(John 6:44)
We are looking at just one verse from a passage which begins with some of those who have been fed by Jesus in the wilderness asking “when did you get here” (ie to Capernaum); and ends with most of Jesus’ disciples leaving Him, on account of the “harshness” of His teaching about bread.
But verse 44 is pretty safe, surely? If you are as old as me, you sang Suzanne Toolan’s well-loved chorus, “I am the Bread of Life”, with its lines “no one can come to me / unless the Father draws him / And I will raise him up/…/on the last day.” – which is pretty close to the NIV:
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day.
Now I have always heard that “draws” in a rather soft, winsome sense, much as you or I might invite a stray cat to come and have some milk. “Don’t be afraid, come and drink.”
Which is all very well, except that the word used, ἑλκύσῃ, means (to quote Messrs Liddell, Scott and Jones) “draw, drag, with collat[eral] notion of force or exertion.” If you have been picturing gentle attraction (as I have), then we have it all wrong. This is the word used when a soldier grabs the body of his fallen foe by the ankle and drags him out of the fray so that he can strip him of his armour; it is a word for dragging someone along in chains. The “softest” application I can find is of drawing your cape behind you, or of drawing your sword; and both of those still speak of irresistible force applied. Neither the cape nor the sword has any say in the matter, nor in the speed at which they must move.
So what is going on here? Let us pan back one notch. The Jews speaking with Jesus have just started muttering among themselves, on account of Jesus saying that He is the bread that came down from heaven, when in fact they know who He is – “Jesus son of Joseph, and don’t we know His father and His mother?” (And in passing, this suggests strongly that they are from Nazareth, and that they had followed Him back from the feast in Jerusalem to the wilderness north of Tiberias, where they were fed with 5000 others, and then on to Capernaum; all because they were trying to work out what the heck was going on with someone they knew from childhood.)
And Jesus replies, “Don’t mutter with one another. No one is able to come to Me, unless the Father who sent Me drags him, and I will make him stand in the last day.”
Is it ‘make him stand’ or ‘raise him from the dead’; and what exactly does “ἐν τῇ ἐσχάτῃ ἡμέρᾳ” mean – in the last day, in an absolute sense, or “in the most extreme of days” or “in the most difficult day”? All good questions, and worth exploring.
What isn’t debatable, is the demonstrated truth of this whole passage: no one is attracted to truth.
Let me soften the shock. Jesus says it over and over again: “I have told you the truth and you don’t believe me.” But if you read John 6 and find yourself getting uncomfortable about the statements Jesus makes about His flesh and blood being real food and real drink, and how only those who eat His flesh and drink His blood have eternal life, then you are in numerous company. Clearly, most of His disciples were so disturbed as to withdraw; and even Simon Peter never said “no, we’re good; we understand exactly what you are saying, and couldn’t agree more.”
When Jesus asked the Twelve if they didn’t also want to leave Him, Simon just said three things:
- To whom would we go?
- You have words of eternal life.
- We have believed and we know that You are the Holy One of God.
Which sounds a lot like “I may not understand or even like what you have been saying, but I know I haven’t got any other options because I know who You are.”
Or “I am here because the Father dragged me to You; and that much I can understand.”
This latter part of John 6 is Jesus speaking absolute truth; and yet no one is saying “wow, that’s amazing, sign me up.” It seems to me that we can be far too concerned about what sits comfortably with our own opinions, political and social preferences and so forth. But the Kingdom of God is God’s Kingdom; He is the very definition of good and true, and He doesn’t need to consult your opinion or mine to establish how His Kingdom operates. But fortunately – and uncomfortably – for us, He is GOOD!
As I have reflected on this, I can see the truth of Jesus’ statement in John 6:44 in my own life. I did not want to become a believer, that did not fit with my preferences one bit. Once I had been dragged to Jesus, I got pretty excited (an understatement); but before I got there, I found the truth that “no one comes to the Father but by me” hugely distasteful. And in my walk with God since, I now find myself having arrived at a clarity about the Kingdom which I in no way wanted to find; I was very happy with “Oh, God knows what He is doing, He must mean it for the best” and I did not want to engage with the exercise of authority or the imperative to embrace prosperity or any other inconvenient truth. But once again, having arrived here I see that God is good, beyond my wildest understanding.
Jewish men used to cover their heads when they read the beginning of Ezekiel, in order to prevent Ezekiel’s vision of God and the whirling wheels driving them out of their wits. And yet these poor folks had to cope with Jesus, the One who came down from Heaven, telling them literal truth face to face. It was too much for most of them.
We can be attracted to some romantic notion of the Good Teacher, or “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” or Jesus the revolutionary or Jesus the whatever. But you cannot come to Jesus as He really is without the Father dragging you to Him. Truth – the genuine article – is just too confronting for us, and the sooner we can agree that we don’t head in the direction of truth under our own steam, the sooner we can stop leaning on our own understanding.
Or as Isaiah 53 has it:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
(Isaiah 53:2b, NIV)
If God is dragging you, be sure it is for your good – and for the good of many others.
Seeing the Kingdom 