DRIVEN OUT AND DRAWN IN
John 6:35, 41-51
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 19), Year B
Analysis by Chris Repp
35Jesus said to “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” 41Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. 44No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
“We have this life not because we choose it, but because God has drawn us to Christ and Christ chooses us.”
Author’s note: My reading of John’s Gospel draws on insights gleaned from Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rorhbaugh’s Social Science Commentary on Gospel of John (Fortress Press, 1988). Especially enlightening is the concept of “antilanguage” developed by the linguist M.A.K. Halliday. (See pp. 7-16 for an explanation.) Antilanguage of note for the purposes of this text study are “coming to Jesus” and “eating the bread from heaven,” both of which mean believing in Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God.
DIAGNOSIS: Death
Step 1: Initial Diagnosis (External Problem): Rejecting the Manna
The first man and woman, the children of Israel, their descendants in this text, and we who would follow Jesus in our own day are all cut from the same cloth. We all want to be in charge. We want control over our own lives and we believe that we know what is best for us. So, when God encounters us with an alternative agenda for our lives, we rebel. “No eating from that tree at the center of the garden? But why shouldn’t we be allowed to know good from evil? Why should we not want to be like God? After all, we’re made in God’s image, aren’t we?” So I imagine a righteous line of defense, held quietly in the hearts of the first couple after their failed attempts at blame-shifting. And the Israelites, fresh from their liberation from slavery in Egypt? They were soon fed up with the manna God provided to keep them alive in the wilderness, willing to return to slavery and its more palatable menu. Now Jesus thinks he’s manna, the “bread from heaven?” Hah! He’s not from heaven, he’s from down the block. We know his parents. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and so it is for us. We know the church and its message, like Jesus’ neighbors think they knew him, and we are not impressed. Nor are we surprised that many are walking away, as some of the disciples will do later in this chapter.
Step 2: Advanced Diagnosis (Internal Problem): Unbelief
Behind all of the above is a common distrust of God, a failure to believe that what God wants for us is actually what is good for us. We hate uncertainty. We want to be in control. We don’t want to be told what to do, or what not to do, or to depend on anyone else. No wonder all of our heroes are self-made people, in charge of their own destinies. (Or so we believe – so the mythology tells us.) We want to be like them.
Step 3: Final Diagnosis (Eternal Problem): Driven Out
The first man and woman are driven out of the garden. The Israelites are driven into the wilderness for forty years instead of going straight to the Promised Land. And then after living in the Promised Land and continuing to turn away from God, they are driven into exile. Death and destruction are their lot even after returning to the land, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Romans. Turning away from God is turning away from the source of life. It is a dead end.
PROGNOSIS: Life
Step 4: Initial Prognosis (Eternal Solution): Drawn to Christ
God will not abandon God’s good agenda for us, and into our dead-end God sends the Son. Our death becomes his, and by his death he drives out “the ruler of this world,” all that rebels against and draws us away from God, as we say in the rite of Holy Baptism. On the cross he draws us, and all people, to himself (cf. 12:31-32). There his life, poured out on the cross, becomes ours.
Step 5: Advanced Prognosis (Internal Solution): Belief (Faith)
We have this life not because we choose it, but because God has drawn us to Christ and Christ chooses us (cf. 15:16). That draw is the beginning of faith, which is God’s doing, not ours. Nurtured in the church’s central task of word and sacrament, we take hold the life that is given us by the faith that is given us.
Step 6: Final Prognosis (External Solution): Eating the Bread (Living in Christ)
The first man and woman were driven out of the garden so that they could not eat from the tree of life and live forever. But Jesus on the tree of the cross undoes the consequences of their rebellion (and ours). Those who come to him, who grasp his life by faith, he promises never to drive away (6:37) and they are sustained forever by the bread of life.
