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Gospel: John 6: 44-51
Jesus said to the crowds:
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him,
and I will raise him on the last day.
It is written in the prophets:
They shall all be taught by God.
Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.
Not that anyone has seen the Father
except the one who is from God;
he has seen the Father.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life.
Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died;
this is the bread that comes down from heaven
so that one may eat it and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give
is my Flesh for the life of the world.”
The Gospel of the Lord.
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“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him,” the Lord says in today’s Gospel.
Whenever this verb draw is used in scripture, it implies a type of resistance, of pushing and pulling.
For example, John uses this verb to describe Saint Peter dragging a net full of fish ashore. The same verb is later used in the Acts of the Apostles to describe Paul and Silas being dragged before government authorities.
It’s also the verb Jesus uses to describe the spiritual dynamics between God and his creation in today’s Gospel. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.”
If you imagine a game of tug-of-war, God pulls from one side, and we often pull from the other.
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Where do I find that type of resistance – or tension – in my relationship with God?
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Perhaps I’ve been lazy about praying more, or have procrastinated returning to church.
Maybe I’ve dragged my feet when needing to offer an apology as Christ commands us.
Or have been slow to let go of a particular habit.
Maybe I’ve let God fade from coming first in my life.
We can make a thousand excuses for why we resist those tugs at our conscience, but perhaps today we can try one simple exercise:
Let go and let God draw us ever closer to himself.
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Image credits: (1) Little Pink Houses of Hope (2) T Nation (3) Go Be Radiant