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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 the same 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.”
Imagine a game of tug-of-war. God is tugging us on one side, but we are pulling away on the other.
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When do I experience this tension in my conscience or my spiritual life?
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Maybe we’ve dragged our feet when needing to offer an apology.
Or we’ve been reticent to let go of a lingering habit.
Perhaps we allow other demands for our time to draw us away from prayer, scripture study, or church. Maybe we allow fear to keep us from sharing our faith.
Even Saint Paul laments this tension between his flesh and his spirit. “I do not do what I want, but what I hate. So it is no longer I who do it, but sin dwelling in me.”
The only way to rid ourselves of these things is to follow the path of surrender, giving up on the tug-of-war, allowing God to do the only thing he desires.
To draw us closer to himself.
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Image credits: (1) Sky’s the Limit Entertainment (2) Patrick Slevin’s Blog, WordPress (3) Laughter Thoughts