This coming Sunday is the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time. 43 Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day.

Jesus now addresses the crowd for a second time and tells them to stop their grumbling. Then he repeats the saying of v.37, but in a slightly stronger form. In v.37 the word “come” (hēxei) is the future, active voice and means that the person (subject) will be in the process of “coming.” But in v.44 the subject is God who will helkysē (draw, haul by force – EDNT v.1:435) the person to him. In the midst of everyone considering the great Eucharistic questions posed by John 6, it is easy to pass over one of the great doctrines of the Gospel and the Christian faith: divine initiative.

John Calvin, the Protestant reformer, held that such divine initiative was irresistible –and if irresistible, then God chose who to save and who to condemn and thus held to “double predestination.” The 4th century British monk, Pelegius (or at least his followers) held that people, theoretically, could come to Jesus (and salvation) on their own. The Catholic Church holds both of these positions to be in error. But that does leave the question of human involvement. “God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. God willed that man should be “left in the hand of his own counsel,” so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.” The church clearly calls this God’s “plan of love.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1730). All this certainly does not rehearse arguments for each position, but simply states how a simple verse has been seen throughout the ages.

To that understanding of the “plan of love,” Borgen sees the verb (helkysē) as a legal term, equivalent to the Hebrew משׁר (which it often renders in LXX), and which means “to take possession of” (i.e., by drawing the object to oneself). Borgen regards Jesus as the agent of the Father and understands this verse to mean, “only those of whom the sender (through the agent) takes the actual possession are received by the agent, and nobody else.” But this implies acceptance, cooperation, and willingness on the part of the person to be drawn. The great missionary scholar Lesslie Newbigin wrote, in speaking of evangelization, that it is “God who sends Jesus for souls, on the other hand, draws souls to Jesus. The two divine works, external and internal, answer to and complete each other. The happy moment in which they meet in the heart, and in which the will is thus gained, is that of the gift on God’s part, of faith on man’s part….faith becomes possible when one abandons hold on one’s own security, and to abandon one’s security is nothing else than to let oneself be drawn by the Father” (The Light Has Come [Grand Rapids, 1982] 231).

In the midst of all this, while we might lose a sense of focus, not for one moment does Jesus lose his sense of mission. For the third time he refers to his future activity of raising up his people on the last day (v.44).

Image credit: The Feeding of the Five Thousand by William Hole (1846-1917) | Edinburgh University Library | PD-US