Rom 1:19-20).
But God does not limit to reveal Himself through creation. In the fullness of time, he showed up in the world. Now it’s possible to see him, touch him, listen to him in a man, Jesus of Nazareth, who is the human face of God; who sees him, “has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9-11).
The Jews murmur, that is, they refuse to follow this path that leads to God. They believe inconceivable that a man is able to advance the claim to render the Lord present. They are frightened by the idea of a God who became man, convinced that the Almighty has his throne in the heavens, living far from the world and manifests his majesty and his strength through his miracles and mysterious voices. They cannot conceive that he reveals himself in a weak and fragile man, in a son of a carpenter.
Jesus recognizes that no one has seen the Father (v. 46), but shows the way to be able to contemplate him. He ensures that one can see God through him, watching what he does, those he frequents with, reproaches, defends, approaches, caresses, allows to touch and kiss him, because his gestures, his choices, his preferences are those of the Lord.
For some, the humanity of Christ is the intermediary that leads to God, for others it is an impediment. Today, as in the past, the positions taken in front of him are diversified, ranging from the enthusiastic welcome, indifference, rejection, resentful opposition.
To grasp the message of the passage, it is important to identify “the stakeholders” of Jesus. The Evangelist calls them “Jews.”
We are in Galilee and it is really strange that John calls “Jews” the people of Capernaum, who are “Galileans,” people who know the origin and the family of Jesus.
In the Gospel of John, the word “Jew” does not have an ethnic-geographical connotation but theological. It indicates anyone take a hostile attitude to Jesus and refuses to believe that he is the full and definitive revelation of God.
The evangelist is not interested in the reaction of the Jewish people two thousand years ago. What presses him is to explain to his readers that “today” they are now faced with an alternative and have to choose between the wisdom of the Gospel, which is the bread of life, and the cunning of the world, which is the poison of death. “Today” they are being asked to believe that in Christ “all” the wisdom of God is present.
Unfortunately, today, as then, many simply recognize Jesus as the wise man who has shown the paths of justice and peace, one of the many prophets, perhaps the greatest of the prophets. While esteeming, they consider him a mere man “Joseph’s son” and do not realize or refuse to accept that he is “the Only Begotten” of the Father (Jn 1:14). They do not believe that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life” (Jn 3:16).
Why is this happening, what is the root of the unbelief? This conundrum is answered in the second part of today’s passage (vv. 43-47).
Someone feeds on the word of Christ, the bread of life, a few others hesitate or unable to understand it. The reason—says Jesus—is that no one can come to Him unless drawn by the Father who sent him (v. 44). The discovery of the “bread of heaven” is not an achievement of man, but a free gift of the Father.
How is it that this gift is not offered to all? Does God perhaps favor some and hinder others? Does he let someone encounter the “bread of heaven”, and refuse it to others?
God gives everyone a chance to know him, “They shall all be taught by God”— Jesus answers (v. 45). It refers to the oracle of the prophet Jeremiah, who announced: “The time is coming—it is the Lord who speaks—I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. And they will not have to teach each other, saying: ‘Know the Lord, because they will all know me, from the greatest to the lowliest’” (Jer 31:34).
The instruction that the Lord gives to all is His Spirit, the divine impulse that acts within every person and pushes him or her on the ways of life. Unfortunately, not always and not all nourish it; not all learn his teachings, nor docile to his impulses. “Only those who learn from him” accept Jesus (v. 45).
The question then is just one: Do I let myself be taught by the Spirit of Christ, or, as the “Jews” of Jesus’ time, reject the “bread of heaven” and prefer the food of death?
Up to this point in his discourse Jesus has not yet invited his listeners to “eat” the bread which came down from heaven. He limited to identifying himself with this bread. In the last part (vv. 48-51) of the passage he, for the first time, declares that, in order to have life, it is a must “to eat the bread which is his flesh.”
The manna that the Israelites tasted in the desert did not communicate the fullness of life, in fact, all died. Only those who eat the bread from heaven will live forever.
In order not to misinterpret the meaning of Jesus’ invitation to eat “his flesh” we must keep in mind what this term means, in the Gospel of John. The Semitic concept of “the flesh” is not identified with the muscles. It indicates the weak, fragile, precarious part of a person. It refers to the whole person as destined to die. God feels compassion to people—the Psalmist says—because “he remembered that they were but flesh, a breeze that passes and never returns” (Ps 78:39). When, in the prologue of his Gospel, John says: “The Word was made flesh” (Jn 1:14), he does not refer to the fact that the Son of God assumed the outward appearance of a man, but that he made himself similar to us, welcoming even the most precarious of our condition.
“To eat” this God made flesh means to recognize that through “the carpenter’s son” goes the full revelation of God; it means to accept the wisdom from heaven even if he sees it covered with “flesh,” that is, of all fleeting aspects that characterize our human weakness.
We repeat: it is not speaking about the Eucharist. Jesus always refers to his message, his gospel that people are invited to assimilate, as bread, to setting up their own lives. Next Sunday will speak about the intimate relationship between this reception of the Word and the sign of the Eucharistic bread.
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